Q21 - Scociologist: The more technologically...

[veengeecomm]

Hello,

I feel like a giant idiot for getting this wrong. In further review I see why its B. However, could someone explicate the choices on this one.

Thanks,

V

[maryadkins]

So the argument here is:

the more technologically advanced, the more aware of drawbacks i.e. effect on human relationships

-->

the more technologically advanced, the more resistance

But how do you know this? Why wouldn't it be the other way around? Like:

the more technologically advanced, the more resistance

-->

the more technologically advanced, the more aware of drawbacks i.e. effect on human relationships

Tricky one!

I think this one comes down to the "therefore" test, right? (Which just means flipping the two sides around the arrow, or the "therefore," like I did above and deciding which one makes more sense.) The second one doesn't actually make much sense, argument wise. You wouldn't say that. The first one does. It wins.

Once you understand that the FIRST core above is correct, the answers become easier to tackle.

(A) gets the core wrong.

(B) is correct: It's offered as the explanation of the conclusion.

(C) misconstrues the point of the argument.

(D) also misconstrues—the more they resist, the more difficult it is? Mmmm, no. That's not what it says. That's just using some of the same words.

(E) also gets the point of the argument mismatched. It's not offered in support of the claim that human relations are affected. That's not the conclusion. That's part of the premise.

I hope this helps clarify!

[Rendona001]

Hi!

It took me a while to understand the above explanation and how the "therefore test" comes in handy but when I go back and re-read the passage the conclusion does not pop out right away. How do I tackle this question under timed conditions?!? Also, what follows the "because" part hint that this is the premise?

[ohthatpatrick]

Yeah, I would consider "This is not surprising" to be the conclusion.

"Because" does indeed always indicate a supporting idea, so whatever it's adjacent to is a conclusion.

You can say "because [premise], [conclusion]"
or you can say "[Conclusion], because [premise]"

The four Premise triggers you should have memorized are F.A.B.S.

For
After all
Because
Since

The 'because' is the primary lifeline they give us here, to find the conclusion quickly. A conclusion is an opinion that gets supported.

The first sentence strikes me as a fact. The second though is an opinion: whether or not something is surprising is an opinion.

The author is of the opinion that "It's unsurprising that the more tech advanced you are, the more you resist tech".

Why?

Because the more tech advanced you are, the more you're aware of tech's drawbacks and how they affect the quality of human relations.

[Rendona001]

Awesome thank you so much for all the insightful comments! Always on point!

[andrewgong01]

I am confused about the conclusion in this argument because I thought the conclusion was the first sentence and hence the argument was trying to prove there is more resistance in tech advanced countries ; not the" not surprising part".

I drew my core as Realise Affect Quality of Relation --> Aware of Drawbacks --> More advanced society=more resistance to change.

Hence because of that I was stuck between A and B because the part in question seems to be an intermediate conclusion (not sure if it counts as "a conclusion on the LSAT). On the other hand, I went with "B" over "A" in the end because I knew this was also a premise that is explaining why there is resistance (assuming drawbacks = causes resistance) however I am not sure as to how to distinguish between "A" and "B" and if this sentence is actually an intermediate conclusion

Thank you

[ohthatpatrick]

The first sentence is presented as fact, and conclusions are usually opinions.

Saying that the "this is not surprising" claim is the actual conclusion is pretty close to saying that the first sentence is the conclusion. This is what we're adding to the first sentence:
It's understandable that more tech advanced societies are more resistant to tech.
(why understandable? it sounds ironic!)
PREM: because, the more tech advanced your society is, the more the people in your society realize that tech negatively affects the quality of human relations.

The problem with (A) is that the 2nd to last idea is not supported by the last sentence. The last sentence just specifies which drawback people become aware of.

It's as if I said,
"The longer the date went on, the more Jenny became aware of Bob's dealbreaker.
Specifically, his breath."

The second claim is just making the meaning of the first claim more clear, more specific. The second claim isn't giving us any reason to believe the first claim. It's just clarifying what the first claim was alluding to.

[kristalhamou]

I am having a bit of trouble understanding this problem. I understand from the above comments, why it is that the second sentence "this is not surprising' is the conclusion and opinion of the sociologist, following a premise discussing the resistance of innovations.

However, when I write out both statements side by side:

"The more technologically advanced a society is, the more marked its members' resistance to technological innovations" (P)
"The more technologically advanced a society is, the more aware its members are of technology's drawbacks" (C)
(IE: deeply affect the quality of human relations)

The assumption I am extracting here is...the more marked members' resistance to technological innovations, the more aware the are of technology's drawbacks

...which seems to be a bit different then what is discussed above or in answer B -- can someone explain?

[kristalhamou]

Also, per answer choice B- isn't it saying that this sentence is in fact an explanation for sentence 1-- otherwise stating that it is a premise (explanation) to the conclusion (sentence 1) in the perspective of the because/therefore idea-- this explanation is the because to the therefore of sentence 1...make sense? Which in fact.. would then mean that sentence 1 is the conclusion and sentence 2 is the premise?

[kristalhamou]

It seems to me that sentence 1 could in fact be the conclusion because, and especially because, the author does not begin the sentence with "it is widely believe" or anything of that sort. Before reading the 2nd sentence, it could be perceived that this is a subjective opinion of the author himself. Following after, in sentence 2 we see that in his own opinion, he is now agreeing to this statement ("this is not surprising") but this sentence, while perhaps his direct opinion, is offering support to the first statement (perhaps acting as premise to conclusion or a statement he is too, trying to promote). Thinking about the argument like this, answer B makes total sense to me- but subsequently, I am viewing sentence 2 as support to sentence 1. Is this not correct?

[ohthatpatrick]

Per your first post, you incorrectly identified the 3rd claim as the conclusion.

The conclusion is "This is not surprising", which we can tell is a conclusion simply from the fact that it is followed by the supporting word "because".

Also, in your first post, you solved for an assumption, which has nothing to do with our task on this problem. This is Determine the Function, so we're only trying to describe the functional relationships.

You would never need to identify an assumption to get one of these problems correct.

You're totally right that (B) makes it sound like Claim 3 "more tech, more aware of drawbacks" is supporting Claim 1 "more tech, more resistant to innovations".

(B) [i]could[/b] have alternatively said
"It is offered as support for the idea that it is unsurprising that more technologically advanced societies are more likely to resist technological innovations".

We're going to pick whatever answer choice they give us that says something true. If it accurately describes the role played by a claim, we'll pick it, even if there's more than one way to accurately describe the role something played.

In terms of judging Claim 1 vs. 2 as the conclusion, you're saying that because it DOESN'T say "it is widely believed that", claim 1 sounds like it's the author's opinion.

But why does it have to be an opinion at all? Why can't you read it as fact?

If I said, "The more technologically advanced a society is, the more cell phone towers it has per capita", that would sound factual right?

Is it just because it's dealing with people's resistance to innovation that you feel like it's impossible to quantify and therefore an opinion (and therefore the author's opinion)?

If an author says
"The more X, the more Y".
This is unsurprising, because ......

It definitely COULD be the author's own pet hypothesis that is NOT yet an accepted fact, and the author is just trying to bolster its plausibility by explaining how unsurprising this is.

But that's sorta making life harder on yourself for no good end.

The author seems to be reacting to a fact by saying, "I see why that's true. THIS is why it's true."

When we are using "explanation" here, it can somewhat be interchangeable with the idea of support (like a premise), but you can explain a fact without really using any "reasoning", as LSAT would think of it.

The water fell out of the cup when it spilled.
This is unsurprising because gravity pulls substances closer to the center of the Earth.

This is a causal explanation, and it's not really speculative. It's just a factual explanation. One fact explains the other.

But the Conclusion is still an opinion: whether or not this explanation is or isn't surprising.

As a second example, say we used General Relativity's idea of curved spacetime.

The Earth orbits around the Sun.
This is unsurprising because the Sun warps the contours of spacetime so that Earth's straight line path appears to us as an elliptical orbit.

(This is more or less factually true, according to general relativity, but it's HIGHLY surprising to me!)

So the fact that you have a causal explanation is separate from whether that explanation is surprising or unsurprising.

Ultimately, I don't think the way you're understanding the paragraph is that different from the way we described in previous posts. I think we may just be splitting hairs.

But let me know if you're unappeased.

[ElizabethM261]

Hello,

Thanks for the clarification on this one. I actually read the second sentence as an intermediate conclusion, and used the "therefore test" to differentiate between it and the main conclusion (first sentence). So, I almost picked A because it says it's a "conclusion supported by...." And if it meant a IC, the answer would be true, however it fails to say "intermediate".

So my question is, can the answer (in this case A) refer to an intermediate conclusion simply as a "conclusion" or would the answer always specify "intermediate conclusion," or call it something completely different such as an "explanation"?

Also, does "claim" always refer to the conclusion or can a premise also be referred to as a claim?

Same goes for "generalization" - does that always have a constant meaning on the LSAT, such as "background info" or "additional premise"? Or does semantics not matter all that much ? Rather I should focus on the meat of the answer, in this case being the claim (conclusion) was incorrect?

Thank you!

[ohthatpatrick]

Just be careful: you can't call the 2nd sentence ANY ingredient, because the 2nd sentence has two claims:

Claim 1 (it's not surprising that more tech goes with more tech resistance)
because
Claim 2 (the more tech you have the more you're aware of its drawbacks)

Any time you're using "because" or "since" in a sentence, that sentence has two claims, and the because/since half is there to support the other half.

To answer your (good) questions:

1. They absolutely could (and do sometimes) refer to an intermediate conclusion as "a conclusion", without giving it any modifier like "intermediate / subsidiary".

Were we to call something THE conclusion, it would have to be a Main Conclusion (and by implication of using "the", there definitely was NOT an intermediate conclusion)


2. Claim and generalization are both very malleable and unspecific. They could each refer to a fact or to an opinion. And they could each be a premise, a conclusion, a counterpoint, etc.

"Claim" just really means "independent clause", or "a complete idea".
So all generalizations are technically claims, although claims don't need to be generalizations.

Since pretty much everything could be called a claim, you should definitely look elsewhere for a reason to like or not like the answer. With 'generalization', you do sometimes feel good about eliminating simply because what they're calling a 'generalization' is NOT a general statement at all. But that's fairly rare.

So mostly accept them as generic nouns and focus more on whether they're SUPPORTING (premises), GETTING SUPPORTED (conclusions), or BOTH (intermediate conclusions).

[MayaM405]

I'm having a hard time identifying the conclusion on this one. I see now that it is the second sentence, but this failed my own therefore test. I read it as: The more advanced a a society is, the more aware its members are of technology's drawbacks. Therefore, the more advanced a society is, the more marked its members are to technological innovations.

Not a perfect argument but I don't see how it fails the therefore test - where did I go wrong? Am i messing up the premise?

Above you mentioned that the second sentence does not support the first, rather it clarifies it. Can you elaborate on how?

Any tips to avoid this type of misidentifying the conclusion as well would be great!

[ohthatpatrick]

It seems like you're just missing the differentiation filter of FACT vs. OPINION.
The author's conclusion can't be a fact. It needs to be an opinion.

This structure is annoying, because the author is saying.

BACKGROUND: Fact 1 exists.
CONCLUSION: It's not surprising Fact 1 exists.
EVIDENCE: Here's a good reason for fact 1 existing.


If you were to think the BACKGROUND was the conclusion, you'd still have a sensible sounding argument.

CONC: Fact 1 exists
EVIDENCE: Here's a good reason for fact 1 existing.


So you really just have to read for opinion indicators like ...
"this isn't surprising"
"this is probably because ..."

.. in order to properly differentiate between the background fact and the author offering an opinion ABOUT the background fact.


Check out the same type of argument structure on each of these.
https://www.manhattanprep.com/lsat/foru ... -t593.html
and
https://www.manhattanprep.com/lsat/foru ... -t329.html
and
https://www.manhattanprep.com/lsat/foru ... 18312.html