Wanted to bring over a helpful explanation I saw from Powerscore:

Whereas most strengthen/weakening questions using causal reasoning follow the form of correlation (premise) to causation (conclusion), this argument has a causal claim as a premise and then another causal claim as a conclusion. This is a tip that the causal reasoning used in the argument is not likely to be the target point to strengthen/weaken the argument; as with other strengthen/weaken questions, the statements in the premises are by and large taken to be true.

The movement here from premise to conclusion, while still relying on causal reasoning in the background, is more centrally focused on reasoning by analogy: the oval orbit of objects in a distant solar system is being compared to the oval orbit of objects in our solar system. As with other arguments by analogy, they can be strengthened or weakened by establishing that the two parts have either a solid or unsolid basis to be analogized to each other.

AC c) is, as the video says, sort of like a necessary assumption in the causal mechanism being claimed here but can also be thought of as a way of showing that the two parts being analogized here are alike in a way that is key for the validity of the analogy.

Second thing I took away from this question:

wording in AC's that would normally be identified as a mis-matched concept is not a problem for PSA and SA questions so long as the subject-noun in the AC is a superset of the subject-noun in the stimulus.

In this case "change" is a superset of the set "species going extinct".

I feel like it's normally helpful to be very critical of these differences in wording between AC and the stimulus, but this problem was a good reminder to remember that PSA and SA questions can be an exception to this rule when the subject in the AC is overinclusive (it's a superset of the subject in the stimulus).

Got this question wrong on first try but here's what I took away after reflection

1)Normative statements (the type of form of a statement that is usually taken by a conclusory statement in PSA questions) have a very high burden of proof. --If a normative statement is is a conclusory statement, it won't be enough for the evidence of an argument to only present non-normative facts, even if these facts may seem to support the conclusion.--

E.g.: premise 1 - getting a 180 on the LSAT increases ones chances of getting into a top law school

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Conclusion: Therefore, If Ryan wants to get into a top law school, then Ryan should study for the LSAT for however long it takes for him to get a 180

One reason normative conclusory statements have such a high burden of proof is because they imply that any and all "costs" in the cost-benefit analysis are outweighed by the one benefit the argument is focusing on.

For example, perhaps studying for the amount of time required to get a 180 on the LSAT comes at the cost of Ryan devoting enough time to his personal statement, or it has a cost separate from the LSAT such as sacrificing time spent with family/friends. Hypothetically, it's easy to come up with scenarios where Ryan does want to get into a top law school and yet it would not be wise for him to take the requisite amount of time to get a 180. This is all true, despite the fact that not spending the time typically required to get a 180 will likely exclude the possibility of his achieving this.

The same goes for the preservation of species question. Even if preventing species from which we're indifferent to from going extinct also maximizes preservation of species we like, we can't conclude that this is the action plan that should be taken. Maybe in an effort to preserve these species we're indifferent to, resources have to be diverted away from preserving the species we like and so this action plan would have the reserve effect. Even if we knew that the proposed plan gave us the best odds at preserving the max amount of species, maybe the resources required for the plan would have to be drawn away from resources currently devoted to feeding the poor. Now it doesn't seem so obvious that we should take that plan. By nesting a normative statement into a conditional as one of the premises - like this answer does and like so many other PSA questions do - this type of attack on the argument is eliminated. It's much harder to attack A-->B then to attack the idea that a certain plan of action should be taken

I get the idea of chaining concepts, but (and correct me if I'm wrong) I feel like the LSAT is far more frequently asking us to think about why chaining causal concepts creates problems so often (especially for WSE and flaw/descriptive weakening questions) in the real world due to the world reflecting - as JY says - "a complex causal model".

For example:

(1) avoiding sweets--c-->improved heart health

(2) improved heart health---c--> improved overall health

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Chaining causal claims: (3) avoiding sweets ---c--> improved overall health

But what if avoiding sweets caused the person such stress (and that stress has an even stronger causal relationship to overall health), that their avoidance of sweets caused their health to deteriorate

Or what if avoiding sweets causes them to redirect their only free time to regulating their diet - time they would have otherwise spent exercising - and their lack of exercise causes their health to deteriorate.

It seems to me like the problem is that the conclusion equates/limits sweets consumption to its effects on heart health. However, avoiding sweets has a lot of other characteristics - some of which we can imagine might not improve heart health. To continue the analogy, perhaps avoiding sweets also has the characteristic of causing increased stress and decreasing exercise ( I know it's unlikely but it's just a hypothetical). In other words, there are many theoretically possible causal pathways between sweets consumption and overall health that are overlooked when the causal claims are chained.

Curious on people's thoughts

When I initially reviewed this question I sort of wrote it off as a weird question, but I think it brings up a lot of relevant points for other questions too.

I think the reason this question is so hard is because this feels like an obvious scope shift. The conclusion talks about the books being influential and the evidence talks about the readers reporting that the book is influential. The answer choices come up with all the obvious ways --in the real world-- these two terms wouldn't necessarily need to be the same. (what if the person has only ever read two books? what if the person didn't even read the book they're reporting? etc.)

But the problem is that pointing out this scope shift doesn't help to evaluate the argument any more than before. In fact, it makes evaluating what exactly had influence even more convoluted.

For starters, the other AC's don't add nearly enough detail, which forces us as test-takers to make unwarranted assumptions. For AC A for example, do people who have read more books have a greater claim at being influenced by any given book because they've seen more of the literary world? Or is it that people who have read less books are more impacted by any given book because the few books that they have read take up a larger proportional space in their "book memory" and their influence is more poignant.

Same kind of thinking goes for AC E- are the people who read the books going to be more influenced by it? Or are people who just listened to the audiobook or heard about it through reviews going to be more influenced by it?

At the end of the day though, even if these answer choices added all sorts of new premises that made new assumptions unnecessary, the fundamental problem with the interpretation of the ordinal ranking remains.

Hoping to remind myself to be more conscious of making subtle assumptions going forward, and to be very critical of all answer choices where assumptions are required

After reading an explanation for why e doesn't help explain the paradox on powerscore, I've come to the following reasoning:

it's potentially tempting to see e as solving the paradox because it's not unreasonable to think that #of kinds of lamps would be correlated with the overall # of lamps. To generalize away from the specifics of the question, I don't think it's completely unreasonable to think that the societies that have the highest number of different kinds of lamps would also have the highest number of total lamps. In other words, I don't think it's unreasonable to think that the # of different kinds of lamps might correlate to the number of total lamps. But it doesn't make sense to say that the # of different kinds of lamps would have a causal effect on the # of total lamps. In contrast, all the other answer choices provide a causal explanation for the distribution of lamps in the stimulus.

TLDR: I think considering causation vs correlation is helpful for this question