Logical Reasoning

PT139 · S4 · Q3 Letter to the editor: You have

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Letter to the editor: You have asserted that philanthropists want to make the nonprofit sector as efficient as private business in this country.

Conclusion

Philanthropists do not want to make the nonprofit sector as efficient as private business in this country.

Evidence

Why would we (or anyone) want to make nonprofits as inefficient as Byworks Corporation, which has posted huge losses for years?

Evaluate

Early questions reward common sense about the real world more than later questions. Would common sense tell us that private business or nonprofits are more likely to be efficient?

Kind of a hard question to answer, right? In one sense, the profit-motive incentivizes cost-cutting efficiencies and productivity maximization (i.e. maxing out profit is related to maxing out efficiency).

Meanwhile, nonprofits are not going to ever be getting rich from their nonprofit, so they don't have that same incentive. Still, one may think,

Ultimately, we can probably agree that it's going to vary a lot from company to company. Some private businesses will be be wasteful, even though their business model incentivizes efficiency.

Some nonprofits will be motivated to be efficient with their limited funding, even though their business model doesn't incentivize efficiency the same way.

So since there's going to be a lot of variation among private and nonprofit businesses in terms of their efficiency, the fact that this author uses one example of a for-profit corporation as a way to make it seem like

Goal

We want to complain about the small, potentially unrepresentative sample of Byworks, one measly company, as a way to impugn the efficiency of all private for-profit businesses.

3.

The reasoning of the argument in the letter is most vulnerable to criticism on the grounds that the argument

  1. draws a conclusion about what

    Bad Conclusion Match

    Is the conclusion about what ought to be the case? Nope, it's just saying "it is the case that philanthropists want no such thing". This is testing a common distinction at play in LSAT (though not a famous flaw): normative language (should / ought / good / bad) vs. descriptive language (is / are / will / was)

    1% picked this

  2. Correct

    takes the condition of one

    Why this is right

    This describes one version of the famous Sampling Flaw -- the sample is too small (only one data point) to be treated as though it's representative of the overall big picture. Does the author talk about "one member of a category"? Sure, Byworks Corp is one member of the category "private business". What is their condition? They've been posting huge losses for years. Is our author taking that to be representative of the category in general? Is she acting like "private business" posts losses year after year? Yeah, she is. She's saying "Philanthropists aren't trying to be as efficient as private business. Private business is massively inefficient. After all, just look at Byworks, which is very inefficient."

    Skill tested: Flaw · how this choice captures the argument's function is the move to repeat next time.

    90% picked this

  3. rejects a claim by attacking

    Wrong Flaw

    This describes the famous Ad Hominem flaw, in which an author dismisses a point of view because the source of the view has some biased/vested interest in the matter or because the source has some conflicting past behavior. This argument isn't attacking the source. The premise isn't saying "We shouldn't believe you — you would benefit if it were true that philanthropists want to make themselves like private business" or "we shouldn't believe you — you used to say that philanthropists would never want to be like private businesses".

    4% picked this

  4. concludes that a claim must

    Wrong Flaw

    This describes the famous Unproven vs. Proven False flaw, in which an author assumes that because someone's attempt to prove X failed, that must mean that X is false. Does the argument conclude a claim is false? Yes. It concludes that the claim "Philanthropists want to make nonprofits as efficient as private businesses" is false. Does our author's argument discuss a failed attempt to prove that claim true? No. Our author introduces her own evidence that philanthropists wouldn't want to model themselves after private business by citing her own example of an inefficient private business. When this flaw is occurring, the author's evidence sounds like it's specifically describing how the opponent's argument / experiment failed.

    2% picked this

  5. concludes that a phenomenon will

    Bad Conclusion/Premise Match

    Does the conclusion say that "a phenomenon will have a certain property"? Nope. It just says that "a certain category of entities is not pursuing a certain goal" (philanthropists are not trying to model their efficiency off that of private business). Even if we were to call "philanthropists" a phenomenon, then this answer choice would be saying that the Evidence discussed the cause of that phenomenon. The cause of philanthropists? Nothing causes people. They're things, not actions that can be caused.

    2% picked this

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