General Blog Post comments

I'll update your posts grades over spring break. I appreciate your patience.

I am impressed by the effort that some of you have been putting into your posts. Many of them are quite interesting.While I don't comment on all of them, I do read them all.

That being said I would like to see more analysis of the statistics that you're discussing. Some things you might touch upon are the issue of correlation vs. causation (which is a common issue in many of the posts), whether the source of your information has an agenda that might obscure the information they're presenting, or the reasons or background of the statistics.

For example, many of the posts that deal with social issues use sources from groups that have a vested interest and use statistics to persuade you that their position is correct. Sometimes they make good use of statistics and sometimes not.

A good example was the shark attack post or the Airplane Crashes Not As Likely As You May Think post, both of which dealt with the availability bias, where we overestimate the probability of an event happening if it appears frequently in the media. The posts pointed this out (even if they didn't use the word "availability bias".

Remember, you're not graded for the content of the posts, but this might be a way of getting more out of them. I'll try to point out these things as they come up.

So 1) attempt to try to understand what you're putting in the posts, 2) try to keep your posts from being too long (250 - 300 words is pretty good), 3) try not to simply copy and paste from a website. I'm more interested in your understanding / interpretation rather than knowing you can copy and paste.