@PowerUp_Tutoring that's right. I was pointing out that, in the classical rhetorical tradition, B is specifically the strongest counter to a claim of bias. That's what made it an interesting question to me.

@PowerUp_Tutoring this is a really good question. It's going to depend on the answer choice set, but that seems like a very strong choice to me. Absent any textual information showing a difference between the towns, that's an excellent counter to the proposed alternate cause.

@PowerUp_Tutoring why thank you!

@PowerUp_Tutoring yes, this is my (former) field. In any case there is error, or difference between a measurement (the thing you detect) and an estimand (the thing you want to know). Objectivity is not defined by the absence of error, or even of all bias necessarily (bias is the specific portion of error that is systematic rather than random). It is a characteristic of the measurement or report of that measurement. An interested party reporting a measurement is definitionally not objective. There may be some people that use objective to mean the absence of systematic error. That usage is nonstandard, not consistent with the history of the term, and I would call it incorrect.

Just to add in an example that might clarify. When we develop a subjective measure, say of patient self report, we do various things to validate it. Regardless of what we do, no reduction of error converts it to an objective measure. It is definitionally not objective, regardless of the error it contains. Similarly, industry funded studies have various mechanisms they can use to reduce bias at various levels. Regardless of what is done to reduce bias, regardless of the presence of error in a specific instance of an industry funded study, it does not change the characteristic (industry funding) that makes it not objective.

@StevenJShi1011 I agree. That's a good example of a clean point of attachment between D and the stimulus that doesn't exist for E.

The lightbulb explanation here is wrong. The passage does not state that we don't know whether a virus can carry new DNA into reproductive cells. The passage states that we don't know whether Steele's hypothesis could happen. Steele's hypothesis involves (the speculative part) viruses picking up DNA from immune cells, and then (the not speculative part) carrying new DNA into reproductive cells. It's entirely possible that the LSAT writers also misread the passage they adapted.

On the logic: passage describes reverse transcription of RNA back to DNA, and then is skeptical thus "could this new DNA then be carried to the reproductive genes, replace the original DNA there, and so be passed on to an organism's offspring?" The skepticism is textually at the chain of events that initiates at "carried to". The passage author is certainly aware (and I thought it was common knowledge) that viruses produce germ line mutations. It's a common form of genetic change that produces the genetic variation evolution acts on, and has been well described in high school biology for decades. As the passage describes, the Lamarkian problem is about whether changes that occur elsewhere (not the germline) in the organism can go from that change to the germline.

On the science: the idea that changes might occur in the germline for other reasons is trivial, and this should be common knowledge. You cannot have evolution without changes in germline genes. There are several well described high school level causes of those changes. Viruses are one of those. Getting genetic differences produced by an adaptive change in the somatic genome TO the germline, that's the challenge, and that is what is described in B. If a gene moves from cells in one location (bone marrow, thymus) to another (nervous system), that resolves the highly speculative element of Steele's hypothesis. It would, of course, be more powerful to show them in the germ line, but it's certainly more powerful to show that, without any effort by scientists at all, changes in the genome in one body compartment show up in another, then to say that scientists can introduce a virus into a specific compartment and cause changes in the genome in that compartment. You might as well say an answer that "genes exist and can be changed" strengthens the argument.

Answer choice A wins due to a bad answer set, but it is not descriptively accurate. The stimulus nowhere states that person constructs an ordered dream narrative. They construct a dream narrative that is both coherent and ingenious. The only way you can reach ordered is if you think that coherent entails ordered (it doesn't) or if you think that by virtue of being a dream narrative, it is ordered. Further, the something itself actually IS ordered (the answer choices and the arbitrary rule they are generated by is ordered), so if we had reason to believe the constructed narrative was ordered (we don't), the order itself wouldn't be imbued by the teller, it would flow from the arbitrary rule, as with certain restrictive techniques for generating art.

@DaltonBarton yes, the written explanation is categorically wrong. It is absolutely relevant. THe question is asking which is a better indicator of the place where a beverage originated, an answer choice that establishes a threshold of length of time for one of the premise variables? Or an answer choice that shows a continuous correlation between length of time and one of the premise variables. It's the latter. To say the first one is irrelevant misses the point of the question.

I read this as attacking a subconclusion, not a premise, which is not an infrequent pattern in difficult weakeners.

MC: TAs shoudln't be considered university employees

SC: the sole purpose of having TAs perform services is for them (implicit, to benefit the TAs, not to benefit the university) to fund their education

Premises supporting the SC: counterfactuals that establish it is A purpose, but there's a gap as to whether there might be another purpose

The support from the counterfactuals to the subconclusion is cleanly attacked by an answer choice that shows an economic reason for the university

First, this is my favorite fallacy: effective -> use, and it gets at the difference between fact and mental states. Second, as an EXCEPT question, it is quite useful to understand what the bare minimum LSAT writers credit for certain classes of questions. This is NA EXCEPT. So the credited answer is NOT a NA for the argument, and every other answer IS an NA for the argument. Answer choice (C) is clearly the correct answer, but examining this to learn more about the boundaries of a necessary assumption remains useful. If we think of necessary assumptions strictly as deductively necessary, two of the necessary assumptions in this answer set fail.

There are some quantifier shifts in the argument, but lets assume the most charitable read, which is that the argument proceeds by building, as a subconclusion, the conditional: Effective(remedy) -> Almost Everyone Would Use(remedy), and then denying the necessary to conclude the sufficient is false.

Answer choice A and D clearly destroy this argument. Availability and awareness are required for use but not required for effectiveness.

Answer choice B and E weaken the argument, but as formulated, are not deductively required. The quantifiers "many" and "almost all" are not forced to intersect. Lets walk through this with E. Negating E gives us, there is at least ONE effective cold remedy that is available and preferable to many people. Is that inconsistent with almost everyone using the mixture? No. Lets set the domain to US adolescents and adults, people with the ability to make decisions about what over the counter cold remedy they will use. That's 280-290 million people. Say 4 million prefer some rival also effective remedy. That is consistent with 276-286 million using the mixture, 99% of the domain. Thus, E is not necessary for the argument. It surely weakens the argument, and is an important axis on which the fallacy demonstrates the difference between effectiveness and use, but it is not an assumption required by the argument.

So, coming back to our reason for examining this question, in an EXCEPT question, we can see that the bare minimum for what the LSAT credits as "an assumption required by [an argument]", is not deductively necessary.

Love that you came back with the question example. I'm beginning to think one of the functions of standardized legal admissions testing was to shift the philosophy portion formerly a large part of legal education on to undergraduate education. So many little interesting philosophical issues end up finding their way into the test somewhere!

This is a good example of a question where you have to remind yourself that the instructions tell you to assume the answer choice is true, even if it contradicts a premise. Answer choice C is almost certainly not true. I had to stop myself and say, yes, well, it's not true, but you have to pretend it's true and answer based on that. mathematically (1) the number of films produced is irrelevant and (2) even if there are hundreds of different plot archetypes, the likelihood of someone seeing several new movies each year seeing two movies with the same general plot structure is quite high. This is, in the best case scenario, the birthday paradox with a little twist (a group of 23 people is more likely than not to have two people with the same birthday).

Ping's explanation of B in both the video and the text (as well as the lightbulb explanation of the answer choice) misses the term shift between "high tax on income" and "high tax on HIGH income" in the conclusion. The conclusion is about the "highest tax bracket". The premise is about high tax in general. B thus attacks the gap between premise and conclusion by saying, specifically, making a great deal of money (which we can infer relates to being specifically in the HIGHEST tax bracket) is an insignificant factor in driving technological innovation.

Just a note for JY Ping Kevin Lin etc: this is tagged sampling. It's not a sampling question. There is no information about how the sample is drawn and the answer doesn't depend on how the sample is drawn. It just says "researches asked office workers..." We have no information on which office workers were asked, which would be sampling. It's a measurement question, specifically recall bias, about retrospective self report as a measure (vs prospective).

This is a good example of what kind of inference is reasonable and what kind is not.

The credited answer, B, requires an inference that reading is a leisure activity, both now and a century ago. If you do not assume reading is a leisure activity, and assume, instead, it might be done as part of professional, home, or other societal obligations, B does not weaken. But, it is reasonable to assume we're talking about leisure reading because that is what the premise of the argument relates to. The argument doesn't make any sense if the scope includes obligatory reading.

Compare, A, which could weaken with an inference, but that inference is NOT reasonable. You could infer that if the literary quality of books available to read was low, this would produce some effect that would decrease the amount the typical person would read, and despite there being fewer diversions, reading would still be low on the list of choices. This requires assuming LITERARY quality has a significant impact on the choices of a typical person, rather than other qualities.

Fascinating question. As per usual SWE EXCEPT questions require inference, often substantial inference. The task is to identify the answer choice with the inference that is least reasonable.

The argument structure is superb acting, therefore audience enjoy, with examples in support of the subconclusion that there is superb acting. One can attack the support of the examples for the subconclusion, or the support of the subconclusion for the main conclusion (audiences will enjoy) and still attack the argument

I'm going to start with E, because i think it's the most interesting answer choice here. EXCEPT questions are great, as they tell you not just what is, e.g., the best weakener. Here you know that the LSAT understands every single answer other than D to be weakeners.

E. The claim in E is structurally an ad hominem argument. It is a claim about the source, and does not examine the source's statement on its merits. Further, it requires some inference to go from audiences find critics unreliable to therefore critics ability to predict audiences enjoyment is suspect. It's a reasonable inference, which I think goes through thinking about what people mean when they say they don't trust critics. They mean they don't trust their global recommendation. But what makes this structurally ad hominem attack valid such that it can be credited as a weakener here? It's because the content of the claim is about the internal state of the audience. It's similar to person A making a claim about person B's intentions. Person B can, per the LSAT, refute that simply by saying person A isn't a reliable judge of their intentions.

A. Inferential in that, to trigger, we need to assume the play is a tragedy. That's reasonable the play is about a sad thing, and the emotions attached to this are guilt and despair. SO if A is true, the conclusion is weakened, but I would note this doesn't clearly weaken the support structure. It's off axis. We're supplying an alternate premise that points to a different conclusion, which in "most weakens" is usually a trap. In EXCEPT questions, it's allowed

B. Inferential in that it says this play will be similar to the other plays. Reasonable. Also, useful to note, this is also off axis. We're being supplied with an alternate premise that provides a reason for why the conclusion is wrong, not directly related to the support structure of the argument.

C. Also inferential. We're being given other authorities opinions on one element of the play, and are asking whether, despite Ziegler being convincing, they are unexciting. This weakens on axis, but is inferential in that it takes another authorities view as sufficient to impact the conclusion about audience enjoyment. I think this one is reasonable, but a bit more of a stretch than A, for example.

D. Credited answer. Importantly, it also weakens through an inferential chain. If we infer the audience is familiar with Warner's other works, and that they find originality to be an important element of enjoyment, a plot that is similar may decrease their enjoyment. This requires substantial steps without clear textual basis in the stimulus. It weakens, but only on a subset of audiences, given a preference not stated. I think it's reasonable to assume that some audience members may have seen other works, and some audience members will have their enjoyment reduced by a less original plot (consider the refrain from disappointed theatre goers, "the plot was derivative"), but the conclusion is general "audiences will enjoy".

This is a lovely little question. It's unfortunate that it is made so easy given the answer set. The question is asking if you know how to discriminate between a causal chain and a conditional chain, and if you know what moves are licensed by both. This is a causal chain. You cannot contrapose a causal chain and you can't execute a modus tolens argument (deny the necessary, conclude deny the sufficient) on a causal chain. The fundamental reason for these restrictions on causal inference is time. Exposures must precede outcomes (cause must precede effect). Conditionals are claims about truth values in the world. If a necessary condition is false, the sufficient condition is false. Period. There is no allowance for, well, maybe if we wait a little bit that relationship will attain. If it doesn't, the conditional is false. This is the first question I've seen that so cleanly lays out the difference.

@J.Y.Ping respectfully, that is not really responsive to my concern. My concern is not that seeing your AI product is going to harm me specifically, but that without an atypical measurement strategy, your AI product is going to harm 7sage. Management attention is finite. AI products are likely to generate compelling business metrics that are easy to measure (engagement and satisfaction), and, in my opinion, likely to produce harms on the 7sage system in general, which are harder to measure (reduced teaching effectiveness and reduced objective quality in total content, when compared to the counterfactual without an AI product). It's your company, of course you can do what you want, but I think your commitment to quality created a uniquely powerful education product. I've made a specific suggestion about how to protect that despite the pull of AI in edTech.

To me, LSAT studying has two goals: 1. achieving a desired score, and 2. sharpening my reasoning skills. I subscribe to 7sage because the content is high quality and is more likely to serve my goals than the alternatives. I realize the drive to release an AI product is very difficult to resist, especially for a company that sees creating new products as one of its fundamental roles, but I am still disappointed to see it. In my experience, LLMs universally degrade quality relative to human work product. Empirically, they can produce higher preference scores in some contexts, but that is not quality. It's related to sycophancy. I think this will be exciting for a number of people and might even lead to more customer satisfaction, but I do not expect it to produce a measurable benefit for the primary goals of LSAT studying, and it may produce a harm. I expect the sort of metrics you will use to evaluate this product are engagement and satisfaction, in addition to net cost. Please think carefully about how to test the effect of this tool on the quality of the content you produce and the effectiveness of your product on student achievement as well.

@icedshakenespresso text can have attitude. See, e.g., RC questions, which ask you to infer attitude from text. It is entirely appropriate to share, in a forum about a new product, the attitudinal qualities of text output from that product.

@icedshakenespresso No LLM has "scored a 180 on the LSAT." It has scored a 180 on an exam that includes question sets present in its training data, by virtue of being on the open internet. LSAC has not offered any AI company a live look at question sets not published.

@antitrust_fan I don't want to get in a flame war, but you're drawing an unwarranted conclusion about what LLM AIs can do well. They do well on benchmarks that test on exam material that is present in their training set (in other words, they are good at knowing the answer if they already have that answer in their training set). This is not a useful measure of being able to produce output that properly analyzes, e.g., the conditional logic. It's polluted with the answer choices and it's polluted with the large volume of low quality analysis

Great set theory question: P1 Many A are B (B is a subset of A), P2 claim C, some characteristic about B, Therefore, C is relevant to another subset of A. Weaken this by attacking the difference between the subset with the characteristic and the subset in the conclusion (here, diseases that are genetically based and diseases in common with cats)

Great example of reasoning about motive, modeled as causal reasoning. Randy claims a motive as cause for a phenomenon (only one source of news, mayor gets another source, the cause/motive is major interested in diversity of news sources). Marion attacks the cause/motive, posits the sole cause/motive of mayor's behavior is mayor's interest in AZCO (political supporter). The credited answer as "logically strongest counter" to the claim of bias as a sole motive/cause is the the same behavior occurring contra interest. As causal reasoning, this would be less strong because the effect is a different, analogous phenomenon (from a causal reasoning perspective, Randy and Marion are reasoning about the cause of a specific phenomenon, the mayor advocating for AZCO. Answer B gives an analogous phenomenon, the mayor advocating for, call it BZCO). As reasoning about motives, answer B is the classical rhetorical counter to a claim of bias, and that makes it strong examining it directly, without comparison to the answer choice set. It should be what you hunt for. It is also the strongest, relative to the answer set.

This is a good question for understanding what the LSAT means by bias.