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Someone recently showed me some LSAT practice questions and I cannot get over how amazing of a test it is. If you're like I was and not familiar with the style, I encourage you to look some up---either some quick internet search or do some short test-prep site quiz like this.
I have never before seen something that I more wished the general population was better at. Can you imagine a world in where significantly more people had the reading comprehension and understanding of arguments to answer these accurately? It feels like 90% of what's annoying about politics and political discussion would just disappear---all the obnoxious bad-faith argumentative games wouldn't work anymore because everyone would see through them, we'll actually be able to have national discussions about substance instead of the nonsense that happens now, etc. Why is studying LSAT-style questions not part of the mandatory school curriculum? Wouldn't pushing for this be one of the best ways to "raise the sanity waterline"?
Now for the controversial point---I've also never been so tempted by the idea of a poll test. I know the two main reasons why disenfranchising a large group is bad: first, democracy isn't about making the best decision, but about making sure that every group feels heard by the system so that they don't violently rebel when it decides against them. Second, it's important to give the rulers of a country incentives to keep everyone happy so that institutions stay inclusive for all the standard Why Nations Fail reasons. However, I never thought I would see a test that so perfectly measures the skills needed to accurately judge political arguments! Maybe if we're in the world where practicing the questions is part of everyone's years of mandatory schooling and the LSAT-score threshold is low enough that almost anyone could cross it if they took that part of school seriously?
Managed to do the questions thanks to @phailyoor's helpful copypasta below and the answer key someone posted still further. I got a 5/5 in the end, though the third one seemed quite ambiguous (insofar as none of the answers were a perfect fit, and several were almost the same level of imperfect).
Perhaps curiously, of all the tests I've encountered, I found the questions pretty similar to the reading comprehension section of the JLPT (obviously only useful for a small part of the audience here, but e.g. questions 8-12 of the N1 sample). They really seem to like doing a particular format where you are given a half-page essay by some cultural figure on some random topic (like crow intelligence, or whether historiography is too focussed on flashy happenings rather than the effort that went into preventing any such happenings) and then have to pick out one of four sentences that is most representative of the core premise or argument. Given that the JLPT seems to be required for foreigners to be employed by many Japanese companies, it seems notable that they would essentially sneak in a verbal intelligence filter on immigrants in this way.
I also got 5/5 but #1 had me nervous. It was so straightforward that I felt like there had to be some sort of trick I was missing.
In regards to #3, it’s marked as “logical reasoning” but I think it’s more of a “common sense” question. They want you to predict the most likely response that a reasonable person would give to this irl.
5/5! I had a similar fear of "this seems too easy I must be missing something" for some of these.
I do think for #3,C is actually the most logical answer, putting common sense aside. It's the most direct flaw with the union member's argument.
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