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PT29.S1.Q22 Need fresh perspective! Comments so far don't completely answer my questions!
Ashley2018-1
Alum Member
So I picked C the first time around and I wanted to know if this would have been the correct answer if the stimulus had concluded that the government's decision to limit the nuclear power plant's liability in case of a nuclear accident was an unwise decision because the financial security of the operators of these nuclear power plants is dependent on the plants being safe (b/c if they weren't, then they would go broke)
And why would the government choose to help nuclear power plants in this way? I thought the decision to limit financial liability was the government admitting the nuclear power plants weren't safe...but that's wrong, according to the video.
Admin Note: https://7sage.com/lsat_explanations/lsat-29-section-1-question-22/
Comments
I read C to say "nuclear plants are safe only because if they weren't safe they would be sued and go bankrupt and the government is stepping in to save their butts so they don't go bankrupt BUT the government doing that isn't really addressing the fact that the nuclear plants are STILL unsafe"
So I fell for the trap, namely that I thought by acting to limit the nuclear power plant's liability, that it meant the nuclear power plants were actually unsafe and I don't see any other reason why the government would act to do so...the video says maybe the government is just incompetent but idk...is there some other potential reason?
J.Y. explains that the conclusion in C doesn't not match.
I get that; I watched the video. But that still doesn't answer my question.
The conclusion is the public's fear
...that wasn't my question.
my question was why would the government help out the nuclear power plants with financial liability? seems to me the gov't is admitting they're unsafe.
it's really hit or miss with this forum, isn't it?
I'll give this a shot so bear with me: if this situation were to arise in the "real world" and we knew that the government was taking on this liability yet believed nuclear plants were completely safe there could still be ways for both of these things to be true. Maybe the nuclear power plant corporations themselves don't believe their businesses are as safe as can be and somehow were able to make a deal with the gov't to "subsidize" them in case of disaster? In this scenario the gov't can still maintain that they believe nuclear power plants are safe, yet extend the liability not on their own accord but from pressure from power plant corps themselves. That would be one scenario. Mind you the reasoning for this doesn't matter, other than it exists and you are trying to make valid someone else's argument, so you kind if just have to roll with it. In general though, sometimes in contracts you'll have clauses that protect you from things that you're almost certainly confident wouldn't happen but you put it in on the off chance, or because it is standard procedure, but it doesn't somehow betray your true beliefs about what you deem likely or unlikely to happen, safe/unsafe, etc.
Not sure why we are bringing real world into our analysis. We are to accept the premises as true.
Bringing aspects of the real world into question analysis and accepting the premises as true aren't mutually exclusive. I wanted to know how it could be that the government is acting as if the nuclear power plants are unsafe and yet they could still be safe; that reason isn't provided in the stimulus so yeah, we gotta think outside the info they give us.
You're absolutely right that it's irrelevant for the purpose of answering the question itself, but I felt like Ashley2018 was struggling to understand why the stim was written that way in the first place (as opposed to the structure of the argument itself) and being able to wrap your head around the subject of the stim can sometimes help to see/understand the logical structure of the argument, as well as its flaws.
The way I read it allowed me to cross out C. Because of the first part of the question, "if a potentially dangerous thing is safe only because the financial... depends on it being safe" didn't sound right.
The nuclear plant(potentially dangerous thing) isn't safe because someone's financial inventive depend on it being safe. If it had the word "considered" or something like that after "is", then maybe. But the way it's written it felt too direct, for me.
Well, an answer not "sounding right" just isn't enough for me. I've had answers that "sounded right" that turned out to be dead wrong and vice versa. I honestly am still confused about what the first portion of C is saying. And just saying an answer choice sounds "too direct" is just too amorphous of a reason.
You need to identify the AC that gets you closest to your conclusion: The public's fear (of accidents) is well founded.
C: If (nuclear power) is safe only because the financial security of (the nuclear power industry) depends on (nuclear power) being safe, then eliminating (the nuclear industry's financial security being dependent on nuclear power being safe) is not in the best interests of the public.
Because this is a latent conditional or hypothetical statement, you don't know you are in the world proposed by the AC. Is nuclear power safe only because the financial security of the industry depends on it being safe? We have no idea, so we have no idea whether this conditional statement would be activated even if it were true.
Also, even if we allow for the sufficient condition to be activated, you're still left with a gap from "its not in the public's best interest to eliminate this dynamic" to "public fear being well founded."
It'd still be wrong for the same reasons. The gap would turn into "not in public interest" and "unwise" and the latent conditional issue would remain.
In the real world we do this all the time... the government quite often understates risk to justify action, or bolster support, while simultaneously pursuing ulterior political agenda. Even excluding this, arguing that limiting liability implies risk, doesn't mean the government then must believe it to be true.
D literally just tells us, there is a danger... what the public fears can actually happen.
So thinking of this question as a pseudo-sufficient assumption question, does D justify the argument because "the government acts to prevent a certain kind of situation from arising" (potential bankruptcy due to unlimited liability) only if there is a real danger such a situation will arise (injury from nuclear accident)
Yes, you only need the second part of the answer. The gov does not act (like its recent action to limit liability) unless there is a real threat of that stuff actually happening.
If no threat, then no act.
If act, then threat.
Gov acted, so there must be a threat... so fear (of accidents) is justified.
Fair enough, I've had the same experience with plenty of incorrect answers I felt were correct. I can understand your frustration, so I'll be more direct. The financial security of the government isn't the sole reason the nuclear powerplant isn't considered safe.
The argument made in the stimulus focused on pointing out that the government held contradictory positions but it didn't tell us anything about what determines whether or not a nuclear powerplant is considered safe or not. C can't be the answer and D fits way better as the answer
The argument is saying "Nuclear Powerplants aren't safe because the government doesnt hold itself financially responsible for them"
This is a bad argument. Correlation isn't causation
C says "the only reason a nuclear powerplant is safe is because the government is under financial deterrent to keep it safe. Taking away that financial deterrent turns the nuclear powerplant unsafe"
C doesn't fix the argument. D does