4. Final Passage from the Set

5. Final Passage from the Set

7. Final Passage from the Set

8. Final Passage from the Set

9. Final Passage from the Set

That's just what it says, right?

It may in fact be the chief distinction.

Okay, so, now let's take a look at this algorithm.

However, judgments about whether a risk is involuntary

Right, voluntary or- I'll just v for voluntariness.

Right, the other way is involuntary.

often stem from confusion and selective attention,

oh, that's- author is criticizing me.

Right, like my rationale for just, you know, saying like

why should we save, why should we try to reduce risk from mountain climbing.

The author is saying that I'm actually confused about what voluntariness is and I'm exercising

selective attention and the real reason for such judgment frequently lies in an antecedent

judgment of some other kind.

This is probably, I would guess, the first place you encounter content confusion.

Okay, yeah, what do we do?

Just contain it.

Alright, so one thing you could, like something very pragmatic you could do is just try to

read the thing without the confusing content.

However, judgment about whether a risk is involuntary often stem from confusion and

selective attention.

Thus, they are of little utility in guiding policy decisions.

So that's actually a lot better without reading this.

So this is something you can do to try to contain your confusion.

Fall back on structural clarity.

This sentence seems kind of important.

There's a thus in there which indicates a conclusion.

What is the they referring to?

What is the they?

Well, you gotta look back at the previous sentence.

Where's the now?

The noun is judgments.

Judgments about whether a risk is voluntary or involuntary.

Like when I when I pointed to the mountain climbing, like, oh, I'm judging this to be

voluntary.

Nobody told you to get on a mountain.

And then when I looked at the air safety, I'm like, well, you know, everyone has to

fly, right?

That's not really a voluntary thing.

So that's my judgment about mountain climbing.

That's my judgment about air safety, right?

About flying in an airplane.

So our author here is saying those judgments, they're just bad judgments.

They stem from confusion, selective attention and something over here.

And something about the real reason for whatever.

Okay, but these judgments, they are useless, right?

They're useless for guiding policy decisions.

That sounds a lot like it could be the main conclusion, right?

Or the main point.

Okay, so that would be my hypothesis.

It's merely a hypothesis because I haven't read the rest of the passage yet.

It's subject to updating if I get information from the rest of the passage that suggests

to me that maybe something else, maybe we're taking this in a different direction.

But up to this point, notice you don't actually have to understand this to form this hypothesis.

In fact, it might even be easier to see this low-res structural summary by neglecting,

by intentionally ignoring this stuff that's kind of confusing.

But we'll put a little flag over here, put a little question mark over here, and maybe

this stuff later on will help us clarify what this is.

Okay, so let's keep reading.

Hmm, new paragraph, how does it connect to this?

Well, they said, judgment about whether a risk is voluntary or involuntary stem from

confusion.

So here, author is saying, look, you know, maybe the author is going to try to explain

this because it's not so easy to figure out when something is voluntary.

Although voluntariness may be entirely absent in cases of unforeseeable collision with an

asteroid.

Okay, he went there.

The asteroid collision.

Yeah, that's, you know, the author is saying, nobody's going to argue that like an asteroid

impacting your town, that there's no sense of voluntariness there, right?

Like, okay, that's totally involuntary.

But that's the special case, right?

You see, the use of the although, this is the concession point.

Our author is conceding this point away.

This is the special case.

Right, but see, with most environmental occupational other social risks is not an all or nothing

matter, but rather one of degree, right?

Just a sliding scale of voluntariness.

On the one end, it's totally involuntary.

On the other end, it's totally voluntary.

But everywhere in between, just, you know, some degree of voluntariness.

Risk is incurred by airline passengers.

Oh, good.

This is the thing that I was talking about up here, right?

That they already talked about.

Risk is incurred by airline passengers typically thought to be involuntary.

Yeah.

This author is like reading my mind, right?

That's exactly what I was saying up there.

I do think it's involuntary since passengers, yeah, especially because since passengers have

no control over whether a plane is going to crash.

I'm just a passenger.

I'm sitting in my seat, right?

Like, how am I supposed to have any control over this?

Clearly, not voluntary, right?

Just like the asteroid situation, there's no entirely absent, voluntary is entirely

absent.

No, actually, the author says, but they can choose airlines on the basis of safety records

or choose not to fly.

So in characterizing the risks as involuntary, people focus on a small part of the complex

interaction, not the decision to fly, but the accident when it occurs.

Ah, so here our author is changing, is attempting to change how I think about whether flying

on an airplane is truly an involuntary risk that I'm incurring.

Right?

See, from a very limited perspective, if I'm just sitting in my seat, I can't control

anything.

It seems to me that the risk of something bad happening to the airplane is entirely

out of my control.

But our author's like, well, you know, you didn't have to get on the airplane in the

first place.

You didn't, you didn't have to fly at all, right?

You could have found some other mode of transportation.

So how come you don't take that into account, right?

It's because I'm focusing on a small part of a complex interaction.

And that sounds a lot like what the author said up here about selective attention, right?

So it sounds like this paragraph sounds like an expansion of this point over here, right?

Our author said, this judgment about whether a risk is involuntary often stem from confusion

and selective attention.

You don't believe me?

Well, look over here, right?

So this I'm going to label as premise, right?

First second, so this is probably premise number one, in fact, right?

Trying to support this idea.

That's the content.

Sorry, that's the structural summary.

For content summary, I will write something like judgment about voluntariness is confused,

right?

Confused or arbitrary, maybe, right?

Selective attention or something like that.

Okay, let's keep going.

Second, right?

So just like if I wrote P1 for first, I'm going to write just P2 for second, just because

it's a good hypothesis.

Okay, so let's keep reading and see if that hypothesis is born out.

Some people often characterize risks as voluntary when they do not approve of the purpose for

which people run the risk.

So I would characterize something as voluntary when I don't approve of the purpose.

What do you mean by that?

It's unlikely that people want to pour enormous taxpayer resources into lowering the risks

associated with skydiving.

Yeah, I don't.

I mean, do you want to?

You probably don't want to, right?

The author says this is a throwaway concession statement, right?

Even if just like the although, right?

Even if the ratio of dollars spent to life saves were quite good.

Yeah, I still don't want to.

Because why should we?

Why should we put taxpayer dollars into lowering the risks associated with skydiving?

This is entirely voluntary activity that people do for entertainment, right?

By contrast, people would probably not object to spending enormous resources on improving

the safety of firefighters, even though the decision to become firefighters is voluntary.

Hmm.

Yeah, I mean, I also I would imagine you also would not object to spending resources on

improving safety of firefighters, right?

Whereas precisely we would on skydiving.

But our author is saying, look, even though the decision to become a firefighter is also

voluntary, right?

It's also voluntary.

This is this is a tough argument to understand.

So I am going to talk in high res terms about this argument in this paragraph.

But then at the end of it, I'm going to show you how even if we just hit content confusion

over here, which is very possible, okay, in fact, I'll say it's likely that you had content

confusion over here.

But right, but if you keep going, and you just kind of pay attention to what the author

says at the very end here, I think this content confusion won't hurt you too much, right?

In other words, what I'm saying is, even if you have content confusion over what the argument

is here, you can still distill out a low res structural summary that will help you eliminate

a bunch of the wrong answers.

And I'll talk about what that is once we get to this paragraph.

Okay, but for now, right now, let's talk about what this, what this argument actually is.

Our author says, in short, there's no special magic and notions like voluntary and involuntary,

therefore regulatory policy should be guided by a better understanding of the factors that

underlie judgments about voluntariness.

Okay, so what is this argument?

What's the author talking about?

What are the factors that underlie judgments about voluntariness?

Well, this goes all the way back to the first sentence where author says, people are actually

just characterizing risks like skydiving as voluntary when they don't approve of the purpose

for which they run the risk.

It's like if you consider an activity such as skydiving, and you, you know, you just

call it, okay, this is voluntary, right?

We label it voluntary.

But really you're apt to do that.

Why?

Because what's actually happening is that you don't like it, right?

You just don't approve of it, which is why, which is what makes you label it voluntary.

We can show this by considering another case of firefighters, right?

Which obviously we all like firefighters, right?

Everyone needs firefighters, right?

This is a public, they're, they're giving, they're providing a public good.

So for firefighters, we are not apt to call them voluntary, even though they are voluntary,

right?

Our authors tell us, I mean, of course it's voluntary, just like how skydiving is voluntary,

firefighting is voluntary.

Nobody forced you to go skydiving, right?

Just like how you could have chosen another career path.

But if these two things cannot be distinguished on the basis of whether or not they're voluntary,

that is to say they both are voluntary, then on what basis are you withholding taxpayer

resources to make skydiving safer while not holding taxpayer resources to make firefighters

safer?

See, like in one instance, okay, we don't want to give money to skydiving to make it

safer.

But in another instance, we do want to give money to firefighting to make this safer.

And we say, yeah, see, if you, if you asked about this, how come you don't want to give

money to make skydiving safer?

Our response is not that we don't like skydiving.

Our response is, well, because skydiving is voluntary.

Nobody made them go skydive, right?

They're doing it for entertainment.

Our author says, fine, okay, if that's your rationale, then you also need to withhold

money for firefighting because it's the same thing.

Nobody made them go be firefighters.

It's totally voluntary.

Do you see, so the fact that you're not withholding public resources for improving the safety

or reducing the risk of firefighting means that, I mean, you know, even though you claim

to be making this distinction on this decision based on whether something is voluntary, there's

something else at play.

And our author says that something else at play is this, right?

This is the thing that matches.

Whether you like a thing is the thing that matches whether you give money to the thing.

You see, that's what our author means when he says, we just characterize it, we like

to slap the label, oh, it's voluntary.

When we don't like a thing, when we like a thing, we're hesitant to slap a label voluntary,

even though it is also voluntary, right?

So our author is saying, look, you know, if we want to make a policy, then we just need

to understand better what factors actually underlie judgments about voluntariness.

And this is, you know, at least in this example, this is the factor, whether or not you approve

of the purpose of the activity, whether or not you like it, that's the factor that underlie

judgments about voluntariness.

Okay, so that's the high-res understanding of the argument.

It's a tough argument to follow, right?

But here, let's return to this claim.

Remember we said we were kind of confused?

The real reasons for such judgments, what judgments, these judgments about whether something

is voluntary, right?

Our author is saying the real reasons for judgments about whether something's voluntary

frequently lies in an antecedent judgment, like in a judgment that already occurred before

this judgment of some other kind.

This is starting to make more sense now, right?

In light of this, what's the antecedent judgment?

See, our author is saying the real reason for judgments of voluntariness, when we consider

skydiving, we judge it voluntary.

Our author is saying the real reason you say it's voluntary, it's because you already made

an antecedent judgment that you don't like skydiving so much.

Right, okay, if that's the case, then we just need to be clear about this.

Don't muddy the waters by talking about voluntariness or not voluntariness.

You know, there are other reasons to make a distinction between why we ought to reduce

the risk to firefighters, but not for skydiving, if that's what you want to talk about.

But just don't rely on this voluntary versus involuntary.

Okay, so here for the content low-res, and this is a thing that you probably can't get

without a high-res understanding.

So without a high-res understanding, you just stick with your structural low-res.

Okay, this is the second paragraph.

You got to know this is in somehow, you might be like, I don't know how, but because it

says second, somehow it's supporting this idea, and maybe you even vaguely get the sense

that something is about a judgment, an antecedent judgment.

That's good enough, right?

But now that we have the high-res, I'm going to say that for this one, it's some other

factor that is underneath this idea of voluntariness, right?

It's some other factor that underlies it.

So now we have one more paragraph.

the limited public and private resources devoted to risk reduction.

Now this goes all the way back to what we had talked about, what we had anticipated

as the low-res, sorry, as the main point, as the low-res in the first paragraph.

We said laypeople's judgments should not form the basis for guiding policy decisions, right?

Like mapped out, this is a negative claim.

We're saying laypeople's judgments about voluntariness, whatever they are, this claim over here is

saying do not use them to make public policy, right?

Do not use laypeople's judgments about voluntariness to make public policy.

Now once we get down over here, we start to get a positive claim, right?

We're starting, okay, it's like up there, it's like, okay, fine.

What should we use to inform our judgment?

If we're not supposed to pay attention to laypeople's judgments about voluntariness

to form public policy, what should we use?

Over here you start to get a little bit of that, right?

You should get, you know, one thing is you should have a better understanding of the

actual factors that underlie people's judgments about voluntariness, the real factors, the

real factors that underlie.

So, okay, that can be used to guide public policy.

You see, so this is the first positive formulation.

So now we want to amend our hypothesis.

This is sort of still the main point, sure, don't use this, but now this main point gets

a partner, right?

Use this instead.

Okay, so now our main point sounds something like don't use A to inform X, rather use B

to inform X.

And in general, our author says you should just save as many lives as you can, subject

to the limited public-private resources devoted to risk reduction.

Okay, so what is our public policy, right?

Don't use, you know, don't use something to inform it.

Here, I'll just copy it over from paragraph one.

Laypeople's judgment about voluntariness, this idea here, we're not going to use it,

right?

We're not going to use it.

But the public policy, what it actually is, is just save as many lives as you can, our

author is saying.

Right?

Basically what the experts said, right?

Like up here, the policy experts said, just focus on aggregate lives at stake, right?

Save as many people as you can, given the limited resources you can.

That's the general principle, that's our public policy.

Departures from this principle should be justified, not by invoking, right, not by invoking alleged

voluntary and involuntary nature of risk.

Again, this is just a rehash of the previous two paragraphs, right?

Don't use laypeople's judgments about voluntariness.

Why?

Well, this reason and also this reason, right?

So don't use it.

Rather, identify the more specific considerations for which notions of voluntariness serve as

proxies.

Again, just a rehash of this idea.

Right?

So this is actually just the summary of what we had already talked about.

Generally speaking, save as many lives as you can, subject to the resources you have.

If you need to depart from save as many lives as you can, okay, you can do that, but don't

look at judgments about voluntariness.

Rather, look at something else, right?

Something else.

So just right there, what I've done is I've kind of stated this in a low-res way, right?

I don't think you needed to understand this argument to be able to get there.

Of course, you need to understand this argument to understand why the author makes this claim,

but you don't need to understand this argument to understand that this is the author's claim.

And if you merely understand in this low-res way that this is the author's claim, that

will help a lot in eliminating wrong answers.

Okay?

So with that, let's take a look at the questions.

Question 23 says, according to the passage, which means we're looking for something that the passage has stated,

so on the spectrum between explicitly stated to strongly implied, it's going to be closer to this end of the spectrum.

Which one of the following do lay people generally consider to involve risk that is not freely assumed?

Not freely assumed. Okay, meaning involuntary, right?

So, traveling outer space was not mentioned.

Skydiving is voluntary. So not that.

The author said it's voluntary, right? Even though the decision to become a firefighter is voluntary.

But the passage didn't say what lay people would think about this. Okay, so it's just not stated.

Airline passengers, involuntary, and gives a reason for that, so there's the state of it.

Or at least it's implied that it's voluntary.