Causation in Logical Reasoning

[Music] hi this is patrick from lsat lab we&#39;re here to talk about causation in the logical reasoning section a lot of times causation is set up by some sort of curious comparison a curious fact and usually there are multiple ways to explain that but the author picks one way we need to be good at assessing the plausibility of the author&#39;s hypothesis and then in other problems we&#39;re going to be responsible for putting together a chain of causality let&#39;s start with those curious comparisons we&#39;re going to show three of them from test questions after you read each one of them i just want you to ask yourself why is that see if your brain fills in the blank like why do you think this curious comparison is true pause the recording read all three and then unpause when you&#39;re done welcome back let&#39;s go through these one by one we&#39;re going to see two different categories let&#39;s get those clear in our heads a small study where we observe things versus a large randomized trial okay well what&#39;s the difference how do they compare turns out there are more newspaper stories about small studies than large ones why the author goes on to conclude that it must be because small studies have really like sensational takeaways and newspapers love a good headline and then the correct answer goes well it might just be that there&#39;s way more small studies than large ones right a large trial takes a significant amount of investment so it just doesn&#39;t happen as frequently alright in this one what&#39;s being compared is crosswalks that are marked by stripes and lights versus crosswalks that are not so adorned and the comparison is that there&#39;s more pedestrian injuries happening at the marked crosswalks than the unmarked ones that&#39;s weird why are there more injuries at the marked ones well the author goes on to conclude clearly these safety measures these lights and these stripes are doing nothing look there&#39;s more injuries here they&#39;re making the situation worse and lsat wants us to consider the alternate explanation maybe these were the worst crosswalks to begin with and the stripes and lights are there trying to make a bad situation slightly better this one&#39;s comparing people who read the labels on their food products to people who don&#39;t read and it&#39;s saying that the ones who don&#39;t read have a higher percentage of fat calories in their diet mmm curious why is that let&#39;s look at one more that you haven&#39;t seen yet all right jimmy replaced his old gas water heater with a new one that&#39;s rated as highly efficient but his gas bills went up so this is a comparison between then and now he used to have the old gas water heater now he&#39;s got the new highly efficient one and yet his gas bill&#39;s gone up that&#39;s paradoxical lsat wants us to be intrinsically confused and thinking why is that but you need to build a habit that you actually make your brain say that question ask it so make your brain think well so wait why is his gas bill higher with this new heater does the new heater suck is something else changed why are newspapers doing more stories on small studies than big ones why are there more pedestrians getting hurt at these brightly advertised crosswalks how come the people who are reading the food label have less fat in their diet it&#39;s important that we develop an ear for curious comparisons so that we can pause and relate to the author empathize with her and think huh why is that once we&#39;ve asked the question why is that our human brains can&#39;t help but start trying to speculate some possible explanations for it here&#39;s a question that is all about coming up with four possible explanations for the same curious fact pause the recording give it a try and then unpause when you&#39;re ready to hear about it so this question is explain the paradox resolve the paradox and it&#39;s an accept question so four answers will help to explain our surprise one of them will either do nothing or make the surprise worse and here the correct answer is a this actually makes it even more surprising because this is saying that his new water heater uses a smaller percentage of gas so wait why are his gas bills going up if the new heater uses a smaller percentage of gas this makes us even more confused that&#39;s why it&#39;s our correct answer but i want to look at the four that give us different explanations so how come this new water heater life of his has a higher gas spill than the old water heater life he he lived well b is saying it&#39;s because his uncle moved in so the difference between now and before is two people versus one does it say that the uncle actually uses the sink or the shower or the toilet no but go ahead and use common sense c is saying that what&#39;s different between now and then is now he does laundry at home whereas he didn&#39;t before do we know that doing laundry at home means more gas usage than when you didn&#39;t do laundry at home here yeah even without common sense it says he started using a gas dryer d is saying that well the thing that&#39;s changed is they jacked up my rates so even though i&#39;ve got this new heater i&#39;ve got higher rates to pay and then e gives us a story where there&#39;s something anomalous the reason his bill&#39;s higher than usual is because the weather is colder than usual so he just needs to run a heater more than he usually would run a heater the variety of possible story lines is part of the richness of causality maybe his uncle moved in maybe now he&#39;s doing laundry at home maybe the utility company jacked up the rates maybe it&#39;s just really cold so everybody&#39;s running their heater a lot we&#39;re totally allowed to use common sense when it comes to filling in the blanks for potential explanations you don&#39;t want to invent a crazy story like if we found out that jimmy just got promoted at his job i don&#39;t know why he&#39;d be using his gas more i could make up a story but there&#39;s no common sense connection between getting promoted and using your gas more already i&#39;m thinking well now that he knows he&#39;s making more money he feels like he can turn the heat up that&#39;s too much of a story because there are multiple ways to explain it&#39;s a flaw when an author commits to one of them whenever we talk about sort of causal flaws we&#39;re really referring to this that an author is overconfident about one specific storyline when there could be other storylines pause the recording and try this one unpause when you&#39;re done welcome back this is a flaw question it&#39;s asking us how the argument is vulnerable to criticism so what&#39;s wrong with it how is it flawed a is the correct answer the four wrong answers are famous flaws such as sampling possible versus certain necessary versus sufficient or an inappropriate appeal to a source that might not be an expert if you&#39;re unfamiliar with these famous flaws there&#39;s about 10 to 15 of them if you want to click open this video in another tab you can come check out those later the correct answer is saying that the author inferred a cause from a mere correlation that&#39;s a foul ball whenever an answer choice on flaw says the author inferred this from that the thing you infer is the conclusion to draw a conclusion is synonymous with to draw an inference you can actually think your way through these answer choices by just seeing whether they match first you just have to find the conclusion and the evidence so the word but tells you that usually we&#39;re leaving background counterpoint and now beginning the author&#39;s argument so we can ignore the first sentence but we got to figure out you know are we getting conclusion and then evidence or evidence and then conclusion and the so tells us that the conclusion comes second so is our conclusion a cause yes because it says trading my sports car in for a minivan would lower my risk these active verbs signify some sort of causal influence is the evidence correlation do we have ourselves a little curious comparison we do we&#39;re comparing minivans and sedans to sports cars and we&#39;re saying one is higher or lower when it comes to an accident rate so if we heard this curious comparison we were one step ahead of the game how do they compare sports car drivers are getting into more accidents hmm why the author is looking at this curious comparison asking herself why and coming away with the idea that the sports car is an inherently riskier car to drive and that&#39;s a flaw because that doesn&#39;t have to be the explanation there&#39;s multiple ways to explain a correlation let&#39;s clarify what correlations are we&#39;ve got to get really good at hearing them you&#39;ve got statistical correlations where you hear that like most people in this group have a certain trait college graduates tend to have good vocab or you get an idea that this group&#39;s more likely or less likely than this group to have some certain trait college grads are more likely than non-college grads to have sophisticated vocab another way to express this lumpiness in the statistics is to just show disproportionate representation liberals are only 53 percent of the population but 79 percent of university professors whoa why what&#39;s skewing it that way correlations can also be temporal you can say hey we raised the speed limit and then the traffic fatalities went down so i guess the speed limit did it that&#39;s like a before after or you can kind of do simultaneous correlations tommy&#39;s taxi started offering free breath mints around the same time that uber&#39;s drivers were when you see a correlation it can be useful to picture those two factors appearing in parallel there&#39;s some association what is it the author always assumes a causal one here with this conclusion our author would be saying that going to college is causing the advanced vocab it leads to other verbs would be like it promotes it contributes to it influences sometimes causal conclusions don&#39;t explicitly name cause effect they just imply it so picture this one i guess the crackdown on plagiarism is making students check their thesaurus that&#39;s like an obnoxiously cryptic way of saying that being at college and not being allowed to plagiarize some source is leading you to search out new wording which is building your vocab so it&#39;s telling a rich causal story that we actually need to sort of vocalize internally what is the author imagining but in a very simple way we want to look at this correlation and think okay the author thinks that the left side leads to the right side but it doesn&#39;t have to be that way given that x is correlated with y you&#39;re not allowed to conclude that x causes y first of all maybe y causes x we should always ask ourselves which of these came first did they have the advanced vocab before they got to college we call this sort of thing reverse causality meaning have you considered that maybe it&#39;s the other way around we&#39;re not allowed to be sure of it we can&#39;t say definitively author you&#39;ve mistaken cause for effect that&#39;s too sure but we can say you&#39;ve failed to consider that maybe it&#39;s the other way around here it definitely makes some common sense why you might have needed an advanced vocab to get into college maybe your if your essay didn&#39;t sparkle with some scintillating vernacular then you wouldn&#39;t have gotten admitted the other popular alternative explanation for a correlation is that there&#39;s some third factor we haven&#39;t identified yet that is really the causal difference maker so sometimes it&#39;s causing both things sometimes it causes one and just happens to be associated with the other but it&#39;s the real reason these two factors are going hand in hand one we could stipulate would be maybe just being wealthy maybe wealthy families are more likely to have advanced vocab and they&#39;re also more likely to get their kids through college if you think about the argument we were reading there was a correlation between driving a sports car and having a higher rate of getting into accidents and our author blamed it on the sports car she was like oh okay well if i trade in my sports car i&#39;ll lower my risk we could consider reverse causality but it doesn&#39;t really make sense to say the higher accident rate came first and then you got the sports car unless we&#39;re thinking about this third factor idea of like well yeah you&#39;re getting into accidents all the time because you are an obnoxious thrill-seeking driver and that same personality trait is making you buy a sports car once you can afford it there&#39;s multiple ways to explain a correlation so it&#39;s a flaw for an author to just assume one thing causes another in addition to chasing down alternate storylines the test is going to ask us to evaluate or assess the plausibility of the author&#39;s storyline in general when you see a causal argument where you get some curious fact which is almost always some curious comparison and then the author goes on to go this must explain it there&#39;s two different pressure points one is is there some other way we could explain it and the other one is okay how plausible is the author&#39;s hypothesis what information could help me assess whether the author&#39;s storyline seems right or seems wrong take a look at this strengthen accept question pause the recording and un-pause when you&#39;re done welcome back so there&#39;s a curious comparison which is the lan party got its only national victory in 1935. so we&#39;re kind of comparing 1935 to every other year and what was different is the lan party won a national election huh why is that why so the author has a theory she says well i think it was due to a combination of two things the lan party specifically spoke to the problems of those hard-hit rural semi-rural areas and those areas were really suffering how would we assess the plausibility of this the most common way that lsat will strengthen plausibility is by showing you an answer where the cause was absent and the effect was absent so in this argument our author thinks for example that them specifically addressing the concerns of these groups helped them win the election so a no cause no effect answer would sound like when they didn&#39;t address their concerns they didn&#39;t win the election and a actually looks like it&#39;s doing that it sounds like in the preceding elections which we know they lost they didn&#39;t make an attempt to address the economically distressed group the problem is this is talking about urban and we are talking about rural and semi-rural voters since this ends up being irrelevant it&#39;s our correct answer because it doesn&#39;t strengthen the argument choice b strengthens basically by explaining the causal mechanism like how would focusing on their problems lead to them winning b is explaining well because when voters feel like you&#39;re focusing on their problems they&#39;re more likely to vote for you c strengthens by giving more data points that match the cause and effect are appearing together in other times when the lan party had success we know they only won this one national election but maybe they&#39;ve won regional elections local ones it was when there was economic distress so the author thought economic distress in the agricultural sector was a cause for the success in this election c is reinforcing that connection it&#39;s saying yep most of the time they&#39;ve been successful there&#39;s been economic distress in the agricultural sector that&#39;s still just a correlation but it helps it&#39;s more data points that show cause and effect going hand in hand d strengthens in a way similar to a the parties that didn&#39;t win in 1935 didn&#39;t specifically address these people so we could think of it as a no cosmo effect another way to think about this one is if our author thinks that what the lan party did right was they specifically addressed the problems of the rural and semi-rural people he must be implicitly assuming that the other parties didn&#39;t so this is sort of spelling out an assumption it can&#39;t be a causal difference maker if it wasn&#39;t actually a difference to begin with this is affirming the other parties did not campaign in those semi-rural areas choice e is making a connection between the economic distress you&#39;re in and your likelihood of voting so we know that the rural semi-rural people were in economic distress this answer then tells us they were very likely to vote and that helps because the author had identified you know the bulk of the population is rural semi-rule but someone might have objected yeah but they don&#39;t vote the bulk of the voters were in urban areas e is ruling out that objection it is saying no no the rural semi rule were not only like most of the population they were the ones most likely to vote so they were really important demographic to reach out to causal arguments are some of the most complex things on the test because we really have two different ways of analyzing them so you&#39;ll need to be always asking yourself two different questions any other way that we could explain this curious comparison this background fact how plausible is the author&#39;s storyline what information would make me believe it more or believe it less when it comes to alternate explanations reverse causality and third factor are the big ideas to remember when it comes to plausibility answers all these sort of covariation answers which means you know here the cause was absent and the effect was absent we can also weaken with covariation by saying hey your supposed cause was in this situation but the effect wasn&#39;t there so you weaken with cause effect mismatches you strengthen with cause effect matches we can also establish plausibility by just explaining how it would work or indicating there definitely is a distinction here if the author needs there to be some distinction when it comes to strength and weaken there&#39;s a definite bias to each of them that&#39;s worth keeping in mind but it&#39;s just a tendency you definitely will see strength and ann weaken do answers of both kinds but if i&#39;m doing strengthen i&#39;m focusing more on helping the author&#39;s storyline when i do weekend i&#39;m focused much more on finding an alternate storyline necessary assumptions somewhere in between those two pretty equally likely to do either evaluate and flaw are way more on that side of presenting alternate storylines flaw really just can describe the fact that the author was so sure of herself in coming to a causal conclusion it doesn&#39;t even have to propose an alternate storyline it can just say hey the fact that alternate storylines exist means you shouldn&#39;t be so short of yourself our last topic shifts our emphasis a little bit more towards the inference family where we are getting facts and being asked to see what we could derive from them pause the recording and try this problem okay welcome back this is a most supported question which we can most easily tell by the word statements we&#39;re not reading an argument there is not a premise or a conclusion our reading job here is just to read these facts and see if we can connect any of them and in particular we look to see whether there&#39;s like conditional logic rules that we could apply or chain together are there causal connections we can put together is there some sort of pivot where we reconcile what came before it with what came after it when we read this paragraph we want the causal language to jump out at us these things tend to isolate that&#39;s causal this has the effect of ooh that&#39;s causal this in turn discourages all right we&#39;ve got ourselves a causal chain the first sentence is just saying two facts the media rarely covers local politics and local politics is usually secretive but then we get into some causality these tend to do this and then we say and what what happens when we isolate local politicians well this has the effect of that what happens when we reduce the chance that any particular resident participation is a meaningful thing well that in turn discourages this so if you just focus on those keywords you can see the shape of what they&#39;re trying to build and since the goal of this is to connect facts if you have a causal chain the most typical type of correct answer would say all right well so x leads to c y leads to c it&#39;s also correct to say x leads to b so sometimes you&#39;ll see correct answers that just reinforce part of the chain all right so let&#39;s insert the actual ideas into our causal chain when we look at the answer choices the correct answer is d which is saying if we were to cover local politics more in the media then you wouldn&#39;t have that discouraging resident participation you would reduce at least one source it&#39;s very safe language the one thing that might freak people out about picking this correct answer is that we were told that the media doesn&#39;t cover local and that is discouraging residents whereas d is saying yeah but does that mean if they did cover local politics it wouldn&#39;t discourage that can feel illegal because in conditional logic if you have if a then b you&#39;re not allowed to say if not a not b but with causality it&#39;s a little bit different if you say that a caused b then you are allowed to say you know if you didn&#39;t have a you wouldn&#39;t have had b or if you had less of a you&#39;d have less of b these are supportable inferences they&#39;re not must be true but lsat routinely gives correct answers in this form on a most supported question if i say if you can surf you have great balance you&#39;re definitely not allowed to say if you can&#39;t surf you don&#39;t have great balance what about ballerinas or yoga instructors however if i say simone surfing has the effect of keeping her skin very tan then i am allowed to say that it&#39;s a supportable inference to think that if she were to surf much less her skin wouldn&#39;t be as tan so d is doing something you&#39;ll see a lot on reading comp and inference questions which is saying if this causal difference maker weren&#39;t present then we wouldn&#39;t see the effect or we&#39;d see less of the effect a was unsupportable because it distorted the meaning of any particular act of resident participation which just meant any random event on average will have a lower chance of eliciting a positive response a is actually saying there are specific there are particular acts that would elicit a positive response that&#39;s completely changing the meaning of how we were using particular b is pretty close because it does reinforce a connection between local politics being secretive and discouraging resident participation but the should is out of scope our author was only listing out descriptive ideas so it&#39;s strain a little bit farther from what we were given to start making normative claims like should ought good bad c is a classic too strong wrong answer we can&#39;t say from these facts what is the number one factor influencing a resident&#39;s decision and e tries to go backwards it almost feels like it&#39;s doing a contrapositive but you&#39;re not allowed to do that with cause effect relationships suppose i were to tell you that i have an extra lip on my right cheek i have three lips and because of that this has the effect of getting me teased on the playground e would be saying if patrick weren&#39;t teased this would cause him to not have a third lip on his face you can&#39;t do that with causality all right so let&#39;s recap curious comparisons are our gateway to anticipating a causal conclusion we want to get real good at hearing wording like we tend to be this we&#39;re more likely to be that or hearing temporal relations like before and after or from this to that or even at the same time while this was happening this was happening we know the author is going to be an eager beaver about coming to one precise causal hypothesis and we need to be able to create some doubt by thinking well couldn&#39;t there be other ways to explain the most common other ways to explain are reverse causality or some third factor but you&#39;ll also see answers that are saying the data is just bad because we used an unrepresentative sample or we&#39;re making like an unfair comparison between two groups or something about our the methodology of this experiment is shady and once in a while you&#39;ll see that they explain something as just a return to normalcy a regression to the mean when it comes to answers that either improve or diminish the plausibility of the author&#39;s storyline the most common type is covariation which just means you&#39;re getting more data points that show you that cause and effect either like appear together or disappear together or weakening data points that show there&#39;s a mismatch one of them appeared but the other one didn&#39;t appear less commonly are correct answers that talk about how the causality would work answers that just clarify there is a difference this difference maker was unique to the person i&#39;m assigning it to or that in some other way just establish a baseline of plausibility okay yes the the thing i am blaming or crediting was there and it is capable of doing what i&#39;m claiming it did when it comes to seeing causal chains we got to get better at spotting causal keywords they&#39;re almost always active verbs like leads to due to because of resulting in and we want to be at peace with this inference that you&#39;re allowed to do on most supported tasks whether it&#39;s reading comp or logical reasoning you&#39;re allowed to say if the causal difference maker hadn&#39;t been there the effect wouldn&#39;t have been there all right thanks a lot for joining us please check out some of our other videos or come visit us on lsatlab.com you

[Music] hi this is patrick from lsat lab we&amp;#39;re here to talk about causation in the logical reasoning section a lot of times causation is set up by some sort of curious comparison a curious fact and usually there are multiple ways to explain that but the author picks one way we need to be good at assessing the plausibility of the author&amp;#39;s hypothesis and then in other problems we&amp;#39;re going to be responsible for putting together a chain of causality let&amp;#39;s start with those curious comparisons we&amp;#39;re going to show three of them from test questions after you read each one of them i just want you to ask yourself why is that see if your brain fills in the blank like why do you think this curious comparison is true pause the recording read all three and then unpause when you&amp;#39;re done welcome back let&amp;#39;s go through these one by one we&amp;#39;re going to see two different categories let&amp;#39;s get those clear in our heads a small study where we observe things versus a large randomized trial okay well what&amp;#39;s the difference how do they compare turns out there are more newspaper stories about small studies than large ones why the author goes on to conclude that it must be because small studies have really like sensational takeaways and newspapers love a good headline and then the correct answer goes well it might just be that there&amp;#39;s way more small studies than large ones right a large trial takes a significant amount of investment so it just doesn&amp;#39;t happen as frequently alright in this one what&amp;#39;s being compared is crosswalks that are marked by stripes and lights versus crosswalks that are not so adorned and the comparison is that there&amp;#39;s more pedestrian injuries happening at the marked crosswalks than the unmarked ones that&amp;#39;s weird why are there more injuries at the marked ones well the author goes on to conclude clearly these safety measures these lights and these stripes are doing nothing look there&amp;#39;s more injuries here they&amp;#39;re making the situation worse and lsat wants us to consider the alternate explanation maybe these were the worst crosswalks to begin with and the stripes and lights are there trying to make a bad situation slightly better this one&amp;#39;s comparing people who read the labels on their food products to people who don&amp;#39;t read and it&amp;#39;s saying that the ones who don&amp;#39;t read have a higher percentage of fat calories in their diet mmm curious why is that let&amp;#39;s look at one more that you haven&amp;#39;t seen yet all right jimmy replaced his old gas water heater with a new one that&amp;#39;s rated as highly efficient but his gas bills went up so this is a comparison between then and now he used to have the old gas water heater now he&amp;#39;s got the new highly efficient one and yet his gas bill&amp;#39;s gone up that&amp;#39;s paradoxical lsat wants us to be intrinsically confused and thinking why is that but you need to build a habit that you actually make your brain say that question ask it so make your brain think well so wait why is his gas bill higher with this new heater does the new heater suck is something else changed why are newspapers doing more stories on small studies than big ones why are there more pedestrians getting hurt at these brightly advertised crosswalks how come the people who are reading the food label have less fat in their diet it&amp;#39;s important that we develop an ear for curious comparisons so that we can pause and relate to the author empathize with her and think huh why is that once we&amp;#39;ve asked the question why is that our human brains can&amp;#39;t help but start trying to speculate some possible explanations for it here&amp;#39;s a question that is all about coming up with four possible explanations for the same curious fact pause the recording give it a try and then unpause when you&amp;#39;re ready to hear about it so this question is explain the paradox resolve the paradox and it&amp;#39;s an accept question so four answers will help to explain our surprise one of them will either do nothing or make the surprise worse and here the correct answer is a this actually makes it even more surprising because this is saying that his new water heater uses a smaller percentage of gas so wait why are his gas bills going up if the new heater uses a smaller percentage of gas this makes us even more confused that&amp;#39;s why it&amp;#39;s our correct answer but i want to look at the four that give us different explanations so how come this new water heater life of his has a higher gas spill than the old water heater life he he lived well b is saying it&amp;#39;s because his uncle moved in so the difference between now and before is two people versus one does it say that the uncle actually uses the sink or the shower or the toilet no but go ahead and use common sense c is saying that what&amp;#39;s different between now and then is now he does laundry at home whereas he didn&amp;#39;t before do we know that doing laundry at home means more gas usage than when you didn&amp;#39;t do laundry at home here yeah even without common sense it says he started using a gas dryer d is saying that well the thing that&amp;#39;s changed is they jacked up my rates so even though i&amp;#39;ve got this new heater i&amp;#39;ve got higher rates to pay and then e gives us a story where there&amp;#39;s something anomalous the reason his bill&amp;#39;s higher than usual is because the weather is colder than usual so he just needs to run a heater more than he usually would run a heater the variety of possible story lines is part of the richness of causality maybe his uncle moved in maybe now he&amp;#39;s doing laundry at home maybe the utility company jacked up the rates maybe it&amp;#39;s just really cold so everybody&amp;#39;s running their heater a lot we&amp;#39;re totally allowed to use common sense when it comes to filling in the blanks for potential explanations you don&amp;#39;t want to invent a crazy story like if we found out that jimmy just got promoted at his job i don&amp;#39;t know why he&amp;#39;d be using his gas more i could make up a story but there&amp;#39;s no common sense connection between getting promoted and using your gas more already i&amp;#39;m thinking well now that he knows he&amp;#39;s making more money he feels like he can turn the heat up that&amp;#39;s too much of a story because there are multiple ways to explain it&amp;#39;s a flaw when an author commits to one of them whenever we talk about sort of causal flaws we&amp;#39;re really referring to this that an author is overconfident about one specific storyline when there could be other storylines pause the recording and try this one unpause when you&amp;#39;re done welcome back this is a flaw question it&amp;#39;s asking us how the argument is vulnerable to criticism so what&amp;#39;s wrong with it how is it flawed a is the correct answer the four wrong answers are famous flaws such as sampling possible versus certain necessary versus sufficient or an inappropriate appeal to a source that might not be an expert if you&amp;#39;re unfamiliar with these famous flaws there&amp;#39;s about 10 to 15 of them if you want to click open this video in another tab you can come check out those later the correct answer is saying that the author inferred a cause from a mere correlation that&amp;#39;s a foul ball whenever an answer choice on flaw says the author inferred this from that the thing you infer is the conclusion to draw a conclusion is synonymous with to draw an inference you can actually think your way through these answer choices by just seeing whether they match first you just have to find the conclusion and the evidence so the word but tells you that usually we&amp;#39;re leaving background counterpoint and now beginning the author&amp;#39;s argument so we can ignore the first sentence but we got to figure out you know are we getting conclusion and then evidence or evidence and then conclusion and the so tells us that the conclusion comes second so is our conclusion a cause yes because it says trading my sports car in for a minivan would lower my risk these active verbs signify some sort of causal influence is the evidence correlation do we have ourselves a little curious comparison we do we&amp;#39;re comparing minivans and sedans to sports cars and we&amp;#39;re saying one is higher or lower when it comes to an accident rate so if we heard this curious comparison we were one step ahead of the game how do they compare sports car drivers are getting into more accidents hmm why the author is looking at this curious comparison asking herself why and coming away with the idea that the sports car is an inherently riskier car to drive and that&amp;#39;s a flaw because that doesn&amp;#39;t have to be the explanation there&amp;#39;s multiple ways to explain a correlation let&amp;#39;s clarify what correlations are we&amp;#39;ve got to get really good at hearing them you&amp;#39;ve got statistical correlations where you hear that like most people in this group have a certain trait college graduates tend to have good vocab or you get an idea that this group&amp;#39;s more likely or less likely than this group to have some certain trait college grads are more likely than non-college grads to have sophisticated vocab another way to express this lumpiness in the statistics is to just show disproportionate representation liberals are only 53 percent of the population but 79 percent of university professors whoa why what&amp;#39;s skewing it that way correlations can also be temporal you can say hey we raised the speed limit and then the traffic fatalities went down so i guess the speed limit did it that&amp;#39;s like a before after or you can kind of do simultaneous correlations tommy&amp;#39;s taxi started offering free breath mints around the same time that uber&amp;#39;s drivers were when you see a correlation it can be useful to picture those two factors appearing in parallel there&amp;#39;s some association what is it the author always assumes a causal one here with this conclusion our author would be saying that going to college is causing the advanced vocab it leads to other verbs would be like it promotes it contributes to it influences sometimes causal conclusions don&amp;#39;t explicitly name cause effect they just imply it so picture this one i guess the crackdown on plagiarism is making students check their thesaurus that&amp;#39;s like an obnoxiously cryptic way of saying that being at college and not being allowed to plagiarize some source is leading you to search out new wording which is building your vocab so it&amp;#39;s telling a rich causal story that we actually need to sort of vocalize internally what is the author imagining but in a very simple way we want to look at this correlation and think okay the author thinks that the left side leads to the right side but it doesn&amp;#39;t have to be that way given that x is correlated with y you&amp;#39;re not allowed to conclude that x causes y first of all maybe y causes x we should always ask ourselves which of these came first did they have the advanced vocab before they got to college we call this sort of thing reverse causality meaning have you considered that maybe it&amp;#39;s the other way around we&amp;#39;re not allowed to be sure of it we can&amp;#39;t say definitively author you&amp;#39;ve mistaken cause for effect that&amp;#39;s too sure but we can say you&amp;#39;ve failed to consider that maybe it&amp;#39;s the other way around here it definitely makes some common sense why you might have needed an advanced vocab to get into college maybe your if your essay didn&amp;#39;t sparkle with some scintillating vernacular then you wouldn&amp;#39;t have gotten admitted the other popular alternative explanation for a correlation is that there&amp;#39;s some third factor we haven&amp;#39;t identified yet that is really the causal difference maker so sometimes it&amp;#39;s causing both things sometimes it causes one and just happens to be associated with the other but it&amp;#39;s the real reason these two factors are going hand in hand one we could stipulate would be maybe just being wealthy maybe wealthy families are more likely to have advanced vocab and they&amp;#39;re also more likely to get their kids through college if you think about the argument we were reading there was a correlation between driving a sports car and having a higher rate of getting into accidents and our author blamed it on the sports car she was like oh okay well if i trade in my sports car i&amp;#39;ll lower my risk we could consider reverse causality but it doesn&amp;#39;t really make sense to say the higher accident rate came first and then you got the sports car unless we&amp;#39;re thinking about this third factor idea of like well yeah you&amp;#39;re getting into accidents all the time because you are an obnoxious thrill-seeking driver and that same personality trait is making you buy a sports car once you can afford it there&amp;#39;s multiple ways to explain a correlation so it&amp;#39;s a flaw for an author to just assume one thing causes another in addition to chasing down alternate storylines the test is going to ask us to evaluate or assess the plausibility of the author&amp;#39;s storyline in general when you see a causal argument where you get some curious fact which is almost always some curious comparison and then the author goes on to go this must explain it there&amp;#39;s two different pressure points one is is there some other way we could explain it and the other one is okay how plausible is the author&amp;#39;s hypothesis what information could help me assess whether the author&amp;#39;s storyline seems right or seems wrong take a look at this strengthen accept question pause the recording and un-pause when you&amp;#39;re done welcome back so there&amp;#39;s a curious comparison which is the lan party got its only national victory in 1935. so we&amp;#39;re kind of comparing 1935 to every other year and what was different is the lan party won a national election huh why is that why so the author has a theory she says well i think it was due to a combination of two things the lan party specifically spoke to the problems of those hard-hit rural semi-rural areas and those areas were really suffering how would we assess the plausibility of this the most common way that lsat will strengthen plausibility is by showing you an answer where the cause was absent and the effect was absent so in this argument our author thinks for example that them specifically addressing the concerns of these groups helped them win the election so a no cause no effect answer would sound like when they didn&amp;#39;t address their concerns they didn&amp;#39;t win the election and a actually looks like it&amp;#39;s doing that it sounds like in the preceding elections which we know they lost they didn&amp;#39;t make an attempt to address the economically distressed group the problem is this is talking about urban and we are talking about rural and semi-rural voters since this ends up being irrelevant it&amp;#39;s our correct answer because it doesn&amp;#39;t strengthen the argument choice b strengthens basically by explaining the causal mechanism like how would focusing on their problems lead to them winning b is explaining well because when voters feel like you&amp;#39;re focusing on their problems they&amp;#39;re more likely to vote for you c strengthens by giving more data points that match the cause and effect are appearing together in other times when the lan party had success we know they only won this one national election but maybe they&amp;#39;ve won regional elections local ones it was when there was economic distress so the author thought economic distress in the agricultural sector was a cause for the success in this election c is reinforcing that connection it&amp;#39;s saying yep most of the time they&amp;#39;ve been successful there&amp;#39;s been economic distress in the agricultural sector that&amp;#39;s still just a correlation but it helps it&amp;#39;s more data points that show cause and effect going hand in hand d strengthens in a way similar to a the parties that didn&amp;#39;t win in 1935 didn&amp;#39;t specifically address these people so we could think of it as a no cosmo effect another way to think about this one is if our author thinks that what the lan party did right was they specifically addressed the problems of the rural and semi-rural people he must be implicitly assuming that the other parties didn&amp;#39;t so this is sort of spelling out an assumption it can&amp;#39;t be a causal difference maker if it wasn&amp;#39;t actually a difference to begin with this is affirming the other parties did not campaign in those semi-rural areas choice e is making a connection between the economic distress you&amp;#39;re in and your likelihood of voting so we know that the rural semi-rural people were in economic distress this answer then tells us they were very likely to vote and that helps because the author had identified you know the bulk of the population is rural semi-rule but someone might have objected yeah but they don&amp;#39;t vote the bulk of the voters were in urban areas e is ruling out that objection it is saying no no the rural semi rule were not only like most of the population they were the ones most likely to vote so they were really important demographic to reach out to causal arguments are some of the most complex things on the test because we really have two different ways of analyzing them so you&amp;#39;ll need to be always asking yourself two different questions any other way that we could explain this curious comparison this background fact how plausible is the author&amp;#39;s storyline what information would make me believe it more or believe it less when it comes to alternate explanations reverse causality and third factor are the big ideas to remember when it comes to plausibility answers all these sort of covariation answers which means you know here the cause was absent and the effect was absent we can also weaken with covariation by saying hey your supposed cause was in this situation but the effect wasn&amp;#39;t there so you weaken with cause effect mismatches you strengthen with cause effect matches we can also establish plausibility by just explaining how it would work or indicating there definitely is a distinction here if the author needs there to be some distinction when it comes to strength and weaken there&amp;#39;s a definite bias to each of them that&amp;#39;s worth keeping in mind but it&amp;#39;s just a tendency you definitely will see strength and ann weaken do answers of both kinds but if i&amp;#39;m doing strengthen i&amp;#39;m focusing more on helping the author&amp;#39;s storyline when i do weekend i&amp;#39;m focused much more on finding an alternate storyline necessary assumptions somewhere in between those two pretty equally likely to do either evaluate and flaw are way more on that side of presenting alternate storylines flaw really just can describe the fact that the author was so sure of herself in coming to a causal conclusion it doesn&amp;#39;t even have to propose an alternate storyline it can just say hey the fact that alternate storylines exist means you shouldn&amp;#39;t be so short of yourself our last topic shifts our emphasis a little bit more towards the inference family where we are getting facts and being asked to see what we could derive from them pause the recording and try this problem okay welcome back this is a most supported question which we can most easily tell by the word statements we&amp;#39;re not reading an argument there is not a premise or a conclusion our reading job here is just to read these facts and see if we can connect any of them and in particular we look to see whether there&amp;#39;s like conditional logic rules that we could apply or chain together are there causal connections we can put together is there some sort of pivot where we reconcile what came before it with what came after it when we read this paragraph we want the causal language to jump out at us these things tend to isolate that&amp;#39;s causal this has the effect of ooh that&amp;#39;s causal this in turn discourages all right we&amp;#39;ve got ourselves a causal chain the first sentence is just saying two facts the media rarely covers local politics and local politics is usually secretive but then we get into some causality these tend to do this and then we say and what what happens when we isolate local politicians well this has the effect of that what happens when we reduce the chance that any particular resident participation is a meaningful thing well that in turn discourages this so if you just focus on those keywords you can see the shape of what they&amp;#39;re trying to build and since the goal of this is to connect facts if you have a causal chain the most typical type of correct answer would say all right well so x leads to c y leads to c it&amp;#39;s also correct to say x leads to b so sometimes you&amp;#39;ll see correct answers that just reinforce part of the chain all right so let&amp;#39;s insert the actual ideas into our causal chain when we look at the answer choices the correct answer is d which is saying if we were to cover local politics more in the media then you wouldn&amp;#39;t have that discouraging resident participation you would reduce at least one source it&amp;#39;s very safe language the one thing that might freak people out about picking this correct answer is that we were told that the media doesn&amp;#39;t cover local and that is discouraging residents whereas d is saying yeah but does that mean if they did cover local politics it wouldn&amp;#39;t discourage that can feel illegal because in conditional logic if you have if a then b you&amp;#39;re not allowed to say if not a not b but with causality it&amp;#39;s a little bit different if you say that a caused b then you are allowed to say you know if you didn&amp;#39;t have a you wouldn&amp;#39;t have had b or if you had less of a you&amp;#39;d have less of b these are supportable inferences they&amp;#39;re not must be true but lsat routinely gives correct answers in this form on a most supported question if i say if you can surf you have great balance you&amp;#39;re definitely not allowed to say if you can&amp;#39;t surf you don&amp;#39;t have great balance what about ballerinas or yoga instructors however if i say simone surfing has the effect of keeping her skin very tan then i am allowed to say that it&amp;#39;s a supportable inference to think that if she were to surf much less her skin wouldn&amp;#39;t be as tan so d is doing something you&amp;#39;ll see a lot on reading comp and inference questions which is saying if this causal difference maker weren&amp;#39;t present then we wouldn&amp;#39;t see the effect or we&amp;#39;d see less of the effect a was unsupportable because it distorted the meaning of any particular act of resident participation which just meant any random event on average will have a lower chance of eliciting a positive response a is actually saying there are specific there are particular acts that would elicit a positive response that&amp;#39;s completely changing the meaning of how we were using particular b is pretty close because it does reinforce a connection between local politics being secretive and discouraging resident participation but the should is out of scope our author was only listing out descriptive ideas so it&amp;#39;s strain a little bit farther from what we were given to start making normative claims like should ought good bad c is a classic too strong wrong answer we can&amp;#39;t say from these facts what is the number one factor influencing a resident&amp;#39;s decision and e tries to go backwards it almost feels like it&amp;#39;s doing a contrapositive but you&amp;#39;re not allowed to do that with cause effect relationships suppose i were to tell you that i have an extra lip on my right cheek i have three lips and because of that this has the effect of getting me teased on the playground e would be saying if patrick weren&amp;#39;t teased this would cause him to not have a third lip on his face you can&amp;#39;t do that with causality all right so let&amp;#39;s recap curious comparisons are our gateway to anticipating a causal conclusion we want to get real good at hearing wording like we tend to be this we&amp;#39;re more likely to be that or hearing temporal relations like before and after or from this to that or even at the same time while this was happening this was happening we know the author is going to be an eager beaver about coming to one precise causal hypothesis and we need to be able to create some doubt by thinking well couldn&amp;#39;t there be other ways to explain the most common other ways to explain are reverse causality or some third factor but you&amp;#39;ll also see answers that are saying the data is just bad because we used an unrepresentative sample or we&amp;#39;re making like an unfair comparison between two groups or something about our the methodology of this experiment is shady and once in a while you&amp;#39;ll see that they explain something as just a return to normalcy a regression to the mean when it comes to answers that either improve or diminish the plausibility of the author&amp;#39;s storyline the most common type is covariation which just means you&amp;#39;re getting more data points that show you that cause and effect either like appear together or disappear together or weakening data points that show there&amp;#39;s a mismatch one of them appeared but the other one didn&amp;#39;t appear less commonly are correct answers that talk about how the causality would work answers that just clarify there is a difference this difference maker was unique to the person i&amp;#39;m assigning it to or that in some other way just establish a baseline of plausibility okay yes the the thing i am blaming or crediting was there and it is capable of doing what i&amp;#39;m claiming it did when it comes to seeing causal chains we got to get better at spotting causal keywords they&amp;#39;re almost always active verbs like leads to due to because of resulting in and we want to be at peace with this inference that you&amp;#39;re allowed to do on most supported tasks whether it&amp;#39;s reading comp or logical reasoning you&amp;#39;re allowed to say if the causal difference maker hadn&amp;#39;t been there the effect wouldn&amp;#39;t have been there all right thanks a lot for joining us please check out some of our other videos or come visit us on lsatlab.com you

Transcript for:Causation in Logical Reasoning

Transcript for:
Causation in Logical Reasoning