Critique about essay structure and communication style:
Walking through statistical issues with papers on the D-K effect is an interesting topic. However, most readers (me included) aren’t intimately familiar with the details of this literature. Because of this the format of this essay, which is being tricky over and over again, makes it really hard for me to parse or learn about the D-K effect. This is an important issue, because you’re writing a blog post to critique peer reviewed literature, so you have to do extra work to build credibility by convincingly walking us through the flawed reasoning. Because of the “tricky” style of the essay, it simultaneously provokes me to want to understand the issue better and yet makes me not want to use this essay as a resource for building that understanding.
It seems like the essay is possibly meant less to be an explainer and more to string together links and reactions to the literature on this topic. However, it’s not obvious that that’s the case, and the essay contains a lot of very bold, definitive judgments on what’s right and wrong in the literature. These judgments are easy to grasp and remember, but the oblique reasoning process is not. Over time, I’ve come to really put my guard up against essays like this, because I don’t want my brain to get polluted by an aura of confident judgmental rhetoric with no true understanding of the underlying issue.
There’s no particular reason I’m flagging the issue on this essay in particular, BTW, but this is my primary reaction to it.
Critique about essay structure and communication style:
Walking through statistical issues with papers on the D-K effect is an interesting topic. However, most readers (me included) aren’t intimately familiar with the details of this literature. Because of this the format of this essay, which is being tricky over and over again, makes it really hard for me to parse or learn about the D-K effect. This is an important issue, because you’re writing a blog post to critique peer reviewed literature, so you have to do extra work to build credibility by convincingly walking us through the flawed reasoning. Because of the “tricky” style of the essay, it simultaneously provokes me to want to understand the issue better and yet makes me not want to use this essay as a resource for building that understanding.
It seems like the essay is possibly meant less to be an explainer and more to string together links and reactions to the literature on this topic. However, it’s not obvious that that’s the case, and the essay contains a lot of very bold, definitive judgments on what’s right and wrong in the literature. These judgments are easy to grasp and remember, but the oblique reasoning process is not. Over time, I’ve come to really put my guard up against essays like this, because I don’t want my brain to get polluted by an aura of confident judgmental rhetoric with no true understanding of the underlying issue.
There’s no particular reason I’m flagging the issue on this essay in particular, BTW, but this is my primary reaction to it.