The following advice was given to a politician by his political consultant: "It is true that 200 apartment renters protested in the rain about the elimination of rent control regulation. However, there are 20,000 renters in the entire city. 19,800 of them stayed home and did not protest. The group that did not protest is much larger and better represents the opinion of renters throughout the city that the elimination of rent control is not a problem. You should not let the small protest discourage you."
Describe how well reasoned you find this argument. In the discussion be sure to analyze the line of reasoning and the use of evidence in the argument. For example, you may need to consider what questionable assumptions underlie the thinking and what alternative explanations or counterexamples might weaken the argument's conclusion. You may also address possible changes in the argument that would make it more logically sound, and what, if anything, would help you better evaluate its conclusion..
This argument states that the politician should not think that elimination of rent control is a problem the city as there were only 200 apartment renters from 20 000 on the protest in the rain. This conclusion, based solely on one piece of evidence, is doubtful because it does not provide any provable statistic information.
Firstly, it is argued that 200 apartment renters took part in the protest, but it is not stated how this quantity was obtained. Have they counted everybody on that rally and have got exactly 200 people? There is also no information about people who did the research and what methods did they use, that is why, the number of people taking part in the protest is tenuous.
Secondly, the quantity of all renters of the city must be taken into account as the political consultant did not give any data about how 20 000 renters were counted. Is it official information and does it consider all market including the shadow market which can be find almost in every city from all over the world? Unfortunately, the reliability of this numbers is extremely low.
Thirdly, the political consultant does not consider that people did not go to protest due to the weather conditions. In fact, it was raining in that day. By the way, there are a lot of other possibilities to express your disagreement with a government policy such as questioning or social media, but the conclusion about people's attitude was made only on the fact of the protest, consequently, it is one more flaw of this argument.
To sum up, the argument and its conclusion are unwarranted and unsubstantiated because they are not supported by statistics, as a result inferences based on that research could lead to bad consequences.
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argument 1 -- not OK
argument 2 -- not OK
argument 3 -- OK
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Attribute Value Ideal
Final score: 2.5 out of 6
Category: Satisfactory Excellent
No. of Grammatical Errors: 0 2
No. of Spelling Errors: 0 2
No. of Sentences: 12 15
No. of Words: 295 350
No. of Characters: 1391 1500
No. of Different Words: 158 200
Fourth Root of Number of Words: 4.144 4.7
Average Word Length: 4.715 4.6
Word Length SD: 2.718 2.4
No. of Words greater than 5 chars: 93 100
No. of Words greater than 6 chars: 75 80
No. of Words greater than 7 chars: 49 40
No. of Words greater than 8 chars: 32 20
Use of Passive Voice (%): 0 0
Avg. Sentence Length: 24.583 21.0
Sentence Length SD: 11.161 7.5
Use of Discourse Markers (%): 0.583 0.12
Sentence-Text Coherence: 0.336 0.35
Sentence-Para Coherence: 0.635 0.50
Sentence-Sentence Coherence: 0.031 0.07
Number of Paragraphs: 5 5