The Little Blue Reasoning Book - Brandon Royal [29]
The general strategy for attack is as follows:
In terms of evaluating or attacking comparisons, when two things are deemed similar, our goal will be to find dissimilarities in order to show that the two things are not alike. Consider the following example: “Martha did such a great job selling cutlery that we’re going to promote her and put her in charge of condominium sales.” What is being assumed is that sales ability is the key ingredient in making sales, and the type of product being sold is of secondary concern. How could we attack this argument? One way is to indicate that there could be a big difference between selling cutlery, a commodity product, and selling a condominium, a luxury good. A person effective at selling one type of product may be ineffective when selling another type. In the entrepreneurial context, a person successful in one industry may not be successful when switching to another industry.
In terms of evaluating or attacking comparisons, when two things are deemed dissimilar, our goal will be to find similarities in order to show that the two things are alike. For example, two male sports enthusiasts are having a beer, when one says to the other: “There is no comparison between athletes today and athletes of yesteryear. Mark Spitz won seven gold medals in swimming in the 1967 Mexico City Olympics, but his winning times are not good enough today to qualify for any of the men’s Olympic swim events.” To damage this argument, the second sports enthusiast might want to choose an example to show how athletes today are in some ways comparable to the athletes of yesteryear. For example, Jack Nicklaus’ final round score of 271 in 1965 to win the Master’s Golf Tournament in Augusta, Georgia, could be compared to Tiger Woods’s final round score of 272 in 2002 to win the Master’s Golf tournament on the exact same course. In this respect, by comparing two athletes in this manner, things do not look so dissimilar after all.
When comparing two things, particularly those across different time frames, we must be careful not to assume that information gathering techniques and, therefore, the quality of the data obtained are comparable. For example, any report comparing the findings of worker satisfaction levels in the 1940s to worker satisfaction levels today would be suspect, for no other reason than the difficulty of comparing the results of information gained under differing circumstances.
At the most fundamental level, we must ensure that the meaning and scope of words and terms used in an argument are consistently applied. Say, for example, we read that pollution is now ten times as bad in the suburban areas of our city as it was twenty years ago. Pollution may indeed by worse, but not by tenfold. What if the definition of pollution has changed to include air, water, noise, and garbage? This would certainly torpedo any attempt to establish a valid comparison.
Representativeness Assumptions
A sample is a group of people or things selected from a larger number of people or things that is presumably representative of the larger group or, as it is often said, “the population as a whole.” We have all heard such statements as: “I’ve never met a person from country Z whom I liked” or “I highly recommend ABC Restaurant because the three times that I have dined there the food has been delicious.”
These two examples show representative sample assumptions in action. The first person obviously has not met all the people from country Z, and the second person obviously has not tried every dish in ABC Restaurant. For a sample to be representative, it must be both quantitatively and qualitatively representative. For a sample to be quantitatively sound, a large enough sample must be chosen. Obviously, the selection of one or two items is not enough. For a sample to be qualitatively sound, a random or diverse enough cross-sample of its members must be chosen.
What about a travel agency that claims “Three out of every four tourists recommend Morocco as a tourist destination.