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Culture War Roundup for the week of December 30, 2024

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Logic games involve some non verbal thinking. I miss the lsats.

I heard they abolished the logic games?

They did? That’s disappointing. It’s been a long time since I took the LSAT.

Someone on Reddit said it was because it was impossible/unreasonably difficult for blind candidates.

That sucks for them but you can’t let a small minority dictate to the vast majority

The Americans with Disabilities Act says you must.

Pretty sure it says you have to make reasonable accommodations.

"Reasonable accommodations" are whatever the activists say they are, and fighting about it in court will cost a lot of time and money. It makes far more sense just to bend the knee right away, because you're going to have to anyway.

Logic games were the best part of the LSAT, distinguishing the truly smart from those who merely had very good reading comprehension. This is just the general miasma of enshittification seeping into where ever it can get to.

Logic games were easy and consistently the section where the better candidates were most likely to score 100%. Much like the GMAT, it’s the verbal section that captured the tails of the IQ range, as befits a test to determine who would be a good lawyer, rather than a good accountant. It’s actually hard to design g-loaded non-verbal tests that don’t merely devolve into tests of mathematical knowledge, which isn’t really the same thing. Reading comprehension and the word substitution questions (ie verbal IQ tests) are smarts, and it’s increasingly clear that the most successful people are luckier on the verbal IQ front than on the spatial one.

Interesting, I've never taken the LSAT personally but distinctly recall Logic Games as being the section that prompted the most complaints from people, which made me think they were the hardest part on the real test because they caused so much uproar (most I've done is a bunch of practice questions online to get an idea of what the test is like and yes on those the games weren't particularly hard compared to the other stuff, but I attributed that to the sorts of questions I like rather than as commentary on their objective difficulty). You can absolutely make logic games very hard, back in the day some newspapers in their daily comics and puzzles section had logic games esque problems that could take up to hours to solve.

I'd heard that they were the hardest with no preparation (at least, to do quickly enough—since there's a 100% verifiable answer, it's easy to be accurate), but the most gameable—they were formulaic enough that if you learn the right techniques about how to organize your approach you could improve your score more easily than you could on any other section.

Yes, seasoned LSAT preparers who had been grinding practise tests since the age of 15 (and who were also very smart) almost always maxed them out - in fact on the forums they were seen as low hanging fruit on the road to a perfect 180 or near-perfect 179. The other sections are more g-loaded and therefore harder to improve at.

The test I took had a ridiculously hard logic game that I am convinced was an unscored test question. It wasn't hard in an absolute sense, I think most people with decent intelligence given infinite time could eventually solve all the questions. But it had way more rules than any of my practice questions. I think I got most of them right because I accurately recognized it as very time consuming and skipped the question section, then went back at the end. And I usually finish standardized tests with 50% of the time to spare, give or take 10%. So I basically spent 50% on this silly figurines on a bookshelf subset, and aced the logic section (but I still think I could have scored zero and gotten that score because I dont think that section counted).

Anyways, I agree that the logic games were a good part of the LSAT, much like analogies on the SAT. As is par for the course, modern DEI is bad for quality.