Famous Flaws | LSAT Logical Reasoning 

Haaaaa

haha, thanks for the love, go Seal Team Six on them boys.

By commonly correct we mean that when you see these flaws in the answer choices, they turn out to be correct more often than not. While the ones that are usually wrong turn out to be incorrect answers when you see them in the choices.

How did you do?

That's awesome to hear, thank you. Good luck, good luck, good luck.

Also explicitly stated at 5:03 !!! Amazing!

haha, thank you for the encouragement. yes, I am a fallen angel, and let me tell you that LSAT Heaven is a surprisingly raw place, with an unexpected level of cussing and examples!

Thanks a lot! Glad they're working for you.

Yeah a bunch of recurring LSAT flaws have fancier names (often latin). For example, I've heard students say that Part vs. Whole is called the Fallacy of Composition. But LSAT doesn't ever use language like consequent and antecedent, so we stick to language the test likes to use. I like your notion of "we basically are doing to the other what we are supposed to do with each condition", though, I'll probably steal that at some point. :)

@@LSATLab You are definitely right about the language, I just remember learning that in my formal logic class, and it helped me understand necessary and sufficient conditions a lot. And steal away! It’ll be nice to know I helped my helpers, haha!

Don't worry, it is an unsustainable level of quality. Crappier future videos will be easier to concentrate on. :) Thanks for watching!

Haha. If I had my druthers, every teaching example would be basketball related, because bball is the background radiation of my brain. But, sadly, other students hate sports and roll their eyes and mentally check out every time I use a basketball/sporting analogy. Sigh ... if only we didn't have to try to reach lots of different styles of learners. :)

Its good to mix it up now and then :)

Awesome, thank you!

You're welcome! We're glad you liked it.

haha, thanks! I literally just logged into RU-vid to see my nightly NBA highlights over a dish of ice cream, and this comment is the cherry on top.

I know Patrick had a lot of fun making it!

They're both super rare, so it's cool to not know them. False Choice means the author is acting like there are only options, but he never actually established here are only two options. (e.g. Taking a limo and taking a helicopter are two ways we could get to Vegas in time for the show. Since all the helicopters are booked, we'll have to take a limo.) Intent vs. Outcome, aka Motive vs. Result, is when an author assumes that whatever thing happened, whatever the outcome of a certain action was must have been the person's intent. Like if I said something that was meant to be complimentary about Lisa's shirt, but Lisa thought I was making fun of it and felt bad, this LSAT author would say, "Clearly, Patrick's comment about her shirt was intended to make her feel bad".

@@LSATLab I see......thankyou very much.....I understand them now.....

Yeah, that's definitely the least clear part of the video, sorry. What we mean is that some of these Famous Flaws are commonly the actual problem with the argument we're reading and are thus the correct answer (Nec vs. Suff, Causal, Ad Hom, Unproven v. Proven False, Part/Whole). Others are almost always incorrect answers (they're very rarely the flaw that's happening on a Flaw question). Circular, Internal Contradiction, Equivocation, Inappropriate Appeal. Sampling is right on the borderline. It shows up a LOT as a trap answer, but it also IS the real problem (thus, the correct answer) a decent amount of the time. Does that make sense?

@@LSATLab Yes. That clears up a lot. Thank you! This was an amazing video

Those all basically act like the Arrow itself, so any idea coming after any of those terms would be on the Right side of the arrow. X --> Y X ensures Y X implies Y X leads to Y X will Y

​@@LSATLab I asked my questioned weird, sorry. So these are necessary condition indicators?

@@2012staytrue Yes, one can think of them as introducing the necessary term in the relationship.

haha, you have a velveteen touch with words.

Thanks, we're trying. As you can imagine, they're more time consuming to make (and when it gets close to a test, we usually have to spend 95% of our time on student support), but there are a couple more like this that we recently made for Reading Comp.

I really appreciate this! Because I have taken the lsat two times and did poorly. I will be retaking it for the third time this April, and I believe with content like this, it will be my last! So, please do for ALL the sessions if possible. Happy New Year!!!

6 of the 10 famous flaws are worth taking fairly seriously as the CORRECT answer. They really are the problem with the argument, a decent percent of the time. But 4 of them (Circular, Equivocation, Self-Contradiction, Inappropriate Appeal) are very rarely the correct answer. We mainly learn these flaws because they show up so frequently as an incorrect answer choice.

LSAT Lab thanks so much

Yeah, I struggled to think of a pithy way to communicate that, sorry. Mainly, I needed a 5 and 5 split for the sake of visual organization, but of the 10 famous flaws profiled in this video, 6 of them come up fairly frequently as the actual flaw (Nec/Suff, Causal, Part/Whole, Sampling, Ad Hom, Unproven/Proven False) and 4 of them primarily show up as incorrect answer choices (Circular, Equivocation, Self-Contradiction, Inappropriate Appeal).

@@ohthatpatrick949 Ah thank you

Part vs. Whole is a type of flaw. It's one of the 10 famous flaws discussed. Did you mean "Part vs. Whole" as opposed to "Sampling"?

@@LSATLab Yes

@@yashraj8827 P vs. W is when the author thinks, "Since this trait is true of each part of X, it must be true of X as a whole", or when they think "Since this trait is true about the whole X, it must be true about each part of X." WHOLE to PART "Since this Ferrari is way more expensive than other cars, the floormat must be way more expensive than other floormats". PART to WHOLE "Since each cheerleader is unable to lift the back of this Ferrari off the ground, the cheerleading squad must be unable to lift the back of this Ferrari off the ground." SAMPLING "Wanda, who is a cheerleader, isn't able to lift the back of this car off the ground. Therefore, all cheerleaders on the squad must be unable to lift the back of this car off the ground." With Part to Whole, the objection is "even though a single cheerleader couldn't do it, it might be possible for a GROUP of cheerleaders to do it". With Sampling, the objection is "even though THAT cheerleader couldn't do it, it might be possible for SOME OTHER cheerleader to do it."

The famous flaws are mainly just for Flaw and Parallel Flaw. The BIG exception is the Causal flaw, which dominates Strengthen / Weaken / Evaluate questions. You'll also see Sampling tested in the Assumption Family, and of course Nec vs. Suff flaw (conditional logic errors) are tested any time the test gives us conditional logic.

Sure, I'm just confused by which part you're talking about. There aren't any correct or incorrect answer choices in the video. After introducing each famous flaw, we're showing some of the common phrasings that Flaw answer choices use to describe that flaw. None of them is "the correct" one. They're just examples of answer choices on Flaw questions that would make us think, "Hey, this is talking about [Famous Flaw X]." For example, whether I see any of these ... (A) presumes the truth of the conclusion (A) presupposes what it seeks to establish (A) assumes what it sets out to prove (A) the conclusion restates a claim offered in support of it ... I would think, "Hey, this is talking about Circular reasoning." Then I could ask myself whether the argument I just read was a circular argument. (Let me know if I'm not actually addressing what you were asking about)

haha, excellent point. Umm, it was Susan Rice? (whom no one would call a Social Democrat, but that's neither here nor there)