they could pick up some skills but i am sure they will get something out of advanced math! i mean the stats speak for themselves, if math majors have hilariously the edge on liberal arts people on the lsat they must be doing something that helps them! and if a lot of smart people in law school think lsat's very mathematical logical games are important enough to exclude people from a prestigious university or not, it must mean that math after all is very useful for logic, dont you think?
oh come on you even stated it like it was an lsat question WHAT IS THE ASSUMPTION THE AUTHOR IS MAKING.
first off hilariously the edge? I looked this up and found a jstor link:
http://www.jstor.org/pss/1182928as I'm not a student tho, I can't see this. what I did see I saw in google:
Economics placed third behind physics/math and philos- ophy/religion in a group of 29 disciplines in both years.
whaaaaat? PHILOSOPHY AND RELIGION has beaten poli sci and crimonology? does this mean GOD helped them do well?
there are all sorts of other factors to consider. for one a lot of people who take the LSAT don't really study for it. like they might take a practice test. but you know who does study for shit extensively and is used to trick questions more than analyzing a passage? your math majors. it is possible math majors have been trained to take tests like this. when's the last time a poli sci student had an exam without an essay portion? the LSAT has an essay portion btw; it doesn't count at all. it's used by law schools who want to see if your score of 168 means you're on the side of 165+ or just a lucky 165- so they read that essay.
I can't account for why philosophy and religion would be second but if it is doesn't this kind of put the lie to math majors just doing better in logic sections? ALSO: we are talking the LSAT. this isn't day to day logic, altho it's a step more applicable than a truth table. these are still phrased like word problems. don't forget that Pascal is famous for among many things his "proof of god's existence" that everyone disproved in a few minutes of hearing it. why would a really famous mathematician like Pascal or Euler still believe in God? or to WITTGENSTEIN IT, why would they even bother as analyzing god through mathematics should be an impossibility? these are still logic, but they missed it. and I know these are a few examples, but we can see loads of mathematicians acting just as illogically as the rest of us.
like we've got some sort of a static here where you say MATH HELPS LOGIC and I say NOT IN REALITY and we're splitting the hair as to how important this could be. like even the LSAT logic game doesn't happen so much; maybe we go out to eat with five friends and one hates Mexican food and the other doesn't want pizza and the other wants cheap but that's not like MARMOT WON'T EAT WITH STEVE AND STEVE LOVES PIZZA AND CHARLES WILL ONLY EAT TO THE LEFT OF JORGE.
so if we approached them with a problem like:
"more people think of tomatoes as vegetables than they do fruit. they also cook tomatoes the same way they cook vegetables. however, biology has determined the tomato is a fruit. a tomato vender is being charged a vegetable tax by a store. should he be charged?"
will the mathematician figure out a right answer? or would that skillset even matter in a real logical dilemma? when we are faced with the prisoner's dilemma, do we need to KNOW the prisoner's dilemma and all the history about it, or do we already know it would be more useful to cooperate? does the prisoner's dilemma even ever occur? can pure mathematic logic apply EVER in real life? or is it more useful to know some logic and then while you might not know you're doing the contrapositive, you might still know it's true?
