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