Cereal advertisement: Fitness experts say that regular exercise is the most effective way to become physically fit, and studies have shown that adults who eat cereal every day exercise more regularly than adults who do not eat cereal.
Conclusion
By eating Fantastic Flakes every morning, you too will be on the most effective path to physical fitness.
Evidence
Regular exercise is the most effective way to become physically fit, and studies show that there's a correlation:
adults who eat | | exercise cereal every day more regularly
Evaluate
Whenever we see correlations on Flaw, we should be suspicious of the famous Causal flaw.
correlation language X is correlated with Y X is associated with Y most X's are Y X's tend to be Y ... and most commonly, people who are X are more likely to be Y
When you're told that people who are [cereal eaters] are more likely to be [regular exercisers], you know the author is going to overconfidently conclude that one of those causes the other.
In the conclusion, they are assuming that [eating cereal] is having a causal influence on [exercising regularly], because they're selling the idea of cereal as a path to fitness (by way of exercise).
Whenever we're presented with a correlation X || Y and the author concludes X --causes--> Y, consider these two alternate explanations: 1. Y --causes--> X 2. Some other factor, Z is really causing X and Y
Goal
On Flaw, we can just call out the illegal move that the author made from Correlation to Causation. We can raise the possibility of Reverse Causality (#1) or Third Factor (#2).
In this case, we also have incredibly loaded language in the Conclusion: the most effective path
We can certainly complain about the fact that the argument in no way justifies that it is better that all alternative paths.