Methods of Reasoning Questions (Intermediate) with Lewis

Okay, so there may be a couple of people here who haven't loaded yet or maybe people will file in and out.

That's fairly classic with these courses, but I'm sorry, five minutes past the hour. So I think let's just get started.

So my name is Lewis for those of you who haven't attended one of these classes before with me or maybe haven't tutored yet.

These live classes are a chance for you guys to supplement the curriculum also get some FaceTime of the tutor.

that's me. I'm a tutor here at LSAT Max. I see some familiar names here in the attendees, but maybe some some new names too.

The way I. on these sessions, I want them to be as conversational as possible. I love engagement, I love back and forths, opinions, questions, anything you've got thrown at me, you can throw them in chat, you can just unmute yourself and talk, you don't need to raise your hand or anything like that, stick a bit like a seminar or something.

The more, the more people participate, the more lively these sessions are and the more fun they are for everyone, especially for me.

But of course, there's no requirement that you participate and I'm not going to call on anyone who doesn't want to speak up.

So of course, you can engage with this however you'd like, it's also going to be recorded and put on the website for later perusal.

yeah, no worries there. Yeah, on that note, our subject is method of reasoning questions, which is a great subject, actually ends up having a lot in common parallel reasoning, which I talked about yesterday or a couple days ago, I don't know.

Maybe it was yesterday. Is that really yesterday? felt like so long. Was it yesterday? I can't. I don't know.

Anyway, but before before we get started talking about method of reasoning questions in particular, if anyone has any questions on any topic related to the LSAT or the application process, go ahead and shoot and I'm happy to to field them.

I'll also take general questions at the end. But if I don't see any in the next 30 seconds, I'll probably just launch on the method of reasoning.

But I want to give you guys a chance. You Okay, well, I'm not seeing any questions, so I think just dive in.

I'll give people maybe 10 more seconds. see someone just joined it. You've got any general questions on any topic that you want to make to me.

Feel free now. Of course, if you don't, that's fine also. Okay, so let's dive in. Methods of reasoning is methods of reading questions are actually

They're very interesting. I'm trying to think about exactly how sort of holistic I want to be in presenting this.

Let's go to a whiteboard to begin with here. So the first thing I want to say about these questions is the way I view the test, there are basically two types of arguments they can give you in the prompt on the logical reasoning section.

They can give you arguments that are already formally valid arguments, or they can give you invalid arguments. And by valid and invalid, I mean in the technical sense, in the logical sense, where logical validity is a formal notion that refers to an argument whose conclusion properly follows as a matter of logic from its premises.

If you want the formal definition of validity, a valid argument is an argument where, if all the premises are true, then the conclusion would also have to be true.

OK, that's the definition. definition of validity. So, now, if someone were to make a valid argument to you in real life, okay, it would still be possible for you to critically engage with this.

For example, suppose someone made the following argument. Well, all, uh, suppose someone made the following argument. Donald Trump's wall is going to keep our boat and it's going to make our border safe.

And you should vote for whichever candidate is going to make the border safe. Therefore, you should vote for Donald Trump.

Actually, let's just start here. Suppose someone made this argument. How might you engage with this argument? What might you say?

Hey, Kingy, been a little while since I've seen you.

Welcome. Okay, how would you engage with this argument? Anyone here? Don't worry about the LSAT right now. Just, I mean, you know, in a more of like, not in the context of the LSAT, just in life.

How might you engage with this argument?

Okay. So why might that matter, by the way? I think that's a good point, but so spell it out more from

Which, which part of this argument are we fighting? How would you direct that?

So maybe Harris's policies will also make the border safe, in which case this is not a reason to vote for Donald Trump, but for Harris.

So that's a really solid argument. Now, if we tried to break down exactly what that kind of argument is doing, it's actually probably doing exactly what the else that wants you to do.

I think you're actually attacking the logical connection between these premises and the conclusion, right? You're saying, well, hold on, there's a jump in the logic here.

Even if it's true that his wall is going to make the border safe. And even if it's true that that's an important issue to vote on, we still haven't established that he's the only candidate doing that.

So this isn't a good enough reason to support voting for Donald Trump yet, right? As against the alternative, we would need to know more.

So you're attacking the validity of the argument, that's excellent. Now I see blue in chat says, well, how do we know the wall will keep our borders safe?

Well, I mean, that's the that's the premise of the argument, but you're right. That might be something you would attack.

You might say, hold on, is that true? What evidence do you have for this? Doesn't seem true. There's no way this is true.

It's an incredibly stupid statement, but I mean, I've never heard a plausible defense of this claim. Usually it's just asserted without support.

Yeah, so I agree. So blue's objection here is just fighting with the truth of this first premise, right? But at this point, I said anything was fair game, there's nothing wrong with that.

But so, I mean, well, you know, We might deny that this is true of course from the point of view of evaluating the logic of the argument This is just a premise.

This is an assumption So This is a premise and then this is a premise now. Are you saying you think this is a valid argument though?

You're saying if these two premises are true the conclusion follows Arguably, yeah, I'm saying that if to me times like there's a principle here And the principle would be this right second one is that what you were saying?

That's the principle the middle and you should vote for And if we're following that rule then It's valid Well, yeah, maybe although what about I mean, what about the first objection that we got from Lila, that how I say anything?

Is that right? Um, so Lila said what but what if the other candidate also has a different policy that would make the borders safe And who are you supposed to vote for?

This principle seemed At it with the one press. It's probably not a good principle, right? But it's not that it's a false principle

I think it's inadequately stated. I mean, for example, if I'm trying to establish principle for how to select one from a list of things, and then my principle doesn't pick out only one thing, then it's a failure of a principle.

And it isn't that the principle is false. It's that it's not sufficient to settle the case. So this does look like an inadequate principle here.

They needed it only in there. You should vote for whichever candidate is the only one who's going to make the border safe.

But even that wouldn't work. if there's more than one candidate that would do that? So, okay, but here's the distinction I want to make.

There are many faults with this argument, okay? Some of the flaws in this argument relate to the dubious premises that it depends on.

I don't think either of these premises is true. The first premise is stupid. The second premise is arguably even dumber.

This is like there are so many things that matter. It would be a safer premise to say that border security is like a relevant consideration.

considering who to vote for. That's probably true. But the single decisive issue when there's also how many other important topics to worry about from wars happening abroad to the economy, to to all kinds of civil rights concerns, to the Supreme Court, the composition of the court, and abortion, and how many other important issues are going with this, the environment.

So those are probably false premises, right? So all I want to say here though is, okay, and there's this logical issue, which is even if these premises were true, it's not clear they justify the conclusion because of what we have pointed out.

So now, of course, the thing to realize on the test, but go ahead, what are you going to say actually?

Okay, right. Okay. Yes. Actually, so this, so interestingly enough, I kind of screwed up in my own example. I realized that they probably wouldn't give a product as for method of reasoning question because it's a little bit too bad of an argument, usually.

So the first point I wanted to make, okay, is when they ask you to critically engage with arguments on the LSAT, they're, they're not asking you to critically engage with these premises the way I just did because they never really want you to question premises.

So they're not asking you to engage critically in that sense or only ever asking you engage critically as a matter of logical blidded.

So as a matter of fit. Now, if they gave you an argument like this, even though in real life there are maybe a host of things you might say, the only critical engagement that we've offered so far that they would be interested in was where we will start it.

It would be well, Hold on, what if Harris also has a separate plan that would make the border safe?

who do you vote for? That kind of objection fits the criteria of the test because it isn't questioning the truth of the matter.

It's just, even if you accept their premises, it's a worry for their conclusion. Now, the interesting thing is, if I were to give you a strictly valid argument like the following, all robots are aliens and Obama is a robot, therefore Obama is an alien, I don't know.

Okay, this is an absurd argument, but there's nothing, do they want to try critically engaging with this? How would you critically engage with this argument?

It's an unfair question, you can't do it within the scope of the Elsa. I mean, you could critically engage with it in real life.

You would say hold on robots are aliens or different things I don't know why you said that also. I don't think Obama's a robot, but again questioning the truth of the premises is is out of the scope of what the test is looking for so Mr.

What's valid? This is clearly valid So now the point I want to make to you and I you missed my lead into this you joined literally right after I said So I was just saying basically the test gives two types of arguments It gives arguments that are already valid like this or it gives invalid now The invalid ones are the only ones you can critically engage with there's no critical engagement.

You're allowed to give on the test But so so blue what you said is true, but it's completely irrelevant as a matter of validity and validity is the only subject on the test What you said is relevant to the soundness of the argument, but not its validity It has no bearing on me also

They are unwilling for very good reasons to open the door to consideration of truth. Correct or incorrect is not something that matters on this death.

If it didn't matter, the test would be impossible. It would just be impossible. For one thing, it wouldn't be objective because truth is a debatable question at the edge of almost all disciplines.

They're not to be attacked. I was sort of rationalizing why that is.

On the test. Because again, imagine you did have to know. Imagine in order to answer the question, you have to know whether the premise was true.

Well, it would presumably take something like at least 24 hours to answer a single question then. Because as soon as the first premise of question brings up some study.

Well, recent study suggests that maybe jogging is correlated with better heart health. You have to go. Oh, really? Can you show me the study?

I need the full study. I need the methodology. I need to know the name of the author. I need a J store.

again, I need to look up every other study that's been done on this. And maybe, who are these guys who funded the study?

I need to look into that. Actually, no, no, hours is not enough. I need an appointment like as a PhD student at a research university and a lab of my own so I can try to replicate the study, right?

what would you have to do? It's impossible, right? It's crazy. You needed to know whether that claim was actually true to evaluate the question you would be screwed and the test would make no sense, right?

So that, yeah, validity is only matter of structure. What you just said was perfect word. Validity is a purely structural relation.

Validity does not depend at all on the truth of the premises of an argument. Remember, the definition is, if the premises are all true, then the conclusion also has to be true.

But the premises don't actually have to be true. It just has to be the case that if they were true, they would necessitate the conclusion, which is true in this case, as you can see, as a matter of structure, right?

So this is a valid argument and there's no critical engagement possible. But, They do give valid arguments often on this test.

So my question to you is if they give you a valid argument, what can they possibly ask you to do with it?

Since you can't fight with the premises. What are you supposed to do? What might they ask you to do with a valid argument?

That's the first question I want to ask.

No, you can't make an invalid argument. It's infinitely strong by their lives. How could you weaken this? Well, you could weaken this, but you'd have to fight with the premises and they don't want you to.

You can't weaken the logic, right? Say, which of the long and true would weaken this? would never, they will never ever ask you to weaken a valid argument because it's unfair.

Which of the following of true would most weaken the argument? There's nothing we can say here that would work.

We can fight with the premises and we can fight with the conclusion but these aren't good answers. We can say, well, there are some robots that aren't aliens.

I would weaken the argument in real life, but it doesn't weaken the logic. It just attacks the premise. There's really good evidence, obviously, that Obama isn't an alien, okay?

Or a robot? True, but all we're doing is attacking the conclusion of attacking the premise. None of this the but usually they wouldn't ask a must be true here because they don't bother giving you a fully structured argument with the conclusion and premises if they want a must be true.

Like they would maybe give you the first two and leave off this or something. They could ask you a must be with they don't typically they give you like a properly structured argument that has all the all the components there is already valid.

Usually they're not going to ask a must be Technically what you're saying is conceivable. Well, but I don't think they would do it.

Well, you can't make this argument invalid because it's already valid. mean, you could.

Strengthen can't ask that. We can send strengthens requiring an invalid argument. There's nothing to strengthen here. It's already strongly strong.

Oh, if this were invalid to begin with, then they could ask all the question types that everyone's mentioning. So I mean, don't know how we would change this, if all robots are aliens and Obama is a cool guy, well, that's not a valid argument now.

I could ask you to strengthen this. Can you give me a sufficient? from us that would strengthen this argument since you, since you asked for this, we're little off topic here, but I'm having fun.

So let's stay here. How would you strengthen this? me a sufficient strength.

You could do it, straighten this, fix this argument as a matter of logic. It's not, whatever you say is not going to make any sense, but that's not your fault.

That's because the argument's stupid. That's not your problem. You can still short up as a matter of logic. Does that make sense, guys?

Do you see why that's the right answer?

Awesome. Okay.

Yeah, Okay. So let's go back to this being a valid argument. Okay. So here's the this is a really weird thing, right?

You have to realize how hard it constrains you that truth is irrelevant. Back to the valid version, there's nothing you can say within the bounds of the test to engage critically, which means the only thing they can ask you to do is not critical engagement at all.

It's just it's level zero critical engagement. Can you understand the structure of the argument? You can't criticize it. is structured because it's fine, but you can at least show them that you understand every time they so here are the only question types if you want to look at it that way that they give you with a valid starting terrible reasoning, methods of reasoning, main point and argument structure, all of which are the same questions basically.

They're just asking you what the structure of arguments, okay, and there's slightly different ways you can ask that question.

One way of indirectly asking if you can understand the structure is to ask if you can identify an argument on a completely different topic that exhibits a similar structure.

That's terrible reasoning. They might ask the same question more directly. That's method of reasoning. Don't show it to me in a separate context, describe it to me.

What is the structure? Okay, so okay. I got it. Thumbs up from Jeff, thanks, man. Okay, so, so let's talk about methods, okay?

So now that we've been talking all about logical validity and how it's a structural relationship, I'm gonna basically do the same thing I did like yesterday or two days ago when I was doing parallel reasoning.

And I'm gonna ask for, just if people can understand the distinction between what I'm gonna call content and structure, okay?

Does that distinction make sense here? let's give another argument. I'll give a simple one. The same one I gave yesterday, actually.

Just to keep it easy. All carrots are vegetables. I think this is what I gave. I can't remember now.

All carrots are vegetables. This is a nut carrot. Therefore, this is a vegetable. What's the content of this argument and what's the structure of this one, okay?

And this terminology is like real terminology. I don't know if it's like, but this is like the way many philosophers would speak about this.

type of other terms you might use too. I'm trying to think. Sometimes, instead of structure, people will talk about grammar, but they don't mean it in my English grammar.

They mean it a bit more of a instead of content.

Okay, that's good answer and that is part of structure. That's true. That is an essential part of structure. And you're right, if this were an argument structure question or main point question, that's the side of structure they would want to know.

That's good and it's true and it's part of it, but it's only a partial answer. So that is part of the structure is we have two premises and a conclusion, and we know which senses which.

Okay. But we can say a little bit more because I can give a bunch of different arguments that have two premises and a conclusion, but that looked very different structurally than this.

So this is part of an answer, but it's not a full answer. What more can we say about the structure here?

The users start with content, what's the content? I don't know, at least two people here were maybe three were with me yesterday when I did this, I'm going to go fast through this.

I'll give the easy answer and then I'll make you give me the harder answer actually, just for fun. The easy answer here is that the content is carrots and vegetables, right?

It's the specific thing we happen to be talking about. Structure is whatever is left when we get rid of the content.

It's essentially asking can we generalize away from the specific topic here? What's left behind if we do that? Well, you can say two promises and a conclusion, that's true, it's just less specific.

than you could be. There's more we can say about the content here. Something about the structure of this argument is what's making it valid.

This argument isn't valid because of its content. It might be true or false because of its content. This statement is true or false because of actual facts about carrots and vegetables.

But this argument's validity does not depend on. It depends only on its structure. I can change the content without affecting the structure.

Instead of talking about carrots, I could talk about ponies. Oh, ponies. This is no longer a true premise. It's also no longer a valid argument.

But if I made another change here, is it a valid argument now? looks valid again. So I've reestablished the structure that made it valid in the first place.

I've still changed the content. We're no longer talking about carrots, we're talking about ponies now. And it went from a sound argument with true premises and a true conclusion to an obviously unsound argument with false premises, least one false premise, and a dubious conclusion.

But it's still valid. So what is the structure of this argument? I'll go back to the original but it doesn't matter.

It would be the same structure regardless of whether we talk about character ponies. What's the structure here?

Like if this is a carrot, then it is a vegetable. Totally. That's exactly right. So in addition to saying we have two premises we can get more specific.

have one conditional tennis. Right? you said is exactly. Right in them. So we have a conditional statement and then what's the second price?

That is, but I mean, I have like, what if I put it like this? So we have a conditional premise.

One premise that asserts the the left side of the conditional and then a conclusion that asserts what? What's the conclusion to start here?

You guys understand what I mean about the second premise here? It asserts like the what, right? So our first conditional premise means it's got roughly this structure.

And then the next premise just asserts this part. I thought at the left side, we can call it, you could call it the sufficient condition if you want it, although I don't want to speak that way.

One premise that asserts the, you could call it the first, the, you know what I mean here, right? So what's the conclusion doing?

Yeah, so Joseph gave, I'm going to give that. That is probably the best summary of the structure of the argument.

So what Joseph says, the argument is just this. That's that's all it is. This is the art. Okay, but if you have to put it into words, you want to practice doing both.

Okay, so this is the right way to understand it in variable form. We, there's a sign that actually he put it into words a little better than I just did here.

We can summarize that as saying all A's or B's. This is a. Therefore, this is a B and that is the art and that's the structure.

This is a purely structural read. He's got there's no content here. I can't beat off of this that we're talking about vegetables and carrots.

That's been extracted out like it needs to be. All that's left is the logical structure. But they also will sometimes word things kind of like the way I am up here.

So I want to get you used to the slightly more awkward wording on music. Can someone finish the sentence for me, please?

We have a conditional premise, then we have a premise that asserts the left side of that conditional and then a conclusion that asserts what?

It's going to track what Joe said because it's correct, but.

Okay, hold on. Can you guys understand the wording I'm using here? Have I lost everybody? I'm not sure. You know what I mean by a conditional premise?

was trying to follow the wording that we would use because it was correct. was a good way to speak.

Yeah, exactly the right. side. But hold on, but the conclusion, hold on, Joseph, I'm going to nitpick you like, and incredibly unnecessarily, but I still want to what you said is good, obviously.

The conclusion, you shouldn't have all that because business, the conclusion isn't that the right side of conditional holds because the left side is there, the conclusion is just that the right side of the conditional holds.

Right? The argument got there because of what you're saying, but that wasn't part of the conclusion. The conclusion is just just asserting the right side.

Okay, so do you guys, can anyone walk me through what I wrote here and explain why this makes sense, or does anyone confuse?

If it makes sense, that's good. just a little, I want to make sure it does.

That's true, but that's not what I'm saying here. You just gave me a good understanding of what conditionals mean, but I was just using the condition.

So, look, the first premise just asserts the conditional relationship. It says that all carrots are vegetables. Now, you pointed out to be clear, that means if something's a carrot is a vegetable, but it doesn't necessarily mean that if it's a vegetable, it's a carrot, because not all vegetables are carrots.

You're right. That's helpful if you're struggling to understand conditionals, but that's just contained in the meaning of the conditionals.

So, the first premise just says, in general, all carrots are vegetables. That's the conditional. In other words, if carrot, then vegetable.

The second premise then asserts the left side of the conditional, namely that carrot is true in this case. Then we don't.

to say word carrot is true, but that's what that's what we're saying. This is carrot. It then goes on to conclude the right side of the condition.

It doesn't conclude that the right side of the condition holds because the left side held. That's not quite right.

It just concludes that the right side holds. And if you ask how the argument reached that conclusion, well, the two premises, from the existence of the conditional relationship and the truth of the left side.

But the reasoning of an argument is not contained in its conclusion. Okay, you can ask how did we reach a conclusion?

And there might be more than one way to reach it. And the argument only relied on one particular path.

And that's fine. But that isn't the same thing as the conclusion. The conclusion is just that this is eventually right.

Okay, now the sharper, but do you guys understand what I do? The task of all these questions, basically, especially method of reasoning and parallel reasoning, is can you extract this structural summary, especially can you handle the way I worded this, because they're gonna word it like I did often, and you don't wanna lose questions here because you don't like this wording, okay?

Can you extract that from the original? Now, this was a very straightforwardly structured argument, but we can give slightly more complicated arguments, okay?

And they won't always, they won't always have structures rooted in conditionals. So, you might imagine an argument like this.

How about the fall? Okay. I want to come up with a really cheeky example, but like I'm trying to use my brain and like I didn't sleep a lot and I drank too much coffee and I had it literally throbbing.

I tried to actually use it for critical thinking. So this is gonna be tough. Okay Center myself. Okay, here we go Hold on You

Okay, I'm trying to lean hard into what they often do, which is saying weird kind of stupid and a little offensive and vaguely confusing things, but I have to worry about the absurdity of any claim.

The question a claim is true is besides the point. The question is, can you just consider it exactly as it is?

Do not make a mistake of relying on your intuition about the world to try to correct the weird things they say.

Instead, read exactly and only what is said. Okay, that's one of the challenges. There aren't really different types of methods.

They're all the same. The question in all of them is, what is the structure of the story? So what is the structure of story?

You should be great. grateful that when they give you these weird arguments like this, you don't need to engage with the content because they only might engage with structure.

That's great. The content was crazy. I wouldn't want to have to engage with this content because it's so stupid.

But I don't have to. How did, I mean, this isn't even a good argument. This is obviously a terrible argument.

But we can still try to categorize the method of reasoning that was employed. First of all, we should start with the basis.

What's the conclusion? What are the prices? This actually isn't a valid argument, but we can still do method of reasoning with it in this case.

They won't always give you valid arguments.

Okay, so that's our conclusion. Good. Okay, so but how did we get here? Roughly. Again, we didn't really get there.

But you know, how did we try?

Okay, say more. Oh, I want to be clear. It is important that you can tell what the premise and the conclusion is, but we haven't even started the answer the question.

That's all we've done. Right. I need to know what the structure is specifically at this arc. And it's not going to be an A or a B situation.

I don't see any conditionals here. Do you? Oh, I see a good answer. But going to say that I cut you out on I apologize if I did.

Yeah. Oh, maybe if you didn't have anything else, that's fine too. But if you did, I, please.

I'm completely confused by what you're asking. I'm sorry. The quiet, they will never ask you to question the premise.

you saying you think the argument is questioning a premise? don't know what that would mean. It's own premise. Do you mean because it said, how do I know this?

Well, this is just rhetorical. This is just like a long-winded way of saying because or something, which they then literally want to say.

This is their conclusion. This is supposed to be their support. I'm just asking, like, how are they reasoning? The last argument I gave you reasoned with conditional reasoning.

gave a conditional premise and it applied it in the forward direction. This isn't doing that. What's it doing? Okay, there's some answers in here.

Can't be trusted is conclusion because men are like fortunate. Okay, well, true, but that's it. That's an answer that's all content, no structure.

So it's not very helpful. Now, I think I saw something else that, OK, so McKinney says it's an analogy to fortune codes.

That's definitely on a very good track here towards an anticipation. So just as the structure is, we start with the conclusion.

We then sort of, OK, I mean, I don't even think that. I think this is more rhetorical than part of the argument, to be honest, but it's fair.

It's fair. They might even include that sometimes. OK, they might say, how do the argument proceed by asking rhetorical questions?

I could see that. So it's probably more right than I am, actually. The more I think about it, that was a good answer.

OK, then you say premise that doesn't necessarily get it. Well, true. It is an inadequate premise. And it's conceivable they would want you to point that out also.

But I want a little more details. OK, so, Rog, you're right about everything you're saying, but it's all content.

It's still all content. I need structure, not content here. So the only answer here. There's probably what I can, you said.

It's reasoning by analogy. There's not much else to say here. That's the strategy. The only support for the conclusion is some analogy.

You don't have to worry about whether that's good or bad reasoning. They didn't ask you that. They just asked you how did it reason.

So don't waste your, don't waste a single second worrying about unless they want you to in the answers. Worrying about whether the reasoning is actually good or bad.

I'm reading this thinking to myself, this doesn't seem very good to me, but ooh, Jesus, I hope they don't ask me about that because I don't know exactly what they would want me to say.

Oh, thank God, they don't need me to worry about it. Okay, I don't know whether it's good or bad, but I know what happened.

They reason to buy analogy, right? Yes, exactly that, perfect. so we're reasoning by now. That's the structure. There's nothing else to say here, because there's nothing else that happens.

And this would be the right answer. 10 times out of 10, this would be the right answer. answer some, some, okay, hold on, let's say, okay, so, so this was I kind of not the greatest and now, okay, I'm going to just pull over real well that question because these are too hard to think of on my own, but I just, to make sure I'm, I'm getting the point across here as a strategy.

Okay, you, the beauty of, method of reasoning questions are way easier than they seem because you don't need to worry about whether the argument's good.

You can take off, but the hardest thing to do, period, is critically engage with these arguments. And as soon as you see, it's a method of reasoning question, you can breathe a deep sigh of relief.

I do. when I get a terrible reasoning question because I don't have to worry about whether it's good or

I just don't have to worry. All I have to do is be able to actually describe what it did.

That's way easier than critically engaging with it because to critically engage with it you also have to know what it did.

You have to know what it did and ask the further question of whether it was good or bad. That's way harder.

Way easier to just ask what did they do, right? And when you ask and answer that question, just make sure the answer you give isn't an answer dripping with content.

If your answer is stuck in the content, then you haven't found a way to characterize what they did as a matter of logical structure, which is what they need to know.

It's not good to give them an answer. This is all about men and whether you can trust them in fortune cookies.

If your summary of the argument depends crucially on this being about men in fortune cookies and trust, then there's a problem.

Okay, so let's zoom out here. Any questions in the meantime I want to pull up a screen share. You only have, like, 15 seconds only, here it was.

Quickly. Quickly. Come on. We're running out of time. Ah. Just kidding. Oh. What does it mean? Oh. You're going to do it like you were doing this.

So I did it veranda. That'll be fine. I, you keep asking this question, but I'm going to keep giving you the same answer.

There are not different types of that. That I'm aware of. There's just methods of reasoning questions. I, honestly, when I took the test, I wouldn't have even distinguished method of reasoning questions from, from most of, from, like, careful reasoning.

I just would have said, oh, yeah, that's like, they're asking me with structures.

Ragu?

That's what you're saying. The hardest part on these, although if you get, this is a skill that is arguably easier to master than many, and once you have it, you'll come to love questions like this.

This is the question type where you actually, the answer choices aren't dangerous. in LR, the answers choices are really deadly, but here, if you can read them very carefully and parse them accurately, it's easy to rule out wrong answers, because they are often just inaccurate.

They just don't describe what happened. So you can just go check, oh, did they do that? Let me look, they didn't, so this is wrong.

Now, that is a skill that no one is born doing, period. And until you develop it, that can actually really screw you up.

But once you get that skill, you will come to love this type of question, because it's like a more reliable process than many on LR.

typically my guess is when people start to get to be like high scores, 170 plus, and they're pushing for like 175 plus, these are like the questions that they start to get 100% accuracy on.

Like, some of these flaw-based questions, you can never really get there. Like, it's always possible that you're just reading it differently than them or overlooking something, and that's very frustrating.

But these are like, okay, if I'm just careful and I don't make stupid mistakes, I should always be able to get these right.

So because this, did they say this or not? Accuracy question is like a bit more objective and precise than some of the others.

I've actually started doing that more. I didn't use do the way I would go through the process instead is I would read an argument and sometimes I'd be like, Oh, gee, whoa, this is like, whoa, think that might be a flaw, but it's really ambiguous.

I can't like, this is and then I got I've done so much of this that I can just from reading an argument, I can tell like, even if like, even if it might be flawed, the flaw is like too subtle for them to ask about it.

And I'm immediately Like, there's no way they expect me to be able to critically engage with this. then they're like, method of reasoning.

I'm like, OK, I knew it. I knew it. I knew there was no way they wanted me to do Like, that was too ambiguous.

So depending on your tolerance level for anxiety, OK, you can do it my way or your way. My way is to get anxious as I go and then breathe a sigh of relief down here.

Your way is to go, I don't want that anxiety. Let just figure out, I don't have to worry. Now I won't.

OK, I like my way because it's a way of telling whether I'm in sync with the test writers. If my feeling about their argument as I read was this doesn't, this feels too subtle for them to want me to critically engage with it.

And then it turns out I was right because of the question. Then I know that I read the argument the right way.

Sometimes they surprise me. Sometimes I feel that way and then they do want me to critically engage with it.

And then I realized I need to go back and reread this because I may have missed some. But this all depends.

And I would be shocked that there are very many people on Earth who like to do it my way because my way is kind of unnecessarily stressful, but I'm just used to it.

But what you said makes perfect sense. There are many, many good tutors would recommend you exactly what you do.

So that's good. It says there are all these moments, right? At some level, okay, if you really want to get a 180, let's say, you need like 1000 mini experiments you're performing that are like checks of your intuition against what they're doing and what they're giving.

I'm basically trying to constantly generate predictions, small predictions, and then evaluate whether they're landing. Because any time those predictions don't land, that's like an indication that I might need to revise the way I'm thinking.

And every time they do land, it's like a solid evidential basis for me to feel confident and like proceed basically, right?

But this is just too, this is way too obnoxious. So it's not worth worrying about. So instead I just want to, you know what, I've had this thing open.

guys have probably all read this. I haven't read this. Give me 60 seconds and then we'll talk about this question.

I see. Okay. Okay. So I think this one's possible to anticipate, but we'll see. I haven't found the answer.

Okay. They were actually kind of gentle with this one. The answer was. Okay. You Definitely yeah, I definitely I do I so I do I'll probably have to stop actually after this question unfortunately just because have a two recession after this but I want to answer at least a couple questions before we go.

I'll say at least a couple minutes at first I'll make it up to Caroline anyway. Yeah, definitely. So, by the way, I got one private message suggesting an answer, and it was correct, but since it was a private message, that doesn't help the rest of you.

What do you guys think? Actually, you know what, I don't have time to do this. I apologize. I wasted too much time in the front end.

Well, not wasted. mean, I thought it was a pretty good discussion, but regardless, so let's walk through this. I'm going to walk through my process on this one, and you can all do whatever.

So, we start with the first big thing I'm noticing is this is inductive reasoning, not deductive reasoning. doing cause and effect.

This is cause and effect, right? Or to be more accurate, this is correlation causation. So, we start with this correlation from the data, and that's that the students who work more hours a week are performing worse in high school.

The original argument then goes on to conclude that it must be working those hours that is monitoring their academic performance.

In other words, the explanation they give to the data is that the hours worked, it's causing the low performance.

Dr. Nash then responds and says, well, hold on. It might be that the low academic performance is actually causing the students to want to go work the hours.

In other words, my anticipation was they're reversing, he's attempting to reverse the causal arrow here. So that was the answer I was looking for.

They then gave a less precise answer, but it still described accurately the family of response, offering an alternative interpretation of the evidence cited.

So that's true. To be more specific, he was reversing the causal arrow, but that's just an example of an alternative explanation to the data.

So B looks like a good answer, but I want to show you also what I mean about how we don't need to just pick out the right answer.

We can rule out wrong answers because that is a genuine strength on these questions and something you should try to do.

Let's go one by one, attempting to downplay the seriousness of the pro. Okay, hold on, this is just there's

There's downplay going on. We're debating the best way to interpret the evidence we have. We're not. Nothing is even this normative.

The question isn't whether it's a good thing or a bad thing or how good or how bad this is just not happening.

So A is a very bad answer. Now B, I've already said I think is a good answer. So what about C?

Questioning the accuracy of the evidence. Now this means something very specific. Questioning the accuracy of evidence does not mean questioning how strongly it supports any given explanatory causal conclusion.

That's not what it means to question the actors. What it means to question the accuracy is literally, did you do your data collection correctly?

Okay, so question the accuracy of data would be like the equivalent of denying the truth of the premise. That would be if you were spotted by saying, actually that correlation you're relying on was later debunked in further experiments that showed that it couldn't be reproduced.

Okay. didn't do that. So C is not the right answer in here. He accepted the accuracy of the evidence, disagreed on what the right interpretation of that evidence is.

Crucial distinction, okay? Then D, proposing that the schools are not at fault. Again, we're not, we're not asking who's at fault or who's not at fault.

So all of these normative answers like A and D are not understanding the nature of the discussion here. Raising the possibility that there's no relationship, that's not true.

So this is the most subtle wrong answer. He denied that the relationship was precisely what Dr. Godfrey said it was, but he actually proposes an alternative explanation that itself seems to assert some relationship between the categories because he reversed the causal arrows.

So he wasn't denying that there's any relationship. He was just denying that the relationship was the way that Dr.

Godfrey said it was. So he looks like a good answer Okay. So anyway, that's why I run down of this example.

We, we've got the one example. Now I do have to run, like I said, to another session, but first, are there any questions on any topic of any kind of people we discussed or otherwise that anyone, I know I can, have one.

Well, you might find a way to ease up on it. So when you blind review, are you reviewing the entire test or just the problem questions?

the process, this sounds excellent. I mean, that sounds brutal, but it truly sounds like you're doing the right thing.

All I'm going to say is what it sounds like you've already seen, but maybe I'll encourage you to speed up even more on blind reviews.

At the point where you're in the high one, 60s, low one, 70s, your accuracy really is quite high. You don't need to be blind reviewing more than 10% of the questions.

I mean, you should be reviewing the questions you got wrong. You don't even need to seriously review all of them.

You might glance at a question you got wrong and realize you just misread something. It was a stupid mistake.

That happens. If so, I wouldn't waste time on that question. would move on. But I would generally look back on all the ones you got wrong.

And you might, admittedly, it might be a good idea to review. a couple other questions too, but only ones that you remember.

I would flag them as you go. If after taking the test, you know something's squeaking you out and you don't like it and you feel like you're guessing at all, literally flag it.

And you can wind review that even if you guess correctly and got it right. Yeah, I wouldn't be wondering doing more than 10 or 15 questions probably on a full exam if you're scoring in the 1177-16.

But that isn't to say that you made a mistake in the old days. You had to get to this level of accuracy and you had to get there by going through the exact...

Right, that's great that you did. But now don't get stuck there. truth is you only need to review 10 or 15 questions for exam now, probably.

It's still going to be time-consuming because I know how thorough you are, but by the way, two to three exams a week is quite a lot.

That may be too ambitious and unnecessary, right? You can start filing that back to one and then maybe doing a couple sections between or something.

You know what I mean? But, okay, because there's this thing of being exhausted, right? Right, don't really, I mean, quality of time is going to be better than quantity of time here, and I would rather you're fresh for the practice you've got to.

Okay, I'm now more than five minutes away to my next session, so I feel very Thank you. Bye. Thanks so much.