Logical Reasoning

PT14 · S4 · Q18 According to a government official

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According to a government official involved in overseeing airplane safety during the last year, over 75 percent of the voice-recorder tapes taken from small airplanes involved in relatively minor accidents record the whistling of the pilot during the fifteen minutes immediately preceding the accident.

Conclusion (Therefore)

If passengers hear the pilot start to whistle they should take safety precautions, whether instructed by the pilot to do so or not.

Evidence

Over 75% of tapes from small airplanes involved in minor accidents involved the pilot whistling during the 15 minutes prior to the accident.

Even minor accidents pose some safety risk.

Evaluate

The author's conclusion is acting like,

Do we? She is thinking that whistles usually mean trouble because most tapes of accidents featured a pilot whistling. But maybe all pilots whistle!

To judge whether whistling portends doom, we would want to know what percentage of the time whistling is followed by an accident, not what percentage of time an accident was preceded by whistling.

By analogy, we could argue that brushing your teeth can be fatally dangerous. After all, 80% of people who die had brushed their teeth earlier that day.

Goal

Let's look for an answer suggesting an alternate explanation for the evidence (maybe whistling isn't suggestive of imminent accidents; it's just a typical thing that happens during almost any flight).

Or look for an answer complaining that the author is going off the percentage of times that accidents were preceded by whistling, rather than the percentage of times that whistling was followed by an accident.

18.

The argument is most vulnerable to criticism on the grounds that it

  1. accepts the reliability of the

    Not a Reasoning Flaw

    The argument does implicitly accept the cited statistics, but there's nothing flawed with that. They come from a reputable source: a government official involved in overseeing airplane safety. This sort of answer would be objecting to the veracity of a premise, but our job is to object to the conclusion drawn, on the basis of those premises, not to object to the premises themselves.

    7% picked this

  2. ignores the fact that in

    Not an Objection

    If some scenario carries with it a 75% risk of getting hurt (and thus a 25% chance of not getting hurt), it's perfectly reasonable to warn people to take appropriate action to avoid that scenario. We can't object to someone giving advice about such a scenario by saying, "Relax, dude, there's a 25% chance your advice will be meaningless."

    13% picked this

  3. does not indicate the criteria

    Not a Reasoning Objection

    We're never picking answers that demand specific measurements / specific definitions / specific names. The exact legal definition of a "relatively minor" accident is not our objection. We know that such accidents pose some safety risk, and for the sake of the author's argument, that's all we need to know. Our objection is supposed to be in reaction to the author's somewhat absurd suggestion that hearing a pilot whistle is an indication of a safety risk.

    3% picked this

  4. Correct

    provides no information about the

    Why this is right

    If 100% of small airplane flights involve a pilot whistling at some time during that flight, then it's a very unremarkable stat that "in 75% of accident recordings, there was whistling within the fifteen minutes before the accident." We wouldn't think that whistling was foreshadowing anything; we would just think that whistling was present on the recording because it's present on every small airplane flight. In a sense, we'd be providing an Alternate Explanation for why whistling shows up pre-accident on so many of these tapes: "It's not because whistling happens when danger is afoot; it's because pilots of small planes love to whistle and do it all the time." Since over 99% of small airplane flights do not have accidents (I'm assuming), then if small plane pilots are always whistling, then over 99% of the time that passengers hear the pilot whistling, they will not experience any minor or major accident.

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

    67% picked this

  5. fails to specify the percentage

    Not Needed

    Would it make any difference to this argument if we said that 5% of small airplane flights vs. 25% of them involve minor accidents? No, because either way, the author can say that, "When there IS an accident, over 75% of the time there was whistling right before the accident". So she can still make her crazy argument that hearing whistling shows you're probably in imminent danger of an accident.

    9% picked this

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