So, SA has been kicking me straight in the crotch and I'm starting to understand why.

For me, it's not enough to think of hard questions like this in terms of building a bridge between premises and conclusion. Framing SA in these terms has killed some of my clarity about what these questions are on the face of it. What you're doing in these questions is making an argument valid. What does that mean? It means that whatever stimulus they give you has not yet reached the point of logical validity!

Alright, so what does that have to do with the P --- C bridge? Well, in terms of this question, the validity issue can definitely be seen in the way JY presents it... if you tease out all of the embedded conditionals and slowly work your way toward what he did here. But if we're saying that the fundamental problem with SA question stems is that the argument isn't valid, then there are often other, easier ways to validate the argument.

This question presents the perfect example. Our dude says we will not be able to determine if there's ET life out there unless they're as smart as us. That's because we can't visit them with a spacecraft, so they have to reach out. Seems legit... except it's not. That's not valid because we don't know that there aren't alternative ways to determine that ET life exists. Our telescopes could give a spectroscopical reading that could only mean organic compounds. A meteor could slice off a chunk of the ET planet and then bring it to our doorstep. The hole in the argument and the reason it's invalid is the fact that it gives us no reason to preclude these alternative possibilities.

Enter answer choice D. It's telling us explicitly, OK, imagine dumbshit aliens exist. In that case (because the answer choices get the benefit of being true, which is why they supply the validity), there is NO OTHER WAY to determine their existence besides spacecraft. Since those aren't happening anytime soon, the loophole has been closed. It's now a valid argument.

Just needed to get that all out to prove to bring these things back down to Earth, so to speak. If I have to conditionalize all of these questions with formal logic, I'm fcked, so I'll be moving forward with this framework and saving the conditional stuff for if I'm truly stumped.

Right with a minute to spare.

And then wrong in blind review. lol. Idc, counting this one as a w

Definitely helps to come up with your own analogous arguments to flesh this concept out.

Legolas claims that the sky is blue because the goldfish jumped into the river on Tuesday. However, his conclusion is clearly mistaken. The water levels in both the lake and the river were low on Tuesday, meaning that any goldfish would have had a difficult time making the crossing.

Bro I am hopeless at parallel reasoning (maybe I should go through that part of the curriculum lol)

I thought this was another 'must be true' question and made a ton of complicated diagrams just to realize I was wasting my time, lol. But hey, still got it right in the end!

Didn't watch the video yet, but I got this one by thinking in straightforward terms of sufficiency and necessity.

Approximate age → feel comfy

Fail the sufficient condition.

Approximate age

You don't get to draw the conclusion that people don't feel comfortable approaching strangers by failing the sufficient condition. When the sufficient is failed, the necessary is free to do as it will. Even granting that people don't feel as comfy approaching strangers who aren't their own age, it stands to reason that there are still far more people not your age than who are your age, meaning that, overall, people may still end up approaching people outside their own age range as often or more often as people within it, leading to friendships. So, even without the language of sufficiency and necessity, I think this one is possible to get.

This is one of the few questions where I didn't miss it by overlooking something or making a stupid assumption. I just straight up did not see the flaw, and I commend the LSAT writers for this sneaky Q. Also, as I'm sure this type of flaw will show up elsewhere, I'm happy to have encountered this SOB question now.

I was really bad at these descriptive weakening questions before. For some reason, the MOR lessons combined with these few flaw questions up to this point have me killing these questions, like straight up just figuring out the flaw as I read and then finding it in the stimulus. Feeling great about it considering how badly sufficient assumption questions were crushing me just a week ago. Thanks team.

I chose E by making an unwarranted assumption about the experiment. Since the stim said that the goggles were affixed to the owls before they opened their eyes, I assumed that they ran the experiment when the owls couldn't see anyway, meaning that the conclusion would be totally irrelevant because the experiment wouldn't even be testing what they were claiming to test. That's obviously unreasonable because scientists are not going to run an experiment about vision with owls that cannot see.

I got this wrong under timed conditions and just KNEW that it was wrong before I even went for the BR. This is one of those flaw questions that I wasn't about to map out, so I stared at it for about a minute in BR before the flaw finally came to me.

I think what's difficult about this question is that most of the core curriculum goes over standard PF questions (and rightly so because they are the majority) where we see very close mappings. But if we examine the stimulus carefully, it simply asks for the most similar flawed reasoning. Who cares how many premises there are when the support structure leading to the conclusion is the same? Well, all of us goddamit, which is why the test writers are right c*s for this one, but they're also abiding by the denotation they've set out in the stimulus.

With that said, I went after this with just the flaw in mind. There are two entities, A and B. If C happened, you'd need both of them. C didn't happen. Pick one at random. I had that floating in my head when answer choice A crystallized as the only AC that was arbitrarily choosing one of A or B to announce as wrong even though they could have easily chosen the other one with the information at hand. That took me 3 minutes in BR and I had taken another 3 minutes on the test itself. In the 80's and 90's, with these new PF questions that force you away from your mapping tendencies, it's almost necessary to have a flash of insight, which sucks ass because the stress of taking a test necessarily hampers that insight.

Well played, LSAT writers trying to force the curve back downward. Well played.

Felt damn good not falling for the trap that got me in the lesson. Thanks JY, I'm feeling confident as hell now.

Every time I see 'Ethicist' in the stim, I know shit's about to get real

I hated the wording in the correct answer choice even though I chose it. 'An action' is such a strange way to phrase 'making a movie', and performing such an action is an even weirder way to go about it.

At least they did us a favor by making this an argument part question...

I stared at this question for 10 minutes before realizing it was an RRE, lol

I identified a different defect in A. The argument explicitly refers to the use of colored paper in different contexts, i.e., in different compositions. However, A only refers to the use of paper in a given context, which doesn't necessarily lead us to believe that the statement about texture holds when those same papers are applied to different contexts. Even irrespective of A affecting the argument in the same way that the other premises do, it cannot supply support to the conclusion about the utility of colored paper in different contexts and therefore cannot be necessary for the argument.

Before starting the curriculum, these were my worst question types. Now they're becoming my favorite. Thanks JY!

D is definitely the best answer, I'll grant it that, and I know the right answer just has to be the best answer and not the perfect one. But this pisses me off because I don't think it's actually necessary.

Go ahead and negate D. Then we're left with the fact that no trees have been planted where native grasses would otherwise be growing. That leaves plenty of room, however, for the trees to harm native grasses in other ways. These could be trees with wide canopies that don't leave enough sunlight for the native grasses to survive. That means you could plant a row of trees NEXT to native grasses without displacing native grasses and those grasses could still die because the canopies stretch over where they do grow, block sunlight, and kill the grasses.

I mapped this weirdly but it worked for me.

More X's when A (correlation) than B (correlation)

_

Most X's for A

My dumbass forgot to read the word 'guest' and ended up infinitely confused.

5/5 ON 4 STAR QUESTIONS OMG LET'S GOOOO

Maybe I took the easy route here because, after I'd concluded D didn't reconcile, I looked at E and said I ain't reading all that.

#help is this not bi-conditional? In other words, what's stopping me from switching up necessary and sufficient here?

Right to Keep --> NYC and B10+ and OpNo and 3+Ms

Is there some reason this wouldn't work as well?

Read a MBF as a MBT and corrected it during BR, but if it had been a MBT I'm quite sure I would have been correct, lol

Get pwned Smith