The number of people alive. - bobby Zilisch

The number of people who are alive today is greater than the number of people who have ever died. This is an absolutely loaded statement that many of us have heard and not given a second though to. Now that I am taking psychology and have a scope on the six principles of critical thinking, I can say that this is defiantly a loaded statement. The most glaringly obvious offense is that extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. Claiming that there are more people alive today than have ever died, requires you to say that you have an accurate estimation of how many people have ever lived. There are many estimated from 6 to 60 to hundreds of billions of people. If the answer really is 6 billion people have ever lived, then the current world population is higher than that, but that is often refuted by scientists. It is not so much that this statement is false, as it is that there is no way to prove it either way. This goes against the element of critical thinking falsifiability. There is no way to count how many people have ever lived accurately as there is no record of people thousands of years back. There was no census in 10000 BC. I chose this link because I found it to be really interesting how psychology and the six elements of critical thinking can help realize that many common believes are easily refuted.