LR Crash Course Notes

NotMyName

I really enjoyed these sessions. Essentially, we answered questions live and rotated BRing them 1-on-1 with JY. We learned a whole lot about ways to approach question analysis and to gauge how well we really understand a question -- whether or not we answered it correctly.

My notes from these sessions are shared below. I see now that most of what I wrote for any given QT is actually applicable across the section, so I've gone ahead and reorganized my notes to reflect that. So if you are wondering why there are only few a lines under each QT but a whole lot under Best Practices, that's why : )

Best Practices

AC Strategy
-Narrowed down to 2 AC: circle key words and ID the main points to differentiate the two. Weigh them against one another again and skip/answer.
-Skipping is powerful because we usually interpret better on the second read. Don't even feel obligated to read the AC. Collect your coconuts.
-Don't latch onto AC. We may find ourselves spending 30+ seconds with a single AC just trying to make sense of it but that is stupid because it may not even make any sense to begin with. If you don't have a strong pre-phrase in your head, skim the AC ruthlessly. One of them may jump out as correct. Some may jump out as incorrect.
-Sometimes test writers place the correct answer for highly difficult questions as A or B hoping that when we read these AC, we are still processing the stimulus.

BR Strategy
-Get used to thinking in terms of Domains of Discourse. That will help you generally understand, ID flaws, and de-clutter your diagrams
-Match up corresponding ideas within analogies between the stimulus and AC. Think up additional analogies.
-Cookie Cutters are your friends. Study them so that you can identify them in whatever form they take. Test writers can dress them up in all sorts of creative ways. But if I gifted you a hockey stick, would it matter what color wrapping paper I used?
-There are also Cookie Cutter stimuli. Study these too.
-Sometimes the stimuli and the scenarios they describe or totally unrelatable. When this happens, think of your own real world substitute that matches and is easier to deal with.

Misc
-Once you start seeing the "Matrix" in LR, you won't know where you are until you attempt being 100% aggressive. Do confidence drills starting at 100% aggression (no diagramming, select what you think is right without looking at other AC, etc) and scale back accordingly. Calibrate you confidence level to your ability.

MSS
3 Major Cookie Cutter Types:
-(1) The stimulus is missing a main conclusion which the correct AC provides -- code name: "Extended MP Question"
-(2) The correct AC restates a premise (super premise) or pushes out an inference from 2 premises -- code name: "Mega MSS"
-(3) The correct AC summarizes the stimulus

SA
If you are reading carefully and your intuition is good, the stimulus probably won't flow smoothly. That is because you've detected the gap which we need to plug. Learn to enjoy that discomfort and focus on IDing exactly where that gap is.

Try to get comfortable visualizing aspects of the stimulus and AC in abstract form. If you can see ideas in terms of shapes or "things", that can simplify a purposefully convoluted and wordy stimulus. It can also help us decipher AC by IDing the structure of a given AC: "No [thing]" vs "Any [thing]. Think about what effect those conditional indicators have on their proceeding terms.

PSA
"Pseudo" is not usually that "pseudo" -- don't use the marginal wiggle room allowed on these questions to justify bad and incorrect AC.

PSA vs Principle: Understanding your task
-The QS can be easy to confuse, but the activities they require of us are completely different.
-Principle doesn't show up much, but if we understand PSA/SA, then it shouldn't trip us up because this questions all contain the same puzzle pieces it's just a matter of which one are provided and which we need to ID in the AC.
-To be honest, I still am having trouble differentiating these but I am not missing them either.

PR(F)
-Explicitly line up analogies in BR. Which ideas in the correct AC correspond with ideas from the stimulus? Do this for incorrect AC as well.
-In BR, alter wrong AC so that they would be correct. That will help strengthen your intuition for what was actually wrong. I think this exercise is also good for that thing we do where we read and AC and it sounds good about halfway through but then what we needed (and expected) to be said next wasn't -- and it's wrong because of it.
-Triage. Experiment which prioritizing AC. For example, reading the conclusions first to see if they match.

Flaw
-Learn and lean on the Cookie Cutter flaws. Not every question is Cookie Cutter, but if you know them, then when you face a misc. question, you'll be able quickly eliminate Cookie Cutter AC.
-AC will use tons of abstract language to confuse you and eat up time. Attempt to bring these AC down to the level of the stimulus. Replace the abstract language with corresponding ideas from the stimulus. This process will be much more rigorous in the BR but if you are choosing between 2 AC, deploy this method.
-Correct AC must (1) Be descriptively accurate and (2) Be the flaw
-"Fails to consider..." are almost always accurate because the avg stimulus is only like 4 sentences long. But is it the flaw?

NA
-An NA is an extremely powerful idea, though it looks and sounds weak. That is because without that assumption, the whole argument fall to bits.

Alex

You're the man @jkatz1488

Gracias!

Freddy_D

Very insightful. Thanks, fam

TheMikey

thanks for this!

JustDoIt

Thanks for sharing!

Zachary_P

Wow. Thanks for this!

AllezAllez21

Thanks so much for posting this.

Could you elaborate further on what you mean by "Domains of Discourse?"

Thanks!

NotMyName

@AllezAllez21 of course. I think of it as the overarching set of items we are working with, the domain of our focus, or simply scope. Consider the following "If you are an olympian sprinter you eat wheaties. But if you are an olympian swimmer, you smoke weed". The domain of discourse there is "olympians". So any translating into logic we do, we don't have to worry about adding "olympian" because it is superfluous.

Sprinter -> wheaties
Swimmer -> smoke weed

However, if we consider that same statement and added "Therefore, my cousin, who is the #1 ranked collegiate swimmer in the nation, smokes weed", that is outside of the domain of discourse and an invalid conclusion.

J.Y. Ping

@jkatz1488 Thanks for sharing your notes! I had a lot of fun with you guys.

@AllezAllez21 Domain of discourse is an idea that occurred to me after having made the CC so that's probably why it's not mentioned in the older CC lessons. I've since updated a number of quizzes where I try to explain how to use them. Look at questions 2, 3, and 5 on this quiz: https://7sage.com/lesson/quiz-complex-conditional-translations-1-w-answers/

Many of the questions in the following quizzes in the same set (Complex Conditional Translations) also talk about it:
https://7sage.com/lesson/quiz-complex-conditional-translations-2-w-answers/
https://7sage.com/lesson/quiz-complex-conditional-translations-3-w-answers/
https://7sage.com/lesson/quiz-complex-conditional-translations-4-w-answers/

kvbusbee

@jkatz1488 Your notes for this workshop were really thorough! I'll tack on a few more things that I picked up that really helped me in the workshop:

Timing & Question Difficulty:
1) The difficulty of questions in an LR section is similar to a bell curve; some of the hardest questions are actually in the teen numbers, and there are some easier questions sprinkled in the 20's. J.Y. said that he sometimes even skips whole pages in the middle of the LR section where these questions are if he doesn't fully grasp the stimulus the first time through, and he comes back to these questions once he's finished the rest.

I found this information valuable because I tend to spend too much on the middle of the section where these hard questions are, and then I run out of time before I can answer some of the freebies at the end.

2) I'll echo the above comments on practicing being aggressive with your questions and then scaling it back if you find your self missing too many questions. Since we covered this, the past couple days I've practiced answering questions with 100% aggression, and I'm getting the easy questions right MUCH more quickly by not wasting time reading the wrong answer choices, and I have more time in the problem sets on the harder questions.

PSA:
One tip that seemed to help me on PSA questions in the work shop is that you should "shove" AC's back up into the stimulus and see if it strengthens the conclusion. 'I think this helped me get more right in the PSA's we drilled. However, I'm also still have trouble recognizing PSA question stems sometimes.

Flaw:
The idea of flaws being "cookie cutter" really makes these questions so much easier. For example, we all know what a triangle looks like. We've seen a million of them over our lifetimes and we can see them a mile a way. We can also see that a square is clearly not a triangle. Drilling what the common flaw types are, how they look in the stimulus, and how they look as an answer choice, has really helped me say, "I know the flaw in this question is circular reasoning (a triangle). This answer choice says it's percentage vs. numbers (square), which doesn't look anything like circular reasoning (triangle).
J.Y. probably did a much better job of explaining this, but basically, most flaws are very cookie cutter and much easier to recognize when you drill them.

P.S. The workshop was awesome, and if J.Y. does more I encourage everyone to apply!

partyondudes

Thanks @jkatz1488 and @kvbusbee for sharing your notes! It's helpful to be reminded that there's a time for focusing on deep, drawn out thinking (BR) and a time for, as my grandma says, "going for the jugular" and relying on the intuition developed during BR to collect those coconuts!

This seems to align with @"Jonathan Wang"'s comments in his "Why Formal Logic?" post--and I'm paraphrasing here--that while it's good to diagram things out when you're learning, eventually you need to pull back and transfer all of the stuff on paper into your intuition.

dcdcdcdcdc

Wow, excellent stuff here. Thanks for sharing. In the midst of confidence drills now and it's exhilarating.

AllezAllez21

@jkatz1488 and JY, thanks for the explanations. I see how that is important to keep in mind.

LeslieKnopeIsMySpiritAnimal

This is great, you guys! Thank you!

nishanik15

thank you so much to everyone posting their notes from workshop!