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11 Likes
Now why in the lawd’s name would the LSAT people do that?
BigJay20
Member
PT81.S2.Q22
Older tests actually tested logic. These new tests just rewards your ability to weed through a pile of sh!t and narrow it down to the least pile of sh!t. It's like the test writers are abusing the word "most weakens," "most support," etc...
It's like "hey, here are 5 horrible answers, choose the least horrible."
Now why would an answer about your twin justify as a weakner?
Is this some new strategy we're to expect?
Comments
I can't speak for that question specifically, but I know how you feel. I hadn't done a new test section until last night and it was a wakeup call. Not sure where to go from here, honestly...
The answer choices are the worst.
My sentiments on this test exactly 😂
@obloome omg I'm dying lol! I needed a good laugh this morning :-p
The newer tests are not as logic based as the older tests are without a doubt. In fact, I would say that close reading skills are more heavily rewarded than being very good at conditional logic. Though there is an aspect of the correct answer I don't like, ( which I will mention) but actually this question is testing a pattern of reasoning that has been seen before, including in older tests. The flaw here is what if what is self reported is different than what happened in reality? In other words what if self reports are not reliable data? For this question, we are being asked to weaken a study where people who watched themselves running on treadmills reported exercising one hour more on average than people who watched other people. The conclusion then is that watching a video of you exercising can motivate you to exercise more.
When I was thinking about how to weaken this conclusion my first thought was well what if they aren't being motivated to exercise more but are actually exercising more for some other reason? I then realized this objection didn't really matter and was a trap because it didn't really matter what was motivating them more the fact was they were in fact exercising more. This trap is well expressed in answer choice C which is a really commonly chosen wrong answer choice. At this point I felt like I missed something, glanced back at the stimulus and realized that the stimulus mentioned self reporting. So at this point my objection was: What if people were just saying they exercised more after seeing the videos of themselves but they really weren't?
I went hunting for an answer choice which expressed this objection and found answer choice D. I would have liked this answer choice a lot better if it had said, in another study participants who watched a video of themselves reading reported reading an hour more a day than people who watched a video of other people reading. I picked D on this first round but this was a question I came back to. My justification for why I still thought D expressed the flaw I looking for was that people were still seeing someone who looked just like them ( their twin) and then they self reported increasing a good behavior ( reading more) after observing the twin. This " twist" made this a difficult question.
If it makes you feel any better, this was the question that my tutor and I spent maybe 30 minutes trying to talk through a few weeks ago and even he was like "what the heck this is terrible"
I actually didn't think this one was that bad... and its not really a matter of content, rather understanding the mechanics of "harder" weaken questions.
How do we know when an AC weaken an argument? It makes the conclusion less likely to follow. It doesn't have to disprove it... it only has to move the needle ever so slightly and it weakens.
What makes a weakening AC the right AC? It weakens the most out of the 5 you are presented with. The right answer can be a horrible answer... it can barely weaken at all, and it still is absolutely, without question the right answer as long as it weakens the most.
For example in this specific question what if the answers instead went like this:
B. in isolation or in the context of the original answers might seem to strengthen, or at least not weaken to a degree that it is the correct answer. It is in fact actually wrong, and rightly so. But here in relationship to these new ACs it would be the correct answer. How is it weakening? By showing effect without cause. Very loosely... it is a horrible answer choice. But it's the weakens the most and is therefore correct.
So there are definitely problems with answer D... but it was purposely designed that way, and this is a go-to technique to inflate the difficulty of a question. The test writer is trying to make D unattractive... if they were watching us take the test and saw us recoil in disgust after reading D, they'd be like, "Boom. Got'em."
We have to remember that "dON't MakE youR oWn AsSumpTionS" isn't a hard rule, especially when there is a comparative element to your answer choice selection. Assumptions are allowable, we are just looking for the most reasonable one... note not A reasonable one, but the MOST reasonable one which includes something that may seem completely unreasonable.
TLDR focus on the task. What makes the right answer right? Not how good of a weakening answer it is in isolation.
It took me an hour lmaoo
The hero I didn't know I needed. Thank you
@BigJay20 honestly @canihazJD always is.
@BigJay20 @"giulia.pines"
Thanks but really its just that I went through all of this same stuff. I benefitted from other people in the same way, so just trying to do the same for others now.
Would it matter if the twin recognizes that he or she is looking at their twin and not himself?
@Na-leh2021 I think it would, because if I remember the question correctly the whole point was the study was looking at whether watching videos of yourself exercising would encourage you to exercise more. If it's your twin and you know it's your twin, presumably that rule would be broken. Let's say you were watching someone with a mask of your face exercising. Presumably that person looks somewhat like you, and is trying to convince you that they're you, but they're not you and you know it. The study's results would be similarly skewed, thus making this the right weakening answer.
But what if the twin doesn't recognize that he or she is watching himself but mistakenly thinks he is watching another individual? This whole twin thing is still confusing to me. Am I supposed to assume that a twin watching his other twin is supposed to be akin to him watching himself? Wtf?
Hey could someone get to my question? The whole twin nonsense is confusing af. If the twin recognizes that he or she is watching someone else (his twin), would that strengthen or weaken?
So, flaw analysis: watching yourself exercise on tape is correlated with reporting more exercise, and that somehow means that it's motivating you to exercise more. Classic phenomenon-hypothesis, aka correlation-causation. Conspicuously, there's no link provided between reported exercise and actual exercise (and therefore zero way to claim that specifically motivation is causing you to exercise more, since you can't even say you're exercising more). Answer choice D goes for this weakness and breaks this argument in half by pointing out that there's a significant confounding factor/alternative explanation - the possibility of misreporting. If you recognized this up front as phenomenon-hypothesis, this tracks exactly along what you'd do in other such circumstances - kill the argument by trashing the connection between the evidence provided and the conclusion drawn.
Realistically, I find that people tend to overcomplicate these things. I am 99.9% confident that the LSAC wants you to read 'identical twin' in (D) and make the reasonable assumption that at bare minimum it's possible that you'll think it's actually you. I don't really like relying on that, though, so moving on - even barring that, I think it's important to note here that there is actually no interpretation of this choice that leads to a different conclusion, because invalidating the data that your conclusion is based on is fatal no matter what interpretation you take (see below for further analysis). And finally, if you don't buy any of that, it doesn't change that the actual flaw of the argument is the self-reporting problem, and it's a pretty darn big problem - I don't know of very many arguments that can recover from a complete trashing of the lone data set being relied upon to draw the conclusion. Whatever misgivings you have about (D) are completely swamped by the fact that the other four answers don't even come close to addressing this flaw, nor do they address any other relevant issue. Long story short, the 'identical twin' component of (D) just serves as a red herring to cause us to froth at the mouth and completely ignore the overall implication of the choice.
So, I would contend that the OP's initial assertion that this is a 'pile of sh!t' is objectively and categorically incorrect. To the contrary, it is affirmatively the right answer for very articulable and clear reasons. And, you don't even have to weigh it against the other answer choices - it stands alone perfectly well on its own. This is undoubtedly a five-star question, but if you analyze it properly, at its core it really isn't any different than the hundreds of other corr/caus or phen/hyp questions you've probably seen at lower difficulties.
TL;DR: "identical twins" has nothing to do with it, it's the newly-introduced possibility of misreporting that drives the logic of this answer choice.
====
For the record:
If you think the person on the video is you, the argument is definitely broken. According to the argument, you should have been more motivated to exercise, but you weren't - you just overreported what you did. This raises the issue of whether your reported exercise matches up with your real exercise, which ruins the argument because you can't very well claim that you're more motivated to exercise when you're just making it up.
If you think the person isn't you, it still doesn't matter because you still wind up lying about how much you exercised, which ends up the same as above - you have no way to reconcile reported time with actual time. With the data thus scrambled by this confounding factor, you can't even establish any connection at all between what you report and what's actually happening, let alone assign a particular explanation to it.
This argument rests entirely and critically on the notion that reported time = actual time, so when you take that away the entire thing falls apart regardless of what else is happening. This answer choice could say "I saw an alien on a treadmill and proceeded to overreport my time" and it would have the exact same effect.
Thank you for responding.
So even if the identical twin happens to realize the individual he or she is watching is not himself but his (identical) sibling, this still weakens the argument because he is still over reporting deliberately? I thought the reason why the individual overreports is important to which is why I didn't like D, even if the other choices were worse. I thought it would be a problematic choice if the twin realizes he is watching someone else (even if the person looks very much like him) and thus overeports...because the initial assertion was that watching yourself is what caused the over reporting...
Does this answer choice merely weaken the argument or does it completely invalidate it? The assertion that watching yourself exercise actually motivates you to exercise more?
Just came here to say, reading "Now why in the lawd’s name would the LSAT people do that?" made me smile real big this morning. I haven't even gotten to the test you're talking about, but your title was the best I've seen yet. You sound like my people!
A statement along the lines of "the results are adjusted for overreporting" or something like that would certainly help fix the issue, so it's not irreparably harmed - but it would take a further statement like that to repair the damage.
"Merely" weakening an argument is the same thing as invalidating it, for the record. Validity is a binary - you either are or you aren't. If you can weaken the argument, then the argument isn't valid.
Yeah...I can see how watching your twin is probably the closest an individual can get to watching himself and I suppose that was where the LSAT was going with this answer choice, but if the twin were to recognize that the individual he is watching is somebody else, even if he over reports, does it still weaken because it gets at the flaw that reporting more exercise /= actually exercising more?
Would the answer choice be improved if it was made explicit that the twin really thought he was watching himself? Or is that what this choice was supposed to imply all along?
Yup lol; one of you. IYKYK
Connection between D and the stimulus: Watching someone who looks like you, on video, doing X, can lead to you over reporting that you did X.
Watching someone who looks like you versus actually watching yourself are two different things but because this is just a weakening question, this choice is ok right since watching a genetically identical copy to you is similar enough? The uncertainty is bugging me. I really hate this question.
You're not looking to disprove. The right answer only has to move the needle the most out of the 5 choices. Coincidentally I just went over this question with someone in a session... who is a twin. They automatically threw out D because their first reaction was that they knew you wouldn't mistake your own twin for yourself. A very extreme example of how our experiences and biases can work against us.
Yeah I hate it as well. There's a solid argument to be made about why it's such a weak answer. By sticking to LSAC rules, it means I don't have to assume all twins have met each other after birth or ask what if they've been separated. Prime example how we have to succumb rules that uphold the status quo. That question did not test my logic in anyway.