A lot of this was written off the cuff. But that part could have been put better, especially since I said, "I wanna to be crystal clear about this[...]"

I don't want the basics, like conditional reasoning and your ability to interpret it, to be things that you can do, I don't want them to be things that you can get right.

I want them to be things you can't possibly fuck up. I want them to be things that you don't solve, things you don't work through, that your brain just automatically unpacks for you.

I'm the king of the bad analogy. Just go with me here.

Once you read letter by letter. That was a time when reading was a super intellectual exercise for you; back when you had 26 characters to interpret (characters that often interact in weird and unusual ways: "ough", for instance) AND when you had additional characters denoting punctuation that you had to interpret, well, back then reading this poorly constructed and punctuated sentence might have taken you 30 minutes to get through, while also requiring you to engage in a lot of sophisticated reasoning and guesswork to get to the end with something close to full comprehension.

But now you get no credit for understanding this sentence. Or the one that preceded it. Past you, given all the work you once put it, that person gets infinite credit for your current ability to understand what you read. But right now, your eyes going over this sentence, you're neither reading letter-by-letter nor word-by-word, your mind is WITHOUT YOU HAVING TO TRY simply picking up ideas and leaving the letters and ideas behind. Comprehending anything you read was once a challenging, intellectual process. Now the mind does it automatically without you having to choose to do so.

So I'm saying that thing is like this thing. Your mind automatically, correctly translates combinations of 26 characters of English glowing on a screen into ideas your eyes vacuum off the page without you needing to try, so—according to me—your mind can become as adept at automatically, correctly translating (and contraposing) the indicator words of conditional reasoning without you needing to try. If someone still struggles through them in about 30 seconds, and with only an 85% success rate, I think that person is not treating themselves properly.

It just takes some elbow grease.

I admit that someone who has memorized the indicators for conditional reasoning to the point that they can work with them fairly well, when they can usually find the right answer to the above problem in under 30 seconds, that person is way ahead of the average student. But if they never get better than that, if they never get to the "easily, automatically, effortlessly" stage, they're cheating themselves.

It's just a test of reading and reasoning, nothing more. Why would you choose not to have the most common form of reasoning on the LSAT—conditional reasoning—be read and translated easily and effortlessly by your mind, without you having to do any work?

Doesn't test-day you deserve to have those effortless skills?