Logical Reasoning

PT147 · S1 · Q15 A popular book argues

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A popular book argues that people who are successful in business have, without exception, benefited from a lot of luck on their way to success.

Conclusion

It's ridiculous to say that .

rephrase: Some people who are successful in business did not benefit from luck on their way to success.

Evidence

Success requires a lot of hard work.

Evaluate

Whenever we're doing Flaw and see that the argument has a Rebuttal structure, we want to be sensitive to a few common flaws relating to Rebuttals

1. Ad Hominem (dismisses a view by saying the source has a biased interest or a conflicting past)

2. Unproven vs. Proven True (shows that someone failed to prove X but then erroneously concludes from that that X is false)

3. Straw Man / Irrelevant Response (the rebuttal doesn't seem to have anything to do with falsifying the original position)

This feels like #3. Why is the author thinking that it's relevant to object by saying, "Success requires a lot of hard work"?

Was the popular book saying that "success doesn't require a lot of hard work"? Not as far as we've heard. So in that sense, this author is responding to a position that his opponent doesn't hold (Straw Man) or is rebutting with something irrelevant.

When we're doing Flaw and we see conditional logic wording, we know to look out for the #1 famous Necessary vs. Sufficient flaw, in which the author presents a conditional logic relationship and then interprets it in some illegal reversed or negated fashion.

We have a couple conditional logic indicator words here: without exception / requires

The book says: successful in business → benefited from luck

The author's rebuttal is saying: successful in business → lots of hard work

Those don't conflict, of course. Success in business may require luck AND require lots of hard work.

Goal

The book was saying, "all successful people have had luck". It suggests that maybe "success requires a lot of luck". But the author is taking this to mean that "success doesn't require anything else".

Let's find an answer that speaks to that confusion.

15.

The argument commits which one of the following errors of reasoning?

Correct
It mistakes the claim that
Why this is right
This describes the famous Necessary vs. Sufficient flaw, which could be a decent guess (if we didn't know what to pick) based on the fact that this is a Flaw question and has conditional logic in it. This answer is saying that the book just said that luck was required for success; it didn't say that "all you need is luck in order to succeed", that luck is sufficient to guarantee success. Had it said that, the author's response of, "wait sec --- don't you also need a lot of hard work?" would make total sense. The author's response doesn't make sense in the actual argument, but we can describe the author's flaw by describing how the author got confused. But this answer is a little shady, not gonna lie. The book never said that "luck was required for success". It simply said that all data points with the trait of 'success' also had the trait of 'luck'. A perfect correlation between two things "Every A, without exception, has B true of it" does not have to indicate a necessary relationship moving forward, i.e. "Every future A we see will also have to have B be true of it". But we file this in our hurt locker of "it's the best available answer, even though it's a somewhat broken answer".
Skill tested: Flaw · how this choice captures the argument's function is the move to repeat next time.
82% picked this
It accepts a view as
Opposite
The author is rejecting this book's view as authoritative. This answer describes a version of the famous Inappropriate Appeals flaw, in which an argument appeals to emotion, fear, or an "expert" whose expertise has not been established.
3% picked this
It takes for granted in
Not Circular
This answer describes the famous Circular Reasoning flaw, in which an argument's evidence restates or assumes the truth of the conclusion. The evidence is "Success requires a lot of hard work". The conclusion is "Some successful businesspeople did not benefit from a lot of luck". The evidence is not, therefore, restating or assuming the conclusion.
4% picked this
It treats an effect of
Not Causal
This answer describes the famous Causal Reasoning flaw, in which an author overconfidently concludes one possible causal explanation for something, even though alternate explanations potentially exist. If there were a correlation between X and Y, and the author concluded that X caused Y, we could point out that "Hey, it's possible you're interpreting cause and effect backwards". This argument was nothing like that. The author isn't looking at a correlation and inferring a causal relationship.
9% picked this
It attacks the source of
Not Ad Hominem
The author doesn't attack the source of the argument. It isn't saying, "Don't listen to that book. After all, the people who wrote that book have a vested interest in convincing you that luck is important."
2% picked this

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