PT37.S2.Q25 - in a car accident, air bags greatly reduce

kombucha

Hi, I'm hoping my fellow 7Sagers could help clarify my muddled brain (I'm probably overthinking this).

When a stimulus says something is more/less likely, I understand it's regarding a chance, but does it already take into account the total amount in each group? For example, I was reviewing PT 37.2.25 - my question doesn't really have anything to do with the actual answer, but wanted to clarify and get feedback on my thought process:

One of the flaws I anticipated was that cars with air bags may be more likely because there are just more cars on the road with air bags v. non-air bags. I think this is a very reasonable assumption since in our real world, it's mandatory to manufacture cars with air bags and there are simply not as many non-air bag cars anymore. However, is this a reasonable flaw to make or should I understand that the argument has already taken into account the total number of cars with air bags v. non-air bags and so I should just take at face value that the percentage of accidents is higher for cars with air bags? Hopefully this made sense - appreciate your responses in advance.

Link to the PT Q referenced above: https://7sage.com/lsat_explanations/lsat-37-section-2-question-25/

BinghamtonDave

First, excellent job in questioning the reasoning behind the stimulus’ contention of likelihood of accidents. A skepticism towards the stimulus in this way is a great method for cutting through the confusion of many LR problems. For this problem we have two statements that are supposed to support one conclusion.

First sentence: air bags reduce the severity of serious injury in the domain of accidents.
Second sentence: the likelihood of involvement in accidents seems to be less for cars that don’t have airbags.

Supported conclusion: at this juncture I have found it helpful when BR’ing flaw questions to think of what a supported conclusion might look like. Pushing these two statements together we should arrive at a conclusion akin to: more data is needed to support any contention about the overall safety of cars equipt with airbags in relation to cars not equipt with airbags. All we have so far is the presence of airbags reducing injury and then the number of accidents in relation to each other.

Conclusion/third sentence: Cars equipt with airbags are equal to or less safe than cars that lack them. As stated above, we do not have enough information to support this conclusion.

Now, to your main question: I do believe it is true that the second sentence might be ignoring some real world phenomena that would undercut the contention. Namely, that the sheer number of cars with airbags: lets say 99% of all total inspected cars on US roadways leads to a lessening of the voracity in which the second premise is asserted. But pointing that out only calls into question the legitimacy of one of the premises: and notice also that this is not an answer choice. I think (A) is an incorrect attempt to appeal to this anticipated description of the flaw, but it fails. I think there is also another hidden flaw in this question that revolves around the words "serious injury." That is to say that lessening the risk of serious injury in an accident might force the accidents that do occur with airbags into fender bender territory rather than catastrophic territory. Couple that possibility with the fact that cars without airbags have less accidents, but these accidents might all be catastrophic (presumably because of a lack of airbags) and we really have no support for our conclusion, for although there may be more accidents in cars with airbags, they might be minor accidents, whereas the less number of accidents involving cars without airbags might be terrible, so how do we calculate "safer" given this possible fact pattern?

The issue I see here is the idea that likelihood of reduction in the risk of injury is weighed equally to arrive at a conclusion about overall safety. The two scenarios laid out in the previous paragraph are essentially symptoms of this greater flaw, they are subsumed under it.

I hope this helps
David

kombucha

Hi @BinghamtonDave, thanks so much for your thought-out response! I agree that my anticipated flaw may be just attacking a premise and not exactly the support bw the premises and conclusion, but just for future references - when coming across a likelihood argument, should we understand that the argument has already taken into account the total amount or should we be wary of the given percentage?