AnneOminous

A better way would be to make the criticisms more concrete.

What isn't "concrete" about it? I think the whole article is an exercise in stating the obvious, to those who have had basic education in statistics. Stricter correlations tend to be more linear. A broader spectrum of data points is pretty much by definition "fatter". I don't see how this is actually very instructive. And to be honest, I don't see how I could be much more specific.

Where, and what did they say? We cannot know what better resources you know of unless you tell

"At the extremes, other factors may weigh more."

Nothing that hasn't been said before, and in my opinion better.

I don't particularly like your "ellipse" generalization, either, because it's just wrong. We already know a perfect correlation would be linear. We already know a lesser correlation is "fatter". Bringing ellipses into the issue is just an intuitive, illustrative fiction, which I really don't appreciate very much because it's not particularly informative and it isn't scientifically sound at all.

Please don't misundersta... (read more)

Quote: "The third perhaps is especially tricky. If you "re-express your target’s position ... clearly" you remove the obfuscation that concealed the gap. Now what? Leaving the gap in clear view creates a strawman. Attempting to fill it draws a certain amount of attention to it; you certainly fail the ideological Turing test because you are making arguments that you opponents don't make."

Just no. An argument is an argument. It is complete or not. If there is a gap in the argument, in most cases there are two eventualities: (a) the leap i... (read more)