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PaperclipPerfector  19d ago (text post)   35134 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of February 3, 2025

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Someone recently showed me some LSAT practice questions and I cannot get over how amazing of a test it is. If you're like I was and not familiar with the style, I encourage you to look some up---either some quick internet search or do some short test-prep site quiz like this.

I have never before seen something that I more wished the general population was better at. Can you imagine a world in where significantly more people had the reading comprehension and understanding of arguments to answer these accurately? It feels like 90% of what's annoying about politics and political discussion would just disappear---all the obnoxious bad-faith argumentative games wouldn't work anymore because everyone would see through them, we'll actually be able to have national discussions about substance instead of the nonsense that happens now, etc. Why is studying LSAT-style questions not part of the mandatory school curriculum? Wouldn't pushing for this be one of the best ways to "raise the sanity waterline"?

Now for the controversial point---I've also never been so tempted by the idea of a poll test. I know the two main reasons why disenfranchising a large group is bad: first, democracy isn't about making the best decision, but about making sure that every group feels heard by the system so that they don't violently rebel when it decides against them. Second, it's important to give the rulers of a country incentives to keep everyone happy so that institutions stay inclusive for all the standard Why Nations Fail reasons. However, I never thought I would see a test that so perfectly measures the skills needed to accurately judge political arguments! Maybe if we're in the world where practicing the questions is part of everyone's years of mandatory schooling and the LSAT-score threshold is low enough that almost anyone could cross it if they took that part of school seriously?

As much as I love your comment, please consider that the vast majority of current legislators, as well as a disproportionate amount of political commentators have law degrees or legal backgrounds - often elite ones - and all it's got us is ever-more sophisticated rounds of "obnoxious bad-faith argumentative games."

Isn't this because most of the rhetoric you hear from politicians is targeted at the general public? They're specifically playing for an audience without the expertise to see through the obnoxious, bad-faith games. I hope first, that they don't do the same when behind closed doors and second, that if the public got better at whatever the LSAT tests, their strategies for communicating with the public would also change.

Well, rhetoric goes a lot of different directions for a lot of different reasons, but no, a lot of it is aimed at the most dedicated and smartest people out there, because that's where your activist hours and donor dollars come from. Moreover, there is evidence to show that smarter people aren't necessarily better at seeing through bullshit, but instead are just better at constructing and adapting bullshit to defend their own aesthetic and personal preferences and pre-existing intuitions.

A few weeks ago, people were posting questions from the LSAT on Twitter which they described as especially difficult. Invariably, I found them all to be really easy. This seems to fit with something I've struggled to understand which is why do most people seem cognitively normal most of the time, but as soon as anything becomes just a little abstract, they seem utterly incapable of understanding it? It doesn't usually come up, but if you try to teach someone really basic math or if you try to point out a logical error in an argument, they suddenly lose the ability to understand the most basic and obvious things, most of which shouldn't even need to be explained. They should be intuitive. I guess basic reading comprehension and using logic just happen to be rare abilities, even among people who seem to be able to do other things that seem very cognitively demanding.

I do think that there should be some restrictions on the right to vote based on being able to get say a 170 on the LSAT because I see so many insane opinions being expressed which if acted on would lead to horrible consequences, and they're usually rooted in people not having an understanding of something really basic like how supply and demand work. I don't think education is a solution to this because it's not just that they've never studied economics. I don't think they are even capable of understanding how supply and demand work.

I have a lot of experience trying to teach people math and arguing with people over abstract ideas. There are a lot of simple logical truths which are intuitive to an intelligent person that you cannot get the average person to understand even after hours of explaining to them. Most people are just not capable of rational thought.

This seems to fit with something I've struggled to understand which is why do most people seem cognitively normal most of the time, but as soon as anything becomes just a little abstract, they seem utterly incapable of understanding it?

They're cognitively normal, just on the left side of the bell curve. Go a little further and you find people who might be able to work with things, but cannot understand a drawing or a map.

Managed to do the questions thanks to @phailyoor's helpful copypasta below and the answer key someone posted still further. I got a 5/5 in the end, though the third one seemed quite ambiguous (insofar as none of the answers were a perfect fit, and several were almost the same level of imperfect).

Perhaps curiously, of all the tests I've encountered, I found the questions pretty similar to the reading comprehension section of the JLPT (obviously only useful for a small part of the audience here, but e.g. questions 8-12 of the N1 sample). They really seem to like doing a particular format where you are given a half-page essay by some cultural figure on some random topic (like crow intelligence, or whether historiography is too focussed on flashy happenings rather than the effort that went into preventing any such happenings) and then have to pick out one of four sentences that is most representative of the core premise or argument. Given that the JLPT seems to be required for foreigners to be employed by many Japanese companies, it seems notable that they would essentially sneak in a verbal intelligence filter on immigrants in this way.

I also got 5/5 but #1 had me nervous. It was so straightforward that I felt like there had to be some sort of trick I was missing.

In regards to #3, it’s marked as “logical reasoning” but I think it’s more of a “common sense” question. They want you to predict the most likely response that a reasonable person would give to this irl.

5/5! I had a similar fear of "this seems too easy I must be missing something" for some of these.

I do think for #3, C is actually the most logical answer, putting common sense aside. It's the most direct flaw with the union member's argument.

The LSAT is the most g-loaded of all major US tests (including the regular SAT, the GMAT, the GRE etc). It is as close to a raw verbal IQ test as it is realistically possible to create under the circumstances. It can’t really be taught; you can do a few practices and move up a few points (and sure, if you’re extremely smart that might be from 175 to 179 or 180) due to familiarity but that’s it.

For reference, I'd put myself below the median poster in the SSC/Culture War Threat diaspora, and I got a 171 on the LSAT first try when I was applying to law schools back in 2014.

It's worth noting that 175 is already very high. It's higher than the average LSAT at any of the country's top law schools.

https://www.juriseducation.com/blog/lsat-scores-for-law-school

Sure but a lot of those candidates (DEI aside) are ultra impressive in other ways, have perfect GPAs, went to HYPS for undergrad etc. If you’re a random nobody with an average life and want to get into Harvard or Yale law you need to be more like 179/180.

I have never before seen something that I more wished the general population was better at. Can you imagine a world in where significantly more people had the reading comprehension and understanding of arguments to answer these accurately? It feels like 90% of what's annoying about politics and political discussion would just disappear---all the obnoxious bad-faith argumentative games wouldn't work anymore because everyone would see through them, we'll actually be able to have national discussions about substance instead of the nonsense that happens now, etc. Why is studying LSAT-style questions not part of the mandatory school curriculum? Wouldn't pushing for this be one of the best ways to "raise the sanity waterline"?

I mean, this is literally just "wouldn't the world be a better place if the entire population had much higher verbal intelligence?" Which, yes, of course it would be great (and the same goes for quantitative reasoning, too), but schools are completely useless for this.

At best, they teach elementary skills like reading and writing and sort the people who were born with higher verbal intelligence from the people who were born with lower verbal intelligence by giving them well-designed tests and handing them the appropriate credentials.

Increasingly, they fail to even do this; teachers embrace stupid fads like whole language instead of using proven methods like phonics and run into the usual political problems with honestly assessing students' abilities. So you end up with a situation where 90% of adults graduate high school but only 80% of adults can read, making the high school diploma a useless signal.

MOAR EDUCASHUN is not the answer. There is no answer. IQ is genetic.

There is no answer. IQ is genetic.

This implies some answers.

No, because at a certain point you wind up turning everyone into us ashkenazi and generating crippling neuroticism along with the increased IQ.

I don't think that intelligence is correlated with mental illness in white people. Jews are just neurotic.

Ashkenazi Jews - the stereotypically neurotic ones - are also white. Especially so in the Larry David/Woody Allen-esque liberal NYC progressive-assimilated jew type. Those sorts of jews overwhelmingly are in or the product of mixed marriages.

Intelligence is totally correlated with mental illness in white people- why do you think 95 IQ rednecks just do things while elite human capital, uh, don't.

Lots of Ashkenazi lack that particular trait (Richard Feynman and Larry Ellison come immediately to mind). It is probably separable with ordinary breeding (hello alien overlords), let alone genetic engineering.

Now I'm imagining a scenario where you first breed Ashkenazi wordcels with East Asian shape rotators to create the perfect mind, then mate the hybrids to White jocks in order to add the perfect body. The result would be an elite breed of super-genius athletes we should call Spartans.

I mean, all of this is percentages and magnitudes across large populations, so of course there are going to be outliers of all kinds.

Okay, fine; there is no answer that involves making the current population smarter. If you want to help future generations, you can do eugenics or genetic engineering. And if you don't want to make life worse for your current population you can avoid importing low-IQ foreigners and giving them voting power.

(If this was a hundred years ago I would also mention iodine deficiency and lead poisoning, but we already fixed those.)

Significantly Enhancing Adult Intelligence With Gene Editing May Be Possible.

Okay, fine; there is no answer that involves making the current population smarter.

I still think that that is a bit premature. It is far from certain that we will not find a way to increase g post-birth.

(Whenever I read a story with the plot 'character tries to overcome natural limitation, first attempt fails or has very bad effect, no further attempt is shown' (e. g. Flowers for Algernon, Hawthorne's Dr. Heidegger's Experiment), my interpretation isn't 'one should resign oneself to what Nature wants us to suffer' so much as 'they should have tried again, and kept trying until they or someone else figured out how to make it work.' (cf. Edison, "I didn't fail, I discovered 10,000 ways not to make a light bulb!")

However, I never thought I would see a test that so perfectly measures the skills needed to accurately judge political arguments!

Very few of the political matters that most divide people resemble the sorts of questions found in the LSAT. Rather, they're issues of vibes, values and group-preferences. Using examples from the US, I don't see a large number of people changing their views on BLM, the ethics of abortion, or whether the US needs tougher border security based on having been exposed to formal logic and trained to recognise logical fallacies.

But it might, at least, make the arguments from each side less aggravating....

The "short test-prep site quiz" gates me with a "Press and hold to prove you are not a bot" landing page, which I can't pass (tried everything from holding inhumanely still to wiggling around a bit). Could you repost the questions here?

copypasta for your convenience: Directions: The questions in this section are based on the reasoning contained in brief statements or passages. For some questions, more than one of the choices could conceivably answer the question. However, you are to choose the best answer; that is, the response that most accurately and completely answers the question. You should not make assumptions that are by commonsense standards implausible, superfluous, or incompatible with the passage.

  1. When teaching art students about the use of color, teachers should use colored paper rather than paint in their demonstrations. Colored paper is preferable because it readily permits a repeated use of exactly the same color in different compositions, which allows for a precise comparison of that color’s impact in varying contexts. With paint, however, it is difficult to mix exactly the same color twice, and the varying textures of the applied paint can interfere with the pure effect of the color itself.

Which one of the following is an assumption required by the argument?

A. Two pieces of paper of exactly the same color will have the same effect in a given context, even if they are of different textures.

B. A slight difference in the color of two pieces of paper is more difficult to notice than a similar difference in the color of two samples of paint.

C. Changing light conditions have less of an effect on the apparent color of a piece of paper than on the apparent color of a sample of paint.

D. Observing the impacts of colors across varying contexts helps students to learn about the use of color.

E. It is important that art students understand how the effects of using colored paper in various compositions differ from those of using paint in those compositions.

lsac650420

  1. Copyright was originally the grant of a temporary government-supported monopoly on copying a work. Its sole purpose was to encourage the circulation of ideas by giving authors the opportunity to derive a reasonable financial reward from their works. However, copyright sometimes goes beyond its original purpose since sometimes _______.

The conclusion of the argument is most strongly supported if which one of the following completes the passage?

A. publication of copyrighted works is not the only way to circulate ideas

B. authors are willing to circulate their works even without any financial reward

C. authors are unable to find a publisher for their copyrighted work

D. there is no practical way to enforce copyrights

E. copyrights hold for many years after an author’s death

lsac650415

  1. Union member: Some members of our labor union are calling for an immediate strike. But a strike would cut into our strike fund and would in addition lead to a steep fine, causing us to suffer a major financial loss. Therefore, we must not strike now.

The union member’s argument is most vulnerable to criticism on the grounds that it

A. fails to consider that a strike might cause the union to suffer a financial loss even if no fine were imposed

B. fails to define adequately what constitutes a major financial loss

C. fails to consider that the benefits to be gained from a strike might outweigh the costs

D. takes for granted that the most important factor in the labor union’s bargaining position is the union’s financial strength

E. fails to establish that there will be a better opportunity to strike at a later time

lsac650408

  1. In trying to reduce the amount of fat in their diet, on average people have decreased their consumption of red meat by one-half in the last two decades. However, on average those who have reduced their consumption of red meat actually consume substantially more fat than those who have not.

Which one of the following, if true, most helps to resolve the apparent discrepancy described above?

A. Many more people have reduced their consumption of red meat over the last two decades than have not.

B. Higher prices over the last two decades have done as much to decrease the consumption of red meat as health concerns have.

C. People who reduce their consumption of red meat tend to consume as much of other foods that are high in fat as do those who have not reduced their consumption of red meat.

D. People who reduce their consumption of red meat tend to replace it with cheese and baked goods, which are richer in fat than red meat.

E. Studies have shown that red meat contains slightly less fat than previously thought.

lsac650410

  1. Watching music videos from the 1970s would give the viewer the impression that the music of the time was dominated by synthesizer pop and punk rock. But this would be a misleading impression. Because music videos were a new art form at the time, they attracted primarily cutting-edge musicians.

Which one of the following arguments is most similar in its reasoning to that of the argument above?

A. Our view of pre-printing-press literature can never be accurate, because the surviving works of ancient authors are those that were deemed by copyists most likely to be of interest to future readers.

B. Our memory of 1960s TV shows could hardly be improved, because so many of the television programs of the era are still rerun today.

C. Future generations’ understanding of today’s publishing trends will be distorted if they judge by works published in CD-ROM format, since it is primarily publishers interested in computer games that are using CD-ROM.

D. Our understanding of silent films is incomplete, because few filmmakers of the time realized that the film stock they were using would disintegrate over time.

E. Our notion of fashion trends will probably be accurate if we rely on TV fashion programs, despite the fact that these programs deliberately select the most outrageous outfits in order to get the viewers’ attention.

lsac650417

Thanks!

I also failed at demonstrating my humanity. I would appreciate knowing what's expected, in case the press-and-hold becomes more in use.

It feels like 90% of what's annoying about politics and political discussion would just disappear---all the obnoxious bad-faith argumentative games wouldn't work anymore because everyone would see through them, we'll actually be able to have national discussions about substance instead of the nonsense that happens now, etc.

Is this your impression of how legal battles play out? My impression is that everyone does see through the obnoxious bad-faith argumentative games but elects to play them anyway and award points to the person that most successfully weaponizes them to the preferred ends.

How would you even go about teaching this sort of reasoning?

Seek out a movie called the Paper Chase if you haven't already.

There are entire books on how to study for the LSAT. I presume that would be a place to start, though it might be good to hear from someone who actually took the test.

One of the most valuable courses I took in college was formal logic. I took two of these classes in community college before transferring to a university and to this day remain the most impactful. Basically Modus Tollens and such.

It fundamentally transformed the way I think more than anything, up until getting into software engineering, which I view as an extension of formal logic.

It would be so great if more people had exposure to such topics. But I don't have any faith that it would make a difference. Most of the people in my classes lamented it, viewed it as incredibly boring and hard, and did the absolute bare minimum to not fail the class.

I fully support the idea of a poll test. Too many of our countrymen are just downright idiots. They should not have a say in what we do as a nation.

It would be so great if more people had exposure to such topics. But I don't have any faith that it would make a difference. Most of the people in my classes lamented it, viewed it as incredibly boring and hard, and did the absolute bare minimum to not fail the class.

And here I'm reminded of Andrea Nye's Words of Power: A Feminist Reading of the History of Logic, written after that sort of bad experience with that sort of logic course, and arguing that "logic" as a whole is a tool of patriarchy, privileging the male way of reasoning over alternative, female ways of thinking. (Noretta Koertge's paper here discusses the book and Nye's arguments in it starting on page 3.)

To agree to some extent with @Glassnoser, how well does teaching logic work? In my experience, you usually don't need anything particularly complex, and it's always been very intuitive to me, such that there hasn't really been a need to precisely identify logical errors or forms. But I get, I guess, that not everyone has the same measure of logical intuition. Can it be taught in an effective manner that leads to an intuitive understanding of logic, without requiring explicit, tedious consideration? What made logic so impactful for you? How did things change?

It was really clarifying to me to be able to codify concepts that I intuitively knew. Which then made it easier to quickly "get" logical arguments and follow lines of argument, identify flaws quicker, etc. These were things my 20 year old self I was fine with before, but learning the formal rules, abstracting arguments into variables, and doing tons of proofs changed the way I engaged with arguments.

When these questions were being posted on Twitter, I saw people derive the answers using formal logic, but I knew what they were intuitively, which is probably the ability they're trying to test for.

It fundamentally transformed the way I think more than anything, up until getting into software engineering, which I view as an extension of formal logic.

An Introduction to Functional Programming Through Lambda Calculus by Michaelson starts from lambda calculus, extends it through logical inference to Lisp to typed ML in a few hundred cozy pages!

How can you know the poll test won't be the equivalent of diversity statements?

It's a good point.

do some short test-prep site quiz like this.

Is the 5-question pop quiz the same for everyone? If so, can someone post the answers (spoilered for politeness of course)? I'm not going to give them my data.

Also, is that results graph accurate? I got 4/5. Is this really 94th percentile? The questions weren't obvious, but they didn't seem particularly difficult. I feel dumb for missing one tbh.

Since this is already spoiler territory, Id like to complain about the copyright question. It took me a while until I realised they dont think income after death can incentivise production.

Then you didn't understand the question. You were not tasked with creating a rigorous argument that withstands scrutiny, you were tasked with filling in the blank for "However, copyright sometimes goes beyond its original purpose since sometimes _______." A - D all result in non-sequitors; none of those responses, regardless of whether they are valid criticisms of copyright or not, make sense in the context of stretching copyright beyond its intended purpose. Only E, regardless of whether it's factually true or not, results in a coherent statement.

I think it was reasonably easy to infer that given the text in the original argument -- "its sole purpose" pulled a small amount of weight for me. Its sole purpose was generating revenue for the author, not family or friends or the state.

shit i got 4/5 and i was convinced that the copyright question is where i screwed up. guess ill never know now because im not signing up for their email list to get the answers

The death answer was the right one.

Even with that complaint, it was still the best answer.

Yeah, lots of LSAT questions are this way. It's not pick a correct answer, it's pick the most correct answer.

1D 2E 3C 4D 5C

The LSAT is heavily g-loaded. Most people simply aren't constitutionally capable of doing that kind of thinking.

Talk to some lawyers and see if you still think the LSAT weeds out bad-faith political arguments. Lawyers seem especially prone to bad-faith argument; I suspect it's because litigation depends so much on quibbles and rhetoric that they can't turn it off in other settings (or that the profession attracts people who think that quibbles and rhetoric are central). In any case, the LSAT doesn't cure them, although maybe they'd be even worse without it.

Studying for LSAT-type tests isn't part of the curriculum because so many people are bad it, and therefore it would have a disparate impact on various social groups. Teachers as a class hatehatehatehatehate (1)Quanitifiable metrics (due to a combination of incompetence, professional ass-covering and social justice theories) and (2)Anything that makes them feel dumb. See the various cheating scandals in Ontario for more on what happened when the government brought in a basic math test for teachers.

But even if that could be surmounted, you don't want a poll test. There is no way it would stay neutral. It would end up full of questions like "Since structural racism has entrenched white people in positions of power, which of the following analogies holds?" Passing such a test would be a 3-hour, registered, certificated "workers of the world, unite" sign.

And finally, just because a political argument is flawed doesn't mean its conclusion is wrong, so weeding out people who make or are fooled by such arguments wouldn't help much. Most political reasoning is post hoc anyway, so you'd bring in this testing system and go through all the hassle just to push the political problem back exactly one step from "bad argument" to "core values/ideology", which are not reliably responsive to argument.

We should still have more standardized tests though, with the option to post your score on some public registry. It would solve a lot of other problems.

Talk to some lawyers and see if you still think the LSAT weeds out bad-faith political arguments. Lawyers seem especially prone to bad-faith argument

That's the beauty of arguments. It doesn't matter whether they're bad-faith. It only matters whether they're valid.

But if they're arguing over things like how to interpret some portion of a statute, or what events occured, what's needed is generally not valid deductions, but probabilistic inference.

It's really the horror of arguments. Validity gets hard to check really fast. In geometry or deductive logic it's really easy, in law it's harder but maybe still feasible. But once you get to "I should not be taxed to raise funds for the care of the mentally retarded because of my natural right to property" it's basically impossible, and all that remains is persuasion. I grant that persuasion is largely also rhetorical, but good-faith persuasion seeks to persuade the interlocutor. Lawyer-arguing, (street-litigation?) is carried out, face-to-face, in what ordinary people would consider a personal conversation, as though there were a jury or judge listening, and so rhetoric and theatrics get deployed to sway onlookers, but there are no onlookers; there are only participants. The interlocutor becomes a means, where in good-faith argument he would be an end.

In practice, what matters is whether people find arguments persuasive. That can have quite little to do with their validity.

Talk to some lawyers and see if you still think the LSAT weeds out bad-faith political arguments

Right, part of the reason I'm posting this is that I don't really talk to that many lawyers and that I think they're a few here that might be able to give a more informed view. Is it correct to extend what you're saying bit to that the bad-faith arguments can be arbitrarily subtle and training people to catch more obvious bad faith also trains them to hide their own bad faith better?

There is no way it would stay neutral

Oops, I guess I forgot this other very important anti-poll test argument that they're way too easy to corrupt. Embarrassingly enough, it's actually probably the textbook one too through various Jim Crow examples. Thanks for making it.

The LSAT is not a very teachable test, so teaching it would do little to "raise the sanity waterline" it would just result in a bunch of students with another subject or set of subjects they are incapable of performing well in.

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