Q17 - In a bureaucracy

[nmop_apisdn2]

I'd like to give my take on this question.


Premise 1: In a bureaucracy, all decisions are arrived at by a process that involves many people.

Premise 2: There is no one person who has the authority to decide whether a project will proceed or not.

Conclusion: As a consequence, in bureaucracies, risky projects are never undertaken.


I think a huge part of this question to pay attention to the strength of the conclusion. In particular, the word never stands out to me.

(A) is incorrect because what a project in a bureaucracy requires is entirely out of scope. We are more interested in why risky projects are never undertaken.
(B) is incorrect because what decisive individuals choose to do (where they choose to work) is completely out of scope and does nothing for our argument.
(C) is incorrect because the argument is not concerned with what an individual is willing to do or if the individual will take risks. In other words, I think that we are talking about a group in the stimulus and need to prove why these groups are not going to take on risky projects.
(E) is incorrect because of the word sometimes; sometimes indicates that there is a possibility that they would be willing to take a risk as a group, which is completely against the logic described in the stimulus.

Finally, (D) is correct and sufficient because if the only people taking on risky projects are the individuals, then it must follow that the groups of individuals are not under taking risky projects, since, well, only the individuals are taking on the risky projects.

[ohthatpatrick]

I'd say you were spot on, there. Nice work!

You did a great job of conversationally explaining why the other answers were wrong.

Let me just add that, structurally, all the wrong answers are wrong because they don't have the key words "risky projects undertaken".

In Sufficient Assumption, our task is incredibly mathematical and logical.

We have to prove the words in the conclusion. If there are any terms/ideas in the conclusion THAT ONLY APPEAR IN THE CONCLUSION then that term/idea must be in the correct answer.

Sometimes you get pretty remarkable short cuts by identifying the "new wording" in the conclusion.

In this case, we're trying to prove that "risky projects are never undertaken".

Did we get any premise information about "risky projects"? No.

Did we get any rule in the premise about when something would or wouldn't be "undertaken"? No.

So we MUST have those words in our correct answer (or some identical paraphrase).

Hence, we could safely eliminate A, B, C, and E since none of them have the words "risky projects undertaken".

Nice work!

[WaltGrace1983]

I will also add that it seems (A) and (C) may even weaken the premise-conclusion link.

(A) Unless we assume that the bureaucracy never undertakes ANY project, this would make the conclusion impossible. According to the answer choice, this is because IF it is a project of the bureaucracy, THEN it absolutely must require risk.

Bureaucracy --> Risk

So if the bureaucracy undertakes an project, it is necessarily having a risk. Thus, it undermines the conclusion that the bureaucracies never undertake risky projects.

(C) says that any person who has decision-making powers (those in these many-person bureaucracies) will take risks. Now we don't know if these risks are within the confines of government or if it just means that they don't look both ways before crossing the street but either way this opens up at least some possibility that the bureaucracy takes some risky projects. Remember, we are supposed to completely close the gap. This just gives us some possibilities of making the gap even further present.


As for the others...

(B) We don't know the connection between being "decisive" and being a successful undertaker of risky projects in a bureaucracy. This is eliminated pretty quickly.

(D) This is perfect. It is saying that IF risky THEN it must have been done by a single individual.

R --> I and thus ~I (not a single individual = more people - like a bureaucracy) --> ~Risky.

Bingo.

(E) This is not strong enough. The conclusion says that these bureaucracies NEVER undertake risky projects. Well what if these people sometimes would take risks individually that they wouldn't take in this form of govt.? Okay. This doesn't really do anything for us.