Trent Teti experiences equal parts horror and fascination when he realizes that he's taught more LSAT courses, to more people, than just about anyone else in the world. At some point along the way, he started an LSAT company called Blueprint that does the same. Teaching LSAT classes provides a fairly strange vantage point, and Trent is repeatedly confronted with a rather narrow cross-section of humanity (aspiring lawyers) during what they believe to be the most stressful time of their lives (which will, no doubt, be dwarfed by future harrowing events the like of which they have yet to conceive).
The cyclical nature of LSAT preparation forces a blighted few, Trent Teti included, to answer the same questions regarding the LSAT ad infinitum. Part of the motivation for Trent Teti's blog is to set forth some provisional answers regarding these issues. Another motive is to address some broader cultural issues that may be of interest to students studying for the LSAT. Some of these include the nature of genius, the probable LSAT scores of characters on LOST, and issues regarding the lives of lawyers in general.
The last motive is to assure that Trent Teti avoids working on a languishing dissertation in philosophy he's fairly certain won’t write itself.
As for the rest, Trent enjoys Illy cafe, motorcycles, and Apple Computers. He's either indifferent toward or actively dislikes most everything else.
In particular, Mr. Teti loathes certain expressions (which are sadly in vogue of late) that express trivial truth, such as “It is what is is.” Trent also dies a little when he hears locutions that are apparently devoid of any content, such as “whatever.” Lastly, he's annoyed by the use of expressions that strive at meaning, but apply improper predicates, such as “Let’s be real,” (as if we could be unreal), when what is meant is that we ought to try to be authentic or sincere.
Fallacy Index
Like many of you, we tuned into this evening’s Republican Presidential Debate eagerly expecting a saloon brawl. And like many of you, we were a bit disappointed.
fallacy watch / News / Presidential Election
As you probably know, since we prepare people to take the LSAT, identifying invalid arguments is something of a professional occupation for us. When particularly egregious arguments seep into our social discourse unimpeded, we at Blueprint believe it’s our duty to point our their illogic. It’s kind of like our version of picking up trash on the street when we see it drifting by.
Elections / LSAT / LSAT fallacies / proposition 23 / Trent Teti / voting
When studying for the LSAT it’s easy to think fallacies are akin to other formal definitions and procedures we learn in college; important for a narrowly specified purpose in the short term, but otherwise largely irrelevant to our lives.
At Blueprint, our view is different. We think fallacious reasoning exists outside of the rarified world of the LSAT and that, at times, it can rear its ugly head and infect even the most level-headed of us.
Various circumstances encourage poor reasoning, but chief among these are politics and religion. Our etiquette conveniently holds that we shouldn’t talk about such things so that we publicly justify our inchoate intuitions about the existence of god or the wisdom of universal health care.
LSAT
After days and days of serious intellectual toil, we’ve come up with our analysis of the October 2010 LSAT.
Overall, it seems that logic games were of a more uniform difficulty than in years past, reading comprehension was pretty hard, and logical reasoning was generally pretty average in terms of difficulty. We can’t go into too much more detail for reasons of national security and LSAC’s licensing agreements, but for slightly more in depth analysis (including a brief explanation of the driver/cars game), check out Matt’s video covering the ins and outs of the test after the jump (or in the featured video tab on the right hand side of the page).
Current Events / fallacies / News
Just when you wondered why in the world someone would pay $400 for a pretty phone that breaks easily and gets terrible reception… The dating website OkCupid recently released the results of a shocking new study. It turns out that people who own iPhones have had more sexual partners than people who own other smart
Lawyer / legal life / Miscellaneous / News
Rumors about the legal profession’s demise have become so common lately that one can almost be faulted for not knowing its dismal state. The WSJ legal blog and Above the Law were among the earliest and most vocal critics of the profession’s future, but recently even the mainstream media have started banging the drum. Both the Los Angeles and New York Times have run a variety of stories about the dearth of jobs for law school graduates, their mountains of non-dischargeable debt, and the responsibility law schools have to reduce their admissions.
Lawyer / legal life / Miscellaneous
The second episode of The Deep End aired last night and whereas the premiere was so bad it was good, this week’s installment was merely mundane.
After watching the last week’s episode, I’d expected that the show might turn into a drinking game, in which after each legal error that a seven year-old could spot one took a shot (though one would probably have died of alcohol poisoning by the first commercial break). However, this week simply built on last week’s ridiculous assumptions and failed to add further hilarity.
Current Events / Lawyer / legal life / Miscellaneous
Last night ABC aired its new legal drama, The Deep End. I could argue that The Deep End demonstrates that screenwriting as a serious craft is dead, but if you’ve watched any three-letter network lately (other than HBO), you know that already.
Every decade or so, someone in TV land who narrowly escaped a career in law decides the world would be fascinated by watching the lives of lawyers. In a better world, we would cast stones at such people and leave their utterly implausible and trumped up shows unwatched. In our world, LA Law was a Thursday night staple for nearly a decade in the late 80’s and Ally McBeal helped establish Fox as a serious network in the late 90’s.
applications / students / Tips
I wanted to write about why the couple that crashed the President’s first state dinner should be strung up and publicly flogged for days on end. But editorial rejected it because they wanted to me write something about the LSAT.
So then I offered to write an analysis of why our failure to punish a couple who crash a President’s state dinner in hopes of landing a Bravo reality show indicates that the post WWII American empire is dead, dead, dead. That was rejected by editorial on grounds that it was the same as the first story (which it kind of was, but still), and because they wanted something about the LSAT.
Miscellaneous
I had already written the following when I read Colin Elzie’s rebuke, published late yesterday. He claims my topic selection as wandering into irrelevance. Of course, he’s right and I must apologize. But not all of us can author seminal pieces like Elzie’s Pterodactyl Time!, an exploration of dinosaurs on the LSAT, or Outback LSAT,
