Q10 - Wei: A respected automobile expert claims

[ohthatpatrick]

Question Type:
Match the Flaw

Stimulus Breakdown:
Conclusion: It's not true for most cars that "if you don't service your transmission at least once every 3 years, your car will have a transmission problem".

Evidence: I've owned both my cars for over 12 years, never serviced the transmission, and never had a transmission problem.

Answer Anticipation:
Whoa, author. Easy there with the humblebrag. You've owned TWO cars for over twelve years? I'll see you to your table, Mr. Rockefeller.

And since neglecting those two cars' transmissions never resulted in transmission problems, you're assuming that experts are wrong when they say "for most cars, there WOULD be a transmission problem?" Maybe your rad pair of cars are just the exception. An unrepresentative sample.

Let's look for an argument that says, "Because it wasn't true for those two guys I know, it's not true of MOST-GUYS."

Correct Answer:
A

Answer Choice Analysis:
(A) This looks great. The author relies on her tiny sample of one cat to refute an expert's claim about most cats.

(B) The evidence here is not a small, personally-known sample. It's a statement about the motives of car dealers, writ large.

(C) This does rely on a small, personally-known sample, but the author's sample is a bad match for the original. In the original, it's like "that didn't happen to me ... Thus it doesn't happen to most". In this one, the author DID have two accidents. So does that clearly establish that "increased chance of accident" didn't happen to him? It sounds like it DID happen to him. Too murky.

(D) This does rely on a small, personally-known sample, but we can't tell if the sample is a good match. The sample needs to be an example of a "good pair of boots" to qualify as a "my experience was a counterexample to the expert's rule!". But all we know is the not-encouraging fact that these boots were from The Discount Store. So if anything they sound like they weren't even good boots.

(E) This doesn't even seem like it was written for this problem. There is no expert we're refuting with a small, personally-known sample.

Takeaway/Pattern: I wish there were a name for this in LSAT lore: the My Life = Everyone's Life flaw. The extrapolation of "whatever my truth is, is truth". If we were looking for easy mismatched conclusions, we'd kill E. If we were looking for mismatched evidence, we'd quicky get rid of B as well. But for C and D, we needed to look deeper and see that they were introducing a different flaw of "not clearly qualifying as a counterexample to the generalization".

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