LSAT Logic and the New Cigarette Warning Labels

LSAT Blog "Reader-of-the-Decade" Caleb already wrote an LSAT diary and a Logic Game for all of us.

He's back, and this time he's got an LSAT-style analysis of the reasoning behind the upcoming cigarette warning labels required by the FDA (PDF).

Thanks for Caleb for sharing his thoughts, and be sure to leave some comments letting him know what you think of his arguments.

Caleb's analysis:

If the LSAT gods smiled kindly upon you (they won’t) and said that an entire logical reasoning section was going to be based on the new Family Smoking Prevention and Tobacco Control Act, where would you start your studying?

Since you are a LSAT study-monster with aspirations of lawyerin’, this trip to fantasy land (my second home) could be beneficial in your preparation. After all, a key to crushing the LSAT is the ability to objectively analyze arguments without your personal opinions on the subject interfering with your ability to reason. And lots of people have strong views on smoking, right? “Eww! Smoke stinks and stays in my hair for days!” and “I do what I want” are two key opinions that come to mind.

First, let’s get a hold of the basic argument. You can read the text of the bill here (which I recommend), but since you’re lazy busy practicing for the games section I’ll try and give an objective summary. Then, we’ll take a look at pieces of the argument and try to bend and twist them to our will. And, since you will encounter varying levels of difficulty on LSAT questions, we’ll try and get as fiendish and dastardly clever as possible. Because you know the sadistic hobgoblins at the LSAT factory surely will. So let’s start with a summary:

Smoking is bad, mmkay. Tobacco causes damage both in terms of human health and economic impact. Tobacco use costs the US billions of dollars in healthcare and lost productivity. Tobacco companies target young smokers with their advertising. Nicotine is addictive and people who want to quit using it find it very difficult to do so. Lawmakers have an obligation and mandate to protect citizens- especially children- and should oversee and regulate the tobacco industry. An effective strategy to lower the number of smokers and stop underage children from starting is to place graphic images and warnings on tobacco products and advertising, and to ban any flavored cigarettes. Except menthols [true story].

I trained like a Jedi master for the LSAT- with Steve’s LSAT Blog as my lightsaber, of course- so I can’t even type that summary without my brain pumping out fifty different questions and counter-arguments that all bottleneck somewhere in my Broca’s Area (look it up, lazy). I’ll just step out for a second, have a smoke, and come back so we can start in!

Ahh, that’s the stuff.

Now, let’s start with the immortal words of me:

“All reasoning starts with questioning.” –Caleb Shreves

You’re welcome. Here are a few obvious questions that popped into my head while typing that summary:

1. Why is there an economic impact from healthcare and lost productivity?
2. Is tobacco advertising responsible for people smoking? If so, to what degree?
3. How are tobacco companies targeting minors?
4. Why is regulation and, specifically, using graphic warnings an effective deterrent to smoking?
5. Why should legal adult practices be regulated by Government?
6. Why does banning flavored tobacco lower smoking rates?
7. How is “lost productivity” defined and measured?

Add a few of your own. Go ahead, I’ll wait. Now let’s take some of the questions I posed and think of how an LSAT test-maker might think to incorporate them. Here are some easy ideas:

Strengthen: Other countries have implemented similar policies and found them to be effective in deterring tobacco use.

Necessary Assumption: Flavored cigarettes are attractive to minors

Conclusion (inference): The fewer minors who start smoking, the more money the country will save.

Try a few on your own! You should be able to come up with quite a few of these easy ones pretty quickly, and you’ll likely face a few test questions built off these types of low-hanging fruit. But let’s take it up a notch and expand some of these arguments to make them a little more complex. Here’s something based off my dad’s cynical argument, which I call “dying is cheaper.”

End of life care is, by far, the most expensive piece of the healthcare pie. Tobacco users die, on average, ten years sooner than non-users. Thus, tobacco users are doing everyone else a favor.

Great work, dad. Any questions spring to mind when you read that argument? How about a sample LSAT setup to help you out:

Dr. A: “Healthcare costs should be a primary concern when dealing with tobacco regulation. Hence, we should find ways to reduce the number of smokers.”

Dr. B: “I agree that healthcare costs are a primary concern, which is why I encourage more people to start smoking.”

See any conflicting assumptions here? This could be the start of a “the two doctors disagree about…” type question, or a “which statement, if true, would lend support to Dr. A’s conclusion…” type question. Now that we’re this far, let’s scramble the answer up, LSAT style, and get tricksy. Consider which Dr. would be validated by the following evidence:

“Recent studies have shown that treatments for certain common long-term illnesses requiring regular hospital care increase in total healthcare cost at an exponential rate as the person with the illness ages.”

Tricksy indeed! Read the setup again; the doctors are disagreeing about whether the costs of a tobacco-related death outweigh the costs of living an additional 10 years, tobacco-free. If common illnesses cost a crap-ton more every year as you age, then people dying early would, in fact, probably save money! This would be good for Dr. B (surprise- that was dad’s side of the argument!). But you can see how a few questions about an argument, combined with some assumptions, and sprinkled with fuzzy language can give you a pretty nasty LSAT question.

Finally, let’s work together and come up with something really nasty. How about we start with the FDA’s argument about minors:

A primary reason that minors begin using tobacco is the prevalence of advertising they are exposed to. Thus, we should require that tobacco advertisements on billboards and posters contain gruesome and graphic pictures of the consequences of tobacco use.

Allllllrighty then, FDA. What are the assumptions here? Well, first we would assume that minors actually see tobacco advertising, right? Do they? We would need to assume that the advertising that minors see actually affects whether or not they use tobacco wouldn’t we? Why would graphic images stop a minor from smoking? Don’t minors see graphic images on TV and in video games every day? What if studies showed that minors actually become desensitized by graphic imagery and were more likely to use tobacco if this policy were in place? Asking questions like this can immediately help point out the assumptions of any argument- and, accordingly, help you determine how an LSAT question might be framed by them.

Fun (and true) fact: tobacco brands that are heavily-advertised are much more likely to be used by minors than adults. But what if this were reversed? If minors were less likely than adults to smoke heavily-advertised brands, wouldn’t that mean that the advertising doesn’t affect them? (if you’re questioning even this, then you are well on your way to true LSAT dominance). Going with this theme, I would expect a test answer to include a convoluted piece of evidence that showed a link between advertised brands and what minors actually smoked. For starters, we could weaken the FDA’s argument with a statement like:

“A recent study of smokers aged 12-16 found them to have a distinct preference for Brand X cigarettes, a brand that advertises its products far less than its area competitors.”

Okay, we can grasp that. Kids smoke even without the advertising, so advertising ain’t a big deal like the FDA said. But let’s step out farther and imagine some of the fiendish tricks used by the LSAT hobgoblins. How would the LSAT refute this last statement?

“Legislation passed in the last year has forced Brand X to dramatically reduce its advertising budget.”

Now hold on a minute. Maybe these kids had already been exposed to Brand X! Timeline trickery, that is (and one that the LSAT uses sometimes, trust me). Imagine a “which answer, if true, would provide the LEAST support for…” type question on this, using evidence to prove something that is counter to what’s true in the real world, couching it in fuzzy language, and throwing a trick answer in to boot. You can see how the LSAT can take simple things and make them vastly more complicated. Reminds me of my girlfriend.

What’s the point of all this hypothetical nonsense you ask? The more you can quickly and automatically pre-form arguments and assumptions in your mind, the better you’ll do on test day. If every day you take an issue like this and spend 10-15 minutes thinking of how you would create test questions, you will make neural pathways in your brain that will give you X-ray logic-vision when reading new and unfamiliar arguments.

And that sounds good, right? Plus, you might just start seeing the issues you encounter in daily life in a new light, too. Like smoking. Whatever your views on smoking happen to be, I challenge you to look critically at the reasoning behind the decisions made by our Government on this issue. If you can come away saying “nope, looks like they’re air-tight!” then good luck on test day. But I would wager my Xbox and all my Halo games that you’ll at least be a bit more skeptical of these policies and the true rationale behind them if you take the time to examine them. And I don’t wager my Halo-goodness lightly, either.

Caleb

P.S. While I encourage you read the full text of H.R. 1256, I can’t resist showing you item #4 in the “findings” section of the bill:

“Virtually all new users of tobacco products are under the minimum legal age to purchase such products.”

I started smoking at age 26. Should I call my senator?