Supplements LR Problem Set #5 Q539 "Company president: our."

[jared.xu]

I chose A on this problem because I thought A did not really weaken the support for the president's recommendation. I thought that even with the same criteria, the consultants could still evaluate a person as having very different efficiency and time management skill levels. I understand answer A as an attempt to show that the correlation between efficiency and time management could not be taken as causation if the criteria used to evaluate is the same because the same criteria somehow imply an unnatural correlation. After thinking about this issue for a long time, I may have an answer. If the consultants use a criteria to evaluate efficiency and apply the same criteria to evaluate time management skills, the managers who meet the standards for efficiency would likely also meet the standards for management skills because the standards that show you to be efficient (to be doing quality work in a certain amount of time) will also show you as having good time management skills. And if the consultants use a criteria to evaluate time management and apply the same criteria to evaluate efficiency, most likely they will find those who meet the standards for good time-management skills will also appear efficient because they have done some work within a short chunk of time. However, my second example does not totally work because efficiency is much more abstract than time management and deals with the quality of the work done rather than just meeting deadlines. So I still hold on to the opinion that the same criteria used to evaluate both efficiency and time management skills could yield different results, and thus, the correlation of efficiency and time management did not come into being through unnatural manipulation. I still don't completely see why using the same criteria would be that devastating to the argument and that manipulative of the result of the correlation between efficiency of time-management skills. Thank you in advance for replying.

[Eric Ockert]

Jared

This is again a Weaken question (here a Weaken EXCEPT). You are right to notice the consultants' report as showing a correlation between time management and efficiency. And you are right to note that the conclusion is a Causal one, indicating that improving time management skills will CAUSE an improvement in efficiency (or more specifically, productivity, as the conclusion states). Translating this correlation into the causal relationship in the conclusion is, as in most cases, an inherently weak argument.

A is indicating that the reason for the observance of this positive correlation between efficiency and time management is essentially an error in the data. If the criteria were the same (and we could hypothesize a number of possible ways this could have happened), then that could very well explain why the two qualities were correlated.

To give an absurd example (albeit similar): If I were take data on a number of personal and physical traits and I noticed that all the coolest people were incredibly fast, that may seem like a correlation between speed and coolness. But if I judged how fast people were by how long it took them to run a 100 meter dash, but also judged how cool they were with the exact 100 meter dash test, then it is a virtual guarantee that the two qualities are going to be in line, regardless of the meanings of the words. In this case, much like your example, "coolness" is fairly abstract and obviously different than speed. But if the criteria were the same, they are going to correlate with each other.

And keep in mind, you don't need to "devastate" the argument. All you need is to cast doubt, and if you can suggest that these two qualities may not even really be correlated, that is definitely going to question that causal relationship in the conclusion.

Again, hope that helps!