can i quickly ask if anyone happens to know off the top of their head, how is the rule-application/pseudo assumption question different from the previous general strengthening questions where they tell us that one way to strengthen the question is to state an assumption the question hinges on being true but doesn't explicitly state? Is this just asking for a more targeted version of that?

I redid the question twice and watched the explanation multiple times and for some reason this question is completely not clicking for me at all - I think the stimulus just doesn't make sense to me for some reason so if anyone can explain just one more time that would be great!!

for an ideal experiment, it has to be: large sample (to exclude minor variations in characteristics but still have an amount representative of the population being measured), random sample (to avoid sampling bias/group that has a trait appearing more often than what is in the population being represented), random assortment (which is making sure that the only difference between the two groups which are the control and experimental is that one is given the experimental condition and one isn't) - i think these are the major things to keep in mind but there might be some smaller elements that they mentioned in the last lesson

Hi! I don't know if this helps much, but there are lots of questions on the exam (at least that I've seen) that ask about the populations being sampled in a study and whether the population is big enough and/or representative enough to actually be able to draw a valid conclusion for causation. It might be that understanding how sampling is performed (to avoid errors) helps in understanding how a study presented in questions on the exam might have errors in sampling/experimentation that leads their results to be incorrect (which I assume might be helpful for Weaken questions). Hope this helped!

i'm just curious here, how is this different from mistaking correlation for causation?

like for example in the circumstance "you do some research and find that high altitude training worked wonders (or didn't) for the American team in the Tour de France bicycle race, then that's pretty good evidence for (or against) your hypothesis [that high altitude training works for or against American marathon runners]"

both feature American teams, so on one hand you could use this circumstance to attempt analogous causation but if its the correlation that both feature American teams for example, couldn't this also just be attributed to maybe a circumstance where American teams put more funding into sports (or something along these lines)? i'm confused how this doesn't mistake correlation for causation so any help here would be really appreciated!

this might be answered in a future lesson, but i'm just curious. are there situations where "some" means "all" like the previous lesson said, and are used qualifiers as a sufficient condition? i know the example here is "some people who can read are students in the class, some students in the class are people who can read," but if we were provided more context before or after that statement that would include "all" as the meaning of "some" students in the class (the meaning being "all students can read in the class"), are there cases that the LSAT expects you to use this as a sufficient condition?

i hope this question makes sense!

Hi! When I did the problem I thought the same, but to be honest it doesn't matter either way. With the way it was done in the video, you end up:

Conditional: If the policy of free speech is not given, governments responds with no rationality

/Pfs --> /RR

and

Contrapositive: if the government responds rationally, policy free speech is given

RR --> Pfs

if you do the problem without considering irrational as /RR (without rationality) but rather GRI (government responds irrationally) for example, you end up with

Conditional: if the policy of free speech is not given, then the government responds irrationally

/Pfs --> GRI

and

Contrapositive: if the government responds without irrationality (double negative, which means if the government responds rationally), then the policy of free speech is given

/GRI --> Pfs

so basically you can either have RR (responds rationally) or /RI (responds without irrationality, which means responds rationally) - as long as you keep consistent exactly what your variables/symbols mean you're golden!

Hope this helps!