I was torn between A and E and I chose E because the causes of the back pain could affect the outcome of the experiment. The damage to your back that results from a car accident would be very different from sitting in a chair chair 12 hours a day, so magnets may be effective against one more than the other.
@JaredKebbell The stim states that most of Group 1 felt relief of back pain. We do not know how their back pain is caused but we do know that at least 50% or more have felt relief. I think this is the most important factor to consider with E because it was tempting for me too.
@Twills well an argument is the premise + conclusion and in this case, it is asking for the strongest counter to his argument which means it is looking for a way to weaken the support between the phenomenon and hypothesis. The answer is A because it is an alternative hypothesis; the original hypothesis stated that magnets help reduce back pain, so by stating it is a placebo, it weakens the original hypothesis.
So, since group 2 didn't receive a placebo, could we assume that the researchers / observers were not blinded and knew which group was getting the treatment vs. not? I just want to make sure I am not assuming something that I shouldn't be!
Something that helped me in this scenario is to pretend to be the person responding. If I were talking to someone who said the stimulus, I'd likely respond with something like A. "Maybe magnetic fields are effective, but what if knowing they were there played a role and it wasn't just the magnets?" Something that pokes holes in the physician's support, like the placebo effect.
Honestly I feel like answer A isn't strong. It relies on the assumption that the patients in the two groups both know which group they're in., which I guess is a somewhat reasonable assumption but it doesn't seem too strong to me.
@TheBigFatPanda i think the strength of this answer choice comes from it referencing the placebo effect. If this back pain study was a real study, this would be a pretty clear criticism of it, since the members of each group are very clearly aware of which group they are in. Plus, the answer does not necessarily have to severely weaken the argument, it just has to weaken it the most out of every other answer choice
@TheBigFatPanda We don't have to assume that the patients know what group they are in. Stimulus states that one group received treatment, "magnets", and the other group didn't.
So, like the other person mentioned, its the placebo effect causing patients who received the magnets to think that the magnets are working vs patients who received nothing to have no improvement.
@MnM I think both of you guys are missing my point. I know what the placebo effect is. My point is there's not really an indication that the experiment was set up in a way where the control group knows that they are in fact the control group, and vice versa the experiment group knows that they are the experiment group. It could be the case that the control group which received no treatment got what looked like magnetic beads but in fact have no effect and therefore isn't a treatment like the stim said.
At the end of the day it comes down to how you interpret "treatment", which you could either interpret as treatment which only have positive effects in actuality like I mistakenly did (so if you give the control group a fake medicine in this instance that would not count is giving them ACTUAL treatment), or treatment is something that even remotely resembles any form of remedy (basically if you told the control group to just try their best to heal and voila).
#feedback Please bring back the overview feature that lets you see the stimulus and the answer choices without listening to the video. I usually like to give these questions with lectures attached a try before listening so I can understand where my thinking could go wrong.
yes! I have found this section to easy, and I am doing good, but when i watch the explanations, I get so confused! it has been hard to follow along with the explanations.
Receiving no treatment is VERY different than getting a placebo which is also VERY different than comparing to standard of care or standard practice. Placebo does NOT mean doing nothing, as it is often taught in high school science class. It means I did everything the same (within reason) in all groups except for the one variable for which I am trying to test. No treatment means simply that, I did nothing. I just left the subject alone and observed or asked some questions. Testing against standard of care or standard practice means, I am testing against what we usually do to treat this situation. Each one is different and can be useful for different things, but generally the hierarchy goes: 1. Against standard of care, 2. against placebo, 3. against no treatment.
For example, I'm testing a new pain relief pill. If I treat pill vs no treatment, I give half my new pill, and the other half I give nothing, I might not even see them just have them fill out a survey about pain at two different times. This is the lowest level of rigor because I have controlled for the least variables. This is what can be reasonably assumed they did in this example, and, therefore, better than nothing, but not an ideal test.
Testing against a placebo group is better. It would be giving half a new pill and half an identical pill but full of sugar. The act of giving a sugar pill is a treatment, it is just one that we can be reasonable certain will have no mechanistic effect on the test subjects' pain. It could have a psychological effect.
However, this still does not tell me if my new pill works better than aspirin. In this example it would be me hooking you up to a machine that looks, sounds, and smells identical to the magnets, but does not produce the magnetic effect.
Testing against the standard of care is often (depending on the variable you want to test) better than placebo. This would be one group with my new pill and one group with aspirin. This tells us that the new treatment works better or worse against what we are already doing. IDK what the standard of care is for chronic pain, but lets say its opioids. I would give one my pill and the other opioids. In this example it would be one gets magnets, one gets opioids, and ideally, one gets both.
Testing against the standard of care is a far more ethical way to test medicine (refer to the movie Dallas Buyers Club if you want an example of why).
Sorry for the long response, this is just something I am passionate about because the "natural remedy, seed oils are bad, and crystals will heal your cancer" crowd prey on people not understanding these distinctions (especially between placebo and standard of care) to sell their snake oil on Joe Rogan's podcast. Red flags when someone says their supplement preforms better than whatever doctors are telling you to take "in placebo controlled trials". It could mean that I got 10 people together and the 5 of them that took my snake oil said they got 100% better and the other five got a sugar pill. But the 1 million person study by real doctors on aspirin said they only got 98% pain relief vs sugar pill. This is also why the new NIH policy to do all of our new medical tests as ONLY placebo control group tests is unethical, unscientific, and going to lead to poorly informed laws and regulations.
so if i keep getting questions right but my explanations are different than how he explains... am i doing something wrong ? his explanations just confuse me most of the time when i get the question right
Not necessarily, but I would recommend making sure you have a structured approach. Sometimes this happens to me, so I write down my thought process just so I have a procedure to follow and that way I feel confident in my own reasoning instead of feeling like I'm going off my gut
yes, I believe he tends to get carried away and it doesnt help me much, just confuses me more. But I think its the narrator's way of trying to show us how we should be thinking. Its just not helpful sometimes, especially when the examples and thoughts are all over the place.
I think he lowkey does it to get us used to sifting information to get to the most important stuff because the LSAT gives you so much hard jargon and you have to sift through it. If you have practice doing that then you're probs in better shape
Does anyone else wish that we could see all the answer choices first before seeing the correct one? Is there a feature I can turn on that will give me this? I feel like that would be a helpful way of practicing while watching videos.
You can click the "quick view" button on top of the video. It looks like a little magnifying glass and you'll be able to see the entire question with AC!
click the preview above the video, I do that every time and do it myself then go to the bottom of vid and check the answer to see if correct then watch the vid, low key ill skip the vid if i understand it cuz he rambles alot.
yes you can! click where it says "quick view" on top of the video, that'll help you see it without the need to know the answer! I know it has been 4 months since this comment, but aye if you still learning there is the tip!
You can search for the question on Google (in the address bar, pt64-s1-q04), and the first 7Sage link that appears will be the one you need. Just avoid scrolling down too far to prevent seeing the answer.
There is a small button that says "quick view" on top of the video that shows you the question in full, including all the answer choices. I sometimes pause the video and try to do answer the question on my own before I watch the video for the correct answer.
You can search for the question on Google (in the address bar, pt64-s1-q04), and the first 7Sage link that appears will be the one you need. Just avoid scrolling down too far to prevent seeing the answer.
#help I intuitively think that the correct answer would be E - about the different causes of back pain. Even after reading and listening to the explanation, I am hesitant to reject this answer choice. Could anyone provide their understanding of why this choice is wrong?
The argument concludes that magnets are effective at helping with back pain, based on the premise which describes the experiment. This is a weakening question so our job is to attack the relationship between the argument (the conclusion) and the premises that got us there. The different causes of back pain have no impact on this relationship - if anything, it's just additional context. It does not help the argument or weaken the argument in anyway, because it does nothing to the relationship between the premise (the experiment) and the conclusion (magnets help with back pain).
To add to this point, I think E tries to act like it's undermining the experiment's integrity, but it really doesn't.
E is like ooooh well we can't trust the experiment's data because the participants' back pain was caused by a bunch of different things. But when I thought about this, E felt like it strengthened the conclusion that magnets must help with back pain. Imagine if the experiment only included people with back pain from pregnancy. Then, all we could conclude is that magnets help pregnant people with their back pain. But the fact that all these participants actually had back pain for a wide variety of reasons is a good thing, because the magnets helped in all those different circumstances. So, the conclusion is right! Magnets are helpful for a variety of back pains. For this reason, E isn't really a good counter to the argument.
Please correct me if I'm misunderstanding something. Isn't the experimental framework the exact same method as phenomenon hypothesis framework? In this case the phenomenon that needs to be explained is why one group improved and one group didn't. The conclusion hypothesis says, "it's because of the magnets". A correct weaken answer would provide an alternative hypothesis which it does. It says, "maybe it's not magnets but the placebo effect".
How can we derive from the stimulus that the patients in both groups "knew" whether they got the treatment or not? Nowhere in the stimulus says that they both knew.
The way that I saw it was that it is a reasonable assumption that if people are getting magnets applied to them, they'd see or feel something being applied as opposed to those with no treatment (who'd also notice that nothing was applied to them). Since there is no placebo that looks and feels like a magnet (treatment), then the patients who don't get anything would know they didn't receive magnet treatment due to the lack of anything being applied.
Yes! You can see the answer choices below the video, along with the other transcripts. The letters are written in bold, and sentences from the answer choices are in italic form.
No other experiments have been done showing that magnetic fields reduce pain in any area other than the back.
/back→/reduce pain, therefore reduce pain→back. I think what answer says is that If magnets are to exert their pain-reducing magic, it's necessary for them to be applied to one's back. This leads me to the wrong answer choice.
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60 comments
I was torn between A and E and I chose E because the causes of the back pain could affect the outcome of the experiment. The damage to your back that results from a car accident would be very different from sitting in a chair chair 12 hours a day, so magnets may be effective against one more than the other.
@JaredKebbell The stim states that most of Group 1 felt relief of back pain. We do not know how their back pain is caused but we do know that at least 50% or more have felt relief. I think this is the most important factor to consider with E because it was tempting for me too.
I am confused. The answer is A because it weakens the Dr argument and not the conclusion?
@Twills well an argument is the premise + conclusion and in this case, it is asking for the strongest counter to his argument which means it is looking for a way to weaken the support between the phenomenon and hypothesis. The answer is A because it is an alternative hypothesis; the original hypothesis stated that magnets help reduce back pain, so by stating it is a placebo, it weakens the original hypothesis.
#help
So, since group 2 didn't receive a placebo, could we assume that the researchers / observers were not blinded and knew which group was getting the treatment vs. not? I just want to make sure I am not assuming something that I shouldn't be!
Something that helped me in this scenario is to pretend to be the person responding. If I were talking to someone who said the stimulus, I'd likely respond with something like A. "Maybe magnetic fields are effective, but what if knowing they were there played a role and it wasn't just the magnets?" Something that pokes holes in the physician's support, like the placebo effect.
Do words like "probably" and "some" in the conclusion make the conclusion more plausible?
Honestly I feel like answer A isn't strong. It relies on the assumption that the patients in the two groups both know which group they're in., which I guess is a somewhat reasonable assumption but it doesn't seem too strong to me.
@TheBigFatPanda i think the strength of this answer choice comes from it referencing the placebo effect. If this back pain study was a real study, this would be a pretty clear criticism of it, since the members of each group are very clearly aware of which group they are in. Plus, the answer does not necessarily have to severely weaken the argument, it just has to weaken it the most out of every other answer choice
@TheBigFatPanda We don't have to assume that the patients know what group they are in. Stimulus states that one group received treatment, "magnets", and the other group didn't.
So, like the other person mentioned, its the placebo effect causing patients who received the magnets to think that the magnets are working vs patients who received nothing to have no improvement.
@MnM I think both of you guys are missing my point. I know what the placebo effect is. My point is there's not really an indication that the experiment was set up in a way where the control group knows that they are in fact the control group, and vice versa the experiment group knows that they are the experiment group. It could be the case that the control group which received no treatment got what looked like magnetic beads but in fact have no effect and therefore isn't a treatment like the stim said.
At the end of the day it comes down to how you interpret "treatment", which you could either interpret as treatment which only have positive effects in actuality like I mistakenly did (so if you give the control group a fake medicine in this instance that would not count is giving them ACTUAL treatment), or treatment is something that even remotely resembles any form of remedy (basically if you told the control group to just try their best to heal and voila).
#feedback Please bring back the overview feature that lets you see the stimulus and the answer choices without listening to the video. I usually like to give these questions with lectures attached a try before listening so I can understand where my thinking could go wrong.
@allyldh agreed
are these type of questions only experimental?
Is E an example of the "Don't touch Goku" rule? (its best not to mess with the phenomenon?
Am I the only person having a hard time with this section due to over explanation?
yes! I have found this section to easy, and I am doing good, but when i watch the explanations, I get so confused! it has been hard to follow along with the explanations.
can't "received no treatment" easily be interpreted as a patient having been given a placebo?
Assumptions!! While it reasonably could, the stimulus didn't say so, and the answer relied on your assumption to trap you.
Receiving no treatment is VERY different than getting a placebo which is also VERY different than comparing to standard of care or standard practice. Placebo does NOT mean doing nothing, as it is often taught in high school science class. It means I did everything the same (within reason) in all groups except for the one variable for which I am trying to test. No treatment means simply that, I did nothing. I just left the subject alone and observed or asked some questions. Testing against standard of care or standard practice means, I am testing against what we usually do to treat this situation. Each one is different and can be useful for different things, but generally the hierarchy goes: 1. Against standard of care, 2. against placebo, 3. against no treatment.
For example, I'm testing a new pain relief pill. If I treat pill vs no treatment, I give half my new pill, and the other half I give nothing, I might not even see them just have them fill out a survey about pain at two different times. This is the lowest level of rigor because I have controlled for the least variables. This is what can be reasonably assumed they did in this example, and, therefore, better than nothing, but not an ideal test.
Testing against a placebo group is better. It would be giving half a new pill and half an identical pill but full of sugar. The act of giving a sugar pill is a treatment, it is just one that we can be reasonable certain will have no mechanistic effect on the test subjects' pain. It could have a psychological effect.
However, this still does not tell me if my new pill works better than aspirin. In this example it would be me hooking you up to a machine that looks, sounds, and smells identical to the magnets, but does not produce the magnetic effect.
Testing against the standard of care is often (depending on the variable you want to test) better than placebo. This would be one group with my new pill and one group with aspirin. This tells us that the new treatment works better or worse against what we are already doing. IDK what the standard of care is for chronic pain, but lets say its opioids. I would give one my pill and the other opioids. In this example it would be one gets magnets, one gets opioids, and ideally, one gets both.
Testing against the standard of care is a far more ethical way to test medicine (refer to the movie Dallas Buyers Club if you want an example of why).
Sorry for the long response, this is just something I am passionate about because the "natural remedy, seed oils are bad, and crystals will heal your cancer" crowd prey on people not understanding these distinctions (especially between placebo and standard of care) to sell their snake oil on Joe Rogan's podcast. Red flags when someone says their supplement preforms better than whatever doctors are telling you to take "in placebo controlled trials". It could mean that I got 10 people together and the 5 of them that took my snake oil said they got 100% better and the other five got a sugar pill. But the 1 million person study by real doctors on aspirin said they only got 98% pain relief vs sugar pill. This is also why the new NIH policy to do all of our new medical tests as ONLY placebo control group tests is unethical, unscientific, and going to lead to poorly informed laws and regulations.
Tomato Out
so if i keep getting questions right but my explanations are different than how he explains... am i doing something wrong ? his explanations just confuse me most of the time when i get the question right
Not necessarily, but I would recommend making sure you have a structured approach. Sometimes this happens to me, so I write down my thought process just so I have a procedure to follow and that way I feel confident in my own reasoning instead of feeling like I'm going off my gut
In an experiment, would we always get a placebo?
Placebo effect, not always, but a placebo pill or treatment yes to make sure the participants do not know what group they are in.
How do you tell a difference between a question where you need to find an alternative cause or something like this?
Does anyone else feel like he explains a bunch of things that don't help us understand LR more clearly? Tons of jargon.
yes, I believe he tends to get carried away and it doesnt help me much, just confuses me more. But I think its the narrator's way of trying to show us how we should be thinking. Its just not helpful sometimes, especially when the examples and thoughts are all over the place.
I think he lowkey does it to get us used to sifting information to get to the most important stuff because the LSAT gives you so much hard jargon and you have to sift through it. If you have practice doing that then you're probs in better shape
Does anyone else wish that we could see all the answer choices first before seeing the correct one? Is there a feature I can turn on that will give me this? I feel like that would be a helpful way of practicing while watching videos.
If you click quick view right above the video it will show you the question and answers without showing you the correct one.
You can click the "quick view" button on top of the video. It looks like a little magnifying glass and you'll be able to see the entire question with AC!
you can just click on quick review and see all the options
click the preview above the video, I do that every time and do it myself then go to the bottom of vid and check the answer to see if correct then watch the vid, low key ill skip the vid if i understand it cuz he rambles alot.
Click "Quick View" above the video.
there is a way, see above or below
yes you can! click where it says "quick view" on top of the video, that'll help you see it without the need to know the answer! I know it has been 4 months since this comment, but aye if you still learning there is the tip!
I agree, especially because we shouldn't anticipate answer choices for strengthen/weaken questions. I want to see all the options so I can do POE :/
You can search for the question on Google (in the address bar, pt64-s1-q04), and the first 7Sage link that appears will be the one you need. Just avoid scrolling down too far to prevent seeing the answer.
There is not a way to do this sadly. I agree
hit the quick view button at the top of the video screen.
click on quick view before you start the video and it will show you the question and all answer choices.
Press quick view on the top of the video it shows the entire question and answers
There is a small button that says "quick view" on top of the video that shows you the question in full, including all the answer choices. I sometimes pause the video and try to do answer the question on my own before I watch the video for the correct answer.
click on "quick view" that's on top of the video.
You can search for the question on Google (in the address bar, pt64-s1-q04), and the first 7Sage link that appears will be the one you need. Just avoid scrolling down too far to prevent seeing the answer.
I agree.
Just click the quick view button-- usually near the top of the page before you click play to start the video.
@sfarhat898825 nobody's said it yet so I'll say it, you can click quick view at the top left of the screen
#help I intuitively think that the correct answer would be E - about the different causes of back pain. Even after reading and listening to the explanation, I am hesitant to reject this answer choice. Could anyone provide their understanding of why this choice is wrong?
The argument concludes that magnets are effective at helping with back pain, based on the premise which describes the experiment. This is a weakening question so our job is to attack the relationship between the argument (the conclusion) and the premises that got us there. The different causes of back pain have no impact on this relationship - if anything, it's just additional context. It does not help the argument or weaken the argument in anyway, because it does nothing to the relationship between the premise (the experiment) and the conclusion (magnets help with back pain).
I hope that helps a bit!
To add to this point, I think E tries to act like it's undermining the experiment's integrity, but it really doesn't.
E is like ooooh well we can't trust the experiment's data because the participants' back pain was caused by a bunch of different things. But when I thought about this, E felt like it strengthened the conclusion that magnets must help with back pain. Imagine if the experiment only included people with back pain from pregnancy. Then, all we could conclude is that magnets help pregnant people with their back pain. But the fact that all these participants actually had back pain for a wide variety of reasons is a good thing, because the magnets helped in all those different circumstances. So, the conclusion is right! Magnets are helpful for a variety of back pains. For this reason, E isn't really a good counter to the argument.
Hit the nail on the head! E does strengthen the argument. Part of running an ideal experiment is having a large and arbitrary sample size.
You explained this perfectly! I now see why E is wrong. It plays on naive assumptions.
Please correct me if I'm misunderstanding something. Isn't the experimental framework the exact same method as phenomenon hypothesis framework? In this case the phenomenon that needs to be explained is why one group improved and one group didn't. The conclusion hypothesis says, "it's because of the magnets". A correct weaken answer would provide an alternative hypothesis which it does. It says, "maybe it's not magnets but the placebo effect".
#help
How can we derive from the stimulus that the patients in both groups "knew" whether they got the treatment or not? Nowhere in the stimulus says that they both knew.
The way that I saw it was that it is a reasonable assumption that if people are getting magnets applied to them, they'd see or feel something being applied as opposed to those with no treatment (who'd also notice that nothing was applied to them). Since there is no placebo that looks and feels like a magnet (treatment), then the patients who don't get anything would know they didn't receive magnet treatment due to the lack of anything being applied.
Thank you for the response! It does makes sense now! Hope you ace the test!
is there any way to see the answer choices before we start ? #help
Hi there,
Yes! You can see the answer choices below the video, along with the other transcripts. The letters are written in bold, and sentences from the answer choices are in italic form.
Let me know if you have any further questions!
No other experiments have been done showing that magnetic fields reduce pain in any area other than the back.
/back→/reduce pain, therefore reduce pain→back. I think what answer says is that If magnets are to exert their pain-reducing magic, it's necessary for them to be applied to one's back. This leads me to the wrong answer choice.