Q25 - Critic: The Gazette

[mshinners]

Question Type:
Weaken

Stimulus Breakdown:
The argument concludes that the recent action clearly isn't working, but let's rephrase that so we get all the relevant concepts: Increasing the editorial staff has not decreased the number of factual errors.

What premises are offered by the critic to support this? The newspaper runs more corrections than its biggest competitor.

Answer Anticipation:
We're comparing this paper to a competitor in order to prove an absolute - that the number of factual errors has not decreased, but that's not a relevant comparison! We'd need to compare the Gazette now to before the change (hiring more editors) to reach this conclusion. The comparison to the other paper doesn't help us here!

Since the author uses the other paper as a premise, we should anticipate an answer that brings up the other paper, comparing them in a way that makes it more likely that the Gazette could have decreased their errors while still having more errors than the competitor (since we're trying to weaken it). You don't need more than that as an anticipation, but bonus points if you were thinking either the Gazette is more likely to issue a correction, or the Gazette is still ""losing"" to the other paper, but the number of errors have gotten closer.

Correct Answer:
C

Answer Choice Analysis:
(A) Out of scope. Pay has nothing to do with the number of errors. It would be wrong to assume that a higher paid editor is better or more likely to care about errors.

(B) Out of scope. How long it has been in business doesn't tell us about errors.

(C) Very close to our anticipation! We got lucky (predicting weaken answers is imprecise). If this is true, then the number of corrections compared to the competitor doesn't tell us that there actually exist more errors, since the Gazette is just more likely to follow up on them.

(D) Tempting. However, this answer is about what happens before publications, whereas our premise is about post-publication checking. We know there are more corrections issued, so, if anything, this answer tells us that we should hire new editors without making it more likely that we actually have fewer errors than before.

(E) Out of scope. The number of reporters doesn't necessarily impact the number of factual errors in the paper. While you could argue that fewer reporters might lead to overworking increasing errors, that's several jumps - maybe the Gazette fired the people who were the most factually inaccurate!

Takeaway/Pattern: Comparisons are important to note on the LSAT, and our conclusion here comparing the new Gazette to the old one can't be supported by a premise comparing the Gazette to another newspaper. In order to draw that conclusion, we'd need a premise giving us information about how the comparison between newspapers impacts the conclusion about changes to the Gazette.

#officialexplanation

[ganbayou]

Hi,

I thought B is correct because if it's running longer, there would be more possibilities that GS has more errors.
For example,
If we write 1000 pages essay vs 1 page essay, there would be more errors in 1000 pages essay.
I thought this is the similar situation...
Why is B wrong and C correct?

Thank you

[LsatCrusher822]

Hi,

I thought B is correct because if it's running longer, there would be more possibilities that GS has more errors.
For example,
If we write 1000 pages essay vs 1 page essay, there would be more errors in 1000 pages essay.
I thought this is the similar situation...
Why is B wrong and C correct?

Thank you

Ganbayou, you just made a major assumption there...

B) Just because one company has been running longer doesn't necessarily mean that that company has printed more papers! And even if we do assume that they did, the scope of this argument is "recently" and "currently," meaning that whatever the Gazette-Standard had done in the further past isn't relevant to this argument.

This is a classic error where the stimulus takes one trait/characteristic and makes that to be the main determinant of something bigger. In this case we have running "significantly more corrections acknowledging factual errors" to imply that Gazette isn't reducing its error count (i.e., the author is assuming that more corrections mean that there are more errors). But hold on one second... does that need to be true? Perhaps the biggest competitor could have as many errors (or even more than) Gazette, but not make the corrections.

C) exploits this gap and basically tells us that making more corrections while acknowledging the errors doesn't necessarily mean that there are more errors. If Gazette more actively follows up on reader complaints, this means that the biggest competitor may have more complaints due to factual errors, thus making our argument weaker

A) Who cares about salaries... to make this work we have to assume that lower salaries equals lower quality of work, leading to more errors... if so, would tend to strengthen the argument, as it shows that Gazette's errors may not be shrinking...

D) I thought this one was a bit tricky...but we ultimately cannot assess the impact of this answer choice because we would have to make more assumptions... we only know that "each" of Gazette's articles are checked by more editors vs. its competitor.. But do we know how many articles both of these newspapers print? We would have to make some guesses about the quantity of articles produced to say that this answer weakens or strengthens the argument...

E) We don't care about the reporting staff... what does that have to do with errors printed? this just means that the source of the information may have been shrunk... but that doesn't mean that there would be more or less errors per say...

[josh_stout]

I can see how answer choice C would weaken the critic's argument if its focus were *reducing* errors. But the critic's first statement is that the paper hired additional editorial staff in order to "avoid" errors. By definition the verb "to avoid" means "to keep away from" or "to prevent the occurrence of." Inherent in the word's meaning is an element of completeness; one can only avoid if one successfully "keeps away from" or "prevents the occurrence of" in all instances.

The critic's reasoning depends on the fact that the paper runs more corrections than its competitor in which it "acknowledges" the existence of factual errors in its own paper. If we can accept this premise as true, which, unless I'm mistaken, we are supposed to do, then it follows that the paper is not in fact *avoiding* factual errors. The paper, by its own admission, contains errors. Therefore, the paper's attempt to *avoid* factual errors by means of increasing its editorial staff has indeed failed, as the critic asserts - the paper's effort to *avoid* factual errors "clearly is not working," (the Critic, Preptest 78.1.25: LSAC, 2016). [Proper citation protocol is always in order].

As the argument stands, the comparison to the paper's competitor is irrelevant. Contained within the comparison is the simple fact that the paper acknowledges the existence of factual errors within its pages. This is all that is necessary for the argument's reasoning to be sound and its conclusion valid:

- Background (the paper's purpose): The paper hired more editors in order to avoid factual errors
- Premise: The paper acknowledges factual errors (stated negatively, the paper acknowledges that it *does not avoid* errors)
- Conclusion: "Clearly [the paper's plan to avoid factual errors] is not working."

With this understanding in mind, my pre-phrase to weaken was something like "acknowledging factual errors does not mean that factual errors actually exist" (which of course is nonsense, unless the one who does the acknowledging is either lying or wrong). Since I didn't find anything approaching this pre-phrase among the answer choices, I picked C because it seemed least wrong. It at least suggests that acknowledging more errors doesn't mean more errors. But the question of *more* errors isn't the point when the goal is avoiding errors altogether.

The answer choice itself does not suggest that there are no errors in the paper either - a state of affairs already rendered impossible by the premise in the stimulus; the Gazette-Standard acknowledges factual errors in its pages. The credited response, which we are instructed to take as true, suggests that the paper is indeed responding to complaints about errors in the paper. Thus, the answer choice includes the assumption that errors exist in the paper.

I'm not sure how an answer choice that states that the Gazette-Standard "actively follows up on reader complaints about errors in the paper" is supposed to weaken a conclusion that posits that the paper is failing in its attempt to avoid errors. It is especially difficult to understand given the fact that the paper's apparent follow up involves printing corrections that acknowledge the alleged errors. The answer choice essentially says, "the critic's conclusion that the paper is failing in its attempt to avoid errors is suspect because the paper more actively responds to errors than another paper." How is a conclusion about a failure to avoid errors weakened by a statement that readily admits the presence of errors? If anything, this would strengthen the argument, wouldn't it?

Am I completely off base here? Have I missed something glaringly obvious? The semantic range of the verb "to avoid" doesn't include some nuance suggesting failure to avoid. So are we supposed to be a little bit loose with definitions on the test? Are we just supposed to gloss over these sorts of things? It has seemed in my preparation that the goal is just the opposite, which is what makes this question a bit unsettling.

I'd appreciate any responses.

[mshinners]

Good questions! I've got two responses.

With this understanding in mind, my pre-phrase to weaken was something like "acknowledging factual errors does not mean that factual errors actually exist" (which of course is nonsense, unless the one who does the acknowledging is either lying or wrong).

First, if we're going by strict definitions, "acknowledging" something in the strict, philosophical sense of the word requires that thing to be true. Similar to "knowing" something, the LSAT treats these as reflecting truth.

Am I completely off base here? Have I missed something glaringly obvious? The semantic range of the verb "to avoid" doesn't include some nuance suggesting failure to avoid. So are we supposed to be a little bit loose with definitions on the test? Are we just supposed to gloss over these sorts of things? It has seemed in my preparation that the goal is just the opposite, which is what makes this question a bit unsettling.

You're spot on about avoidance being a binary phenomenon - you either avoid a factual error, or you don't. I think where you're going a bit askew here is in viewing the avoidance of factual errors as a binary phenomenon, as well. Instead, I'd argue that each time a potential factual error arises, you can successfully avoid or succumb to it. So, in the normal course of business, a newspaper is going to come across, let's say, 100 factual errors/day. For each of those, the paper can either successfully avoid it, or fail to do so.

The newspaper acknowledges errors, so it has not been successful in avoiding all errors. But an increase in the editorial staff may have decreased the number of these errors that have slipped through, so, on some of those "battles", the plan was a success. To say something is not working is to imply that it has failed completely, and this plan may have had many successes. They may not have avoided some errors, but it's possible they have avoided others, and in those cases, it could be said that the plan was a success.

Past that, the LSAT takes the very common tack in this question of basing a conclusion on a comparison. It'd be more important to learn the patterns of the LSAT in regards to strengthening/weakening arguments that feature comparisons than worrying about the language here.

[josh_stout]

Thanks for the reply. I hadn't considered applying the paper's plan to avoid to individual instances of potential error. The error in reasoning is clear when viewed from that perspective.