After reading "most technical articles" I'd be super skeptical - because there's nothing I can use in this stimulus to support anything about MOST of these types of articles. in the stim, we're talking about a subset: multiauthored technical articles; even then, we just say that there's been an increase - we never say anything ab the fact that most have X quality etc. I hope this helps (:

I had the same reservation about (B), but remember that this is a weakening question - we want to choose, relatively speaking, which AC gets at severing the support relationship. A, C, D, E don't even touch the argument - you have to make many more assumptions to make them relevant. Contrasting that with (B), sure you're assuming who the 'some' and 'not others' applies to, but it still attacks an assumption made by the author that JY points out (i.e., we make a conclusion about general population when the data was just on a subset; B points to how it was unrepresentative)

it's all ab being pragmatic and comparing the ACs (': (i h8 this test)

I think you're misinterpreting A. It's saying that the virus keep the plankton under control essentially. so when removing the virus, we'd at least expect an initial growth/spike in the plankton...which we didn't see at all - so it kind of deepens the phenomenon

Hey maybe I can help! So basically the premises don't really support the conclusion. we're getting analogies as to how TCH (the cruel herd) is like MV (moral vaccum), but crucially we. don't know if these points of similarities are relevant in determining whether Jackie will like TCH's album as a result of already liking MV.

That's what (A) does. It says that the people making the music for MV are on TCH and if she liked MV's music which we know from the first premise is similar to TCH in that its the whole complex rock stuff, then it likely means that she's going to like the new album bc its going to have the similar sound. I hope that makes sense

Don't know if I'm too late but it's because the author's main point (near the end) centres around how we don't need to scratch the hippocratic oath like the critics say to, as there is already being reinterpretations of it. (E), which says facelift - that references this idea of how we don't need to make major changes as opposed to a major surgery (i.e., practically gutting the oath as the critics want to). just gotta map it on to the relevant pieces (:

Parallel flaw: we should continue chopping down the Amazon forest, no matter what. wood from the forest can be used to make houses, paper made from this can help lead to human discoveries, and the industry of wood chopping boosts the local economy.

Hey! B actually sidesteps the argument. In our conclusion, we make it very explicit that it's the specific practice of manufacturing banned pesticides that increase our health risk. B says, hey, you know there are many others that we export that aren't banned. That's great, but again, the author would respond 'idc about those pesticides, im talking about the banned ones'

also: take a look at the premise. are we given an quantifiable amount that the banned pesticides are a small amount? so there's another assumption baked into B. you have to assume that the banned ones are small and the ones that aren't banned are the majority. who knows! there could be 500 banned pesticides and like, 30 pesticides that we use. of those 30, B says we export out, say, 25.

i skipped b precisely because i was like 'it attacks the premise so it can't be right' ugh

Another note to expand on why (A) might be wrong: think about the ideal experiment and how we want to isolate for 1 variable so we can def say that whatever variable we changed had a causal impact on whatever we found in our study.

by keeping gender different in A, we now introduced 2 variables that could explain the increased heart disease. Was it gender that had a causal impact on it? the wine? both? we don't know and it would be too big of an assumption to favour one variable over the other. That's what JY was getting at when he said that we'd need the gender to be same and simply change the wine amount. If that showed them getting more instances of heart disease, then that would attack the causal statement that wine --p--> effects of high fat (i.e., one of which is getting heart disease)

hey! remember in the CC how we can strengthen/weaken causal explanations? one of them is through analogy (i just checked and it's under 'Similar causal relationships'). Basically, we can look at a relevantly similar situation and if it confirms our hypothesis it strengthens and if it doesn't, it weakens. That's essentially what (C) does: based on the logic of this argument, we'd expect other works that vary in the same way to have different authors. At its core, (C) is saying nah, that doesn't have to be true because we have this author whose works are relevantly similar to homer (i.e., those characteristics in the premise), but we know the same author wrote them.

the whole time i was lowkey sweatin cuz i was like 'why is JY committing the sufficiency -necessity error aha' - but that inference really clears things up

many weakening/strengthening questions hinge on your understanding of the ideal experiment, or more specifically how whatever experiment is being talked about is short of the ideal. for weakening, you can prephrase where they messed up and hunt an AC; for strengthening, let's say you see some gap in their experiment, to patch it up, hunt ACs to see if that aspect of the ideal experiment is there. I hope that helps!!

We're in sufficient assumption territory - not necessary. i think you might be mistaking the two (:

how I translated it using your method: /good-legal-system and well-paid --> /effective

If we take the contrapositive, we get

effective --> good-legal-system or /well-paid

so we can never conclude/say that effective is a necessary condition

Hi Fabien! I just took a look at this question again and I think even my explanation was too complex. Focusing on the argument structure helps us see clearly the flaw. The argument is basically the last 2 sentences where we have a major premise supporting the MC.

Let's just write that out:

the more complex, the more ways it can fail

_

therefore, new complex system will make it more likely the bags will inflate

okay, so just because something is introducing more possibilities of failure...that doesn't mean the failure will happen! think about it: if they're tinkering improving the computer system, that prob means the likelihood will decrease. we have no reason to believe the problem will get worse just like we have no reason to definitively say the problem will get better.

(A) gets at what I said - just because we've made something more complex, doesn't mean it's doomed for failure.

(B) - let's see if it passes the test of being descriptively accurate.

"it takes for granted that any failure in the airbag system will cause it..."

hm lets see what the stim says, which is about false positive instances of air bags triggers. okay, sure, this can be considered a failure in the airbag system. however, notice that the stimulus is using causal, probabilitistic words; (B) is saying EVERY time we see a failure, we are in the world that it inflated accidentally.

take a step back and digest this.

failure --> inflate accidentally

really? the stimulus does not state that the only way inflating accidentally can occur is through the failure of the computer system. more importantly, it's not getting at that flaw - we have new phones that are more complex and using this arugment's logic, have more ways of failing to accurately tell the time (idk im making this up). does that mean these new phones always mess us and tell us the wrong time? nope!

i really hope this helps

rest in pieces to me for some reason i forgot it was a strengthening q and chose d??

idky but thinking about the stimulus as a phenomenon in need of explanation and the ACs as all potential hypotheses has made these questions so much easier for me (': thanks 7sage ur the best

hey! i think the key here is to identify the two main ideas occurring, which in this case are 2 clauses.

one clause is saying that choices cannot be free; the other is saying choices are made on the basis of well-reasoned opinions. they're joined together by 'unless,' which i'd argue is the main logical indicator.

so it would be something like

free --> well-reasoned

/well-reasoned --> /free

if choices are free, then they have been made on the basis of well-reasoned opinions.

if there is no basis for well-reason opinions, then the choices are not free.

i hope this helps!

i think he's trying to get at our interpretation of the rule and essentially, what the rule applies to and what it is silent on. i think this is trying to stop us from thinking that 'oh, because we have this necessary condition, that means we have the sufficient condition too!'

e.g., 8.5, where it's public → breach, just because I have a breach of patient privacy, can I say for certain that it was due to public discussion of medical records?

No! There could be many other ways (perhaps a hacker who stole data). The point here is that if you do have a breach, you can't automatically (and sometimes this happens subconsciously) make it the sufficient condition and conclude that therefore, there must have been public discussion of the medical record.

does that make sense? that's how i think of it! hope this helped.

so from the premise we say that

avoiding dairy --c--> avoiding heart disease

but then our conclusion jumps to the superset

avoiding dairy --c--> maintaining good health

for me, this is where the flaw clicked (after listening to JY's explanation). sure, in one instance (heart disease) we can clearly see how avoiding it may be for the best. but surely there are other crucial aspects of maintaining good health, like bone structure. therefore, can we resolutely state that in all instances 'avoiding dairy --c--> maintaining good health'?

not really and that's what (A) gets at -- if we were to completely get rid of dairy (like milk) we could get osteoporosis or sum and that's not good health!

feel free to correct my thinking in case it's not adding up

*note the arrows reflect the potential causality as stated in stim

soooo they are critiquing the argument in favour of choice B (courthouse) instead of critiquing B itself by showing us why it sucks or why choice A (factory) is better. This matters because the conclusion is about which choice is better and as the argument currently stands, we genuinely don't know -- again, because we don't know the pros/cons of choice A and B. all we know is that there was some argument(s) for B, it sucked, so A is better (which is flawed reasoning)

I can't remember where but I swear JY said that if the stim doesn't go into depth about the experiment or 'studies' mentioned, then that's a clue to assume it was done correctly--or that the flaw/potential weakener is going to focus on something else. Because this stim just mentioned studies and didn't delve deeper, I assumed there wasn't anything wrong w/the studies themselves.

Please correct me if I'm wrong though!

Here is one of the specific examples I came up with that (hopefully) align with the principle:

“The fact that a standard is already in wide use can be a crucial factor in making it a more practical choice than an alternative.”

With the addition of hockey pads during the first NHL regular season, the size used then has remained the size today. If the pads grew in size, it would help all goalies improve their save percentage. However, it's not worth it to undergo this change because the cost to NHL teams in terms of money, practice and frustration outweighs the benefit of the goalie making additional saves.

This will help when you're doing flaw questions and the flaw is an invalid argument like this; knowing these will help you anticipate whether the answer choices are right/wrong...so sometimes you won't need to read the conclusion, but that won't be for a while i think

Hey Hannah! I believe he is just referring to the reasoning behind why (A → B ‑m→ C) is wrong is the same reason why (A → B ←s→ C) is wrong.

Think about it in buckets. Just like for (A → B ‑m→ C), we have all the A letters in B, but when we dump 'most' of B into C, we don't know if any of the Bs that have As attached to them jump into the C bucket. It could be that we have 5 As, all dumped into a bucket of 11Bs. (This means that 5 Bs have As with them). It's very possible that the 6 Bs dumped into C are the ones that don't have an A attached with them. The point is, we don't know know for sure if there are As in C.

(A → B ←s→ C)

Now 'some' is even 'weaker' in a sense that its lower boundary is simply 1. So if we just had 1 A, dumped that into 11 Bs, it's very, very possible that there isn't any As in C, but again, we just don't know because we don't know the size of the sets relative to one another.

I truly hope this helped!