PT65.S4.Q26 - because our club recruited the best volleyball players

lsatseverus

Hello,

I'm having trouble understanding why B is incorrect, and why E is the correct answer.

So originally when going over the stimulus I only found one flaw in the stimulus: The individual players don't tell us about the quality of the team (Parts doesn't equal the whole)

And, I assumed "B" was the correct answer since it kind of described the flaw. "features that are not relevant to the quality of that entity", I guess the features are relevant, but I assumed that those features are not relevant to the overall quality of that entity. Meaning the individual parts can't give us any detail of the quality of the whole.


I don't understand how "E" is the correct answer. Best team most likely to win -> Our club will almost certainly be city champions.....Okay...they have the same transitional conditions...what's wrong here?
https://7sage.com/lsat_explanations/lsat-65-section-4-question-26/

Darth Jurist

@lsatseverus said:
I don't understand how "E" is the correct answer. Best team most likely to win -> Our club will almost certainly be city champions.....Okay...they have the same transitional conditions...what's wrong here?

Lottery winners flaw. If you look at the initial conclusion in the argument, you will see that it is only a sub-conclusion. This question is hard because there are two flaws present: part-whole and lottery winner's flaw. The thing to keep in mind is that the overall argument is about the likelihood of winning. So you want to find and expose that flaw (i.e. find the answer choice that describes the lottery flaw).

The lottery flaw can be explained like this:

Imagine there is a lottery in a small town and only 200 tickets are available for purchase. You buy 100 of them and the other 100 tickets and each sold to individual people. Can we conclude that you will almost certainly win the lottery? No. Just because your overall chances are better than everyone else's does not mean you are guaranteed to win, nor does it mean you are the most likely winner. Just like if you stack a volleyball team with the best players in the city you are not guaranteed to win. Sure, you are the favored choice among critics, but it does not preclude a Cinderella team from coming in and upsetting the favored team. What if half the team contracts food poisoning and dies? What if they have exceptional talent but no team chemistry? What if the league is fierce with competition and the team in question may only be slightly better than the rest. For reasons like this, we cannot conclude that the stacked team is more likely to win that not.

This is a tough question because they bait you so cleverly with the initial part-whole flaw presented when in reality, the real flaw is so subtle and hard to see. On top of that, the lottery flaw can be hard to conceptualize.

Hope this helps!!

lsatseverus

Thank you! I wasn't quite familiar with the lottery flaw, so this indeed threw me off guard.

@"Darth Jurist", I have another question if you don't mind, are the statements: "It's most likely going to rain today" same as "It's almost certainly going to rain today"?

Darth Jurist

@lsatseverus said:
"It's most likely going to rain today" same as "It's almost certainly going to rain today"?

Not really... Most is usually used as an existential quantifier (if I'm not mistaken), which is more related to conditional logic. "Almost certain" is talking more about the probability of a event occurring, so you could think of it as the chance that an event will occur.

Now, in terms of "most" being used in the "most likely" sense, this is one instance where it is being used in a probabilistic sense similar to "almost certainly". The important thing to remember with these to statements (as they are used in the stimulus of this LR question) is that one is a premise and the other is the conclusion. The example you used above would be very similar and mean almost the same thing, with the latter positing a higher probability of the event, raining, occurring. "Most" simply implies a 51% chance or greater whereas "almost certain" implies around a 95-99% chance. By themselves, they are very similar statements with exception of that one caveat. In the stimulus, they're very different in that they are each different parts of the greater argument.

I'm really glad you brought this up, as it can be difficult to conceptualize "most" and "almost certain" and their subtle differences. In a way, the argument in this question is also presupposing what it sets out to prove, or committing the circular reasoning fallacy (similar to the lottery winner's flaw). As I mentioned in my initial response, just because I buy half the lottery tickets available and have the higher chance of winning out of everyone else (50% chance versus everyone else with a 1% chance) does not meant I will almost certainly (99% chance) win said lottery. My presupposition is unwarranted.

It all hinges on the minute details! XD
Thank you for the great questions and allowing me to work with you on this, it was a great learning experience for both of us.

nye8870

This is a tough question because it requires quick assessment of the math involved. On 7sage %46 of takers got it wrong. I like to imagine a regular six sided die but instead of a number 6 you replace with another 5. Now you have a %33 chance of rolling a 5 and 1 thru 4 independently have about a %17 chance. So at first glance seems great odds for a 5. But.... If you have %33 percent of rolling a five (winning the championship) there is a %67 alternative outcome where you do not roll a five (lose the championship) so having the better odds does not really translate into the outcome of "almost certainly winning". BTW I am not sure if we can assess any actual percentage to that quantifier because of its ambiguity.