#11 - Lobbyist: Those who claim that automobile exhaust

[Administrator]

Please post your questions below!

[gwlsathelp]

Hello, I got stuck on this question and did not know how to approach it to solve it. Is this conditional reasoning and in what way is this flawed reasoning?

[Frank Peter]

Hi gw,

This isn't really conditional reasoning - typically we would look for some of our sufficient or necessary condition indicators, which aren't really present here. The flawed reasoning here is that the lobbyist is making a categorical claim that isn't really supported by the statistical information presented. The problem is that there are a lot of factors which could contribute to an improvement in public health indicators that wouldn't necessarily mean that automobile exhaust isn't a problem. For example, what if the "starting point" for our health indicators was an extremely low number because people were generally in very poor health, and then conditions gradually improved over the last century? In that case, the statistics aren't really telling the whole story, and automobile emissions could still represent a risk to public health.

[MillsV]

Hi - Can you explain why the answer is C and not A?

[Luke Haqq]

Hi MillsV!

I can certainly explain answer choices (C) and (A).

We can start by considering why answer choice (C) is the correct one. The question stem asks us to identify the answer choice that parallels the flawed reasoning in the stimulus. Answer choice (C) states, "using a cell phone while driving is not dangerous because the number of traffic accidents has decreased since the invention of the cell phone." The lobbyist in the stimulus argues that people are mistaken for thinking emissions are a public health risk, based on the fact that indicators of public health have improved even though emissions have also increased. A flaw with this reasoning is that it fails to consider alternative causes behind improvements in public health indicators (e.g., causes like sanitation efforts); it could be the case that emissions still cause public health risks, even if overall public health is otherwise improving due to other factors like sanitation improvement. Similarly in (C), cell phone use could still contribute to traffic accidents even if other measures (e.g., better braking and other equipment in cars) cause an overall decrease car accidents.

By contrast, answer choice (A) states, "inspecting commercial airplanes for safety is unnecessary because the number of commercial airplane crashes has decreased over the last decade." It's true that this reasoning seems flawed--it fails to consider that those safety inspections themselves could be a central cause to the decrease in airplane crashes over the past decade. Unlike answer choice (C), this isn't a failure to consider an alternate cause/explanation, but rather a failure to identify a causal relationship at all (between safety inspections and a decrease in crashes).

Answer choice (A) provides an example of flawed reasoning, but it doesn't parallel the same structure of the flaw in the stimulus in the way that (C) does.

[MillsV]

Thanks very much Luke

[BMM2021]

Hi,

I'm not sure that I understand the difference between A and C when it comes to the kind of flaw - it didn't appear to me that the stimulus itself is causal. The conclusion states that it is mistaken to believe that emissions are a public health risk; in other words, emissions are not a public health risk. The premises "support" this claim by identifying two pieces of info: that over the same period of time that emissions increased, public health also increased dramatically. I didn't take this as a claim/inference that the author believes or is trying to say that emissions actually improve the public health. To me, the author could be neutral about that kind of claim and still hold that emissions aren't a public health risk.

In turn, the argument appears to overlook the possibility that emissions are still a PH risk despite improving PH over time. The conclusion in A seems to be overlooking the possibility that inspections are causally/negatively related to airplane crashes, and the conclusion in C appears to overlook the possibility that cell phone use while driving could still be dangerous even though accidents have declined over time. With this reasoning, I'd say the right match is still C, but I just wanted to see if my approach or understanding of the flaws present is off. Sorry for splitting hairs, but thanks for any feedback!

Brian

[Rachael Wilkenfeld]

Hi Brian,

The problem in the stimulus is that the argument ignores all the other potential causes not described in the stimulus. It's not that the exhaust is the cause of the improved health. It's just saying that it isn't making it worse. Same in the correct answer choice---it's not that cell phones make us less likely to crash. It's that the author is ignoring potential causes for the decrease in the number of traffic accidents.

Answer choice (A) is different. It is ignoring the potential cause IN THE ANSWER CHOICE. It's not that there could be some outside cause. It's that it ignores the cause that was open and obvious, the very inspections that could have made the crash rate drop. That's different that the idea that there's a cause completely outside the considerations given by the author. This is that the author is using the considerations he had poorly.

Hope that helps!

[nguyenpcindy]

Hi! I was struggling between choosing C or D. Could you explain why D is incorrect?

[atierney]

Hello,

For this question, the argument's mistake is that they are assuming that one factor in determining public health, which exists among many, is the only factor that would contribute its status overall. In other words, there is failure to consider the entire breadth of the indicator used (public health), which necessarily is determined by factors (disease, lifestyle, nutrition, etc.) that are at most indirectly related to that which it is used to measure (automobile emissions).

The answer therefore, must make a similar error, and answer choice D does not do this, in that this answer's metric, injuries to skydivers, is not influenced by factors indirectly related to the thing it is measuring, skydiving. While you might possibly argue that injuries to skydivers could be caused by such factors as the relative number of new people trying it, the height planes drop people off from, etc., all of this is inherently still dependent upon and directly related to the overall danger of skydiving, in a way that the sedentary lifestyle of the public or its access to medications are not with respect to automobile emissions.

Answer choice C however does, since it uses the broader metric traffic accidents to measure the safety of cell phone usage while driving, with the idea being that traffic accidents can certainly caused by other things unrelated to cell phone usage (although we might question the relevance of this by today's saturation of cell phones... AND automated cars!)

Let me know if you have further questions on this.