Jose L. Duarte
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More scams

7/31/2014

84 Comments

 
Lewandowsky, S., Oberauer, K., & Gignac, G. E. (2013), titled their paper thusly:

NASA faked the moon landing—therefore, (climate) science is a hoax: an anatomy of the motivated rejection of science.

 And in their abstract they say:

"Endorsement of free markets also predicted the rejection of other established scientific findings, such as the facts that HIV causes AIDS and that smoking causes lung cancer."

This is all false, and the paper should be retracted. It should've been retracted by the authors already.


First, the title. It's not metaphorical or anything. It plainly describes a relationship between believing the moon landing was a hoax and believing climate science is a hoax, even specifying a causal direction. These are variables that were measured in this study – again the title is not a metaphor, is quite specific and descriptive. What do the data say? Well, out of 1145 participants, only 10 believed the moon landing was a hoax (likely including fakes.) We'll pause here to note that 10 in this context is essentially zero, and we couldn't validly infer links between moon hoaxism and anything else from that number. But it's worse – a majority of these 10 reject the idea that climate science is a hoax – 7 out of the 10. Only 3 participants out of 1145 endorsed the moon hoax and the climate science hoax.

Therefore, the title is false. That's a big problem. (We shouldn't decompose those 10 people, and I do so only out of illustrative necessity – the title would be nuts even if the majority of the 10 believed climate science was a hoax.) The title is not only false, it declares the opposite relationship suggested by the authors' trivial data for it. If the authors meant to say something about moon hoaxism based those 10 people, a more accurate title, given their data, would be: "NASA Faked the Moon Landing–Therefore (Climate) Science is Reliable."

The title being wildly false is bad enough, but it's made worse by the fact that it slanders millions of people as believing that the moon landing was a hoax. They don't believe any such thing, according to the authors' own data. Slandering one's participants is a serious ethical breach.

That should be enough to retract – it was just made up. No scientist should ever get away with that, with just making stuff up under the banner of science. But there's more...

Now to the abstract...

Out of 1145 participants, only 16 reject the claim that HIV causes AIDS. Out of 176 free marketeers*, only 9 reject the HIV-AIDS link – that is, 95% agreed that HIV causes AIDS. There were fake participants in the study that can be identified by their response patterns – those trivial 9 and 16 figures will drop when we delete the fakes.

Out of 1145 participants, only 11 reject the idea that smoking causes cancer. Out of 176 people who endorsed free markets, only 7 rejected the claim that smoking causes cancer. 96% of them agreed that smoking causes lung cancer. (They should've said "increases the risk of", because some intellectual types will be sticklers on that, might struggle with their answers – see the footnote.)

They didn't disclose this in the paper. They didn't tell us. Nor did they clean the fakes from their data, fakes which end up driving some of the key results. They did the opposite – they claimed effects based on these numbers, in their headline, their abstract... Their effects were artifacts of improper statistical inferences, driven by variance between "agree" and "strongly agree" answers to those science items – the opposite of "rejection".

Let's look at the whole picture. This was a scattered online study posted at political climate-related websites. Anyone in the world could participate, and we have no idea who they were. Here's the endorsement count for each of the conspiracies in their conspiracy variable, and the rejection count for the HIV and smoking facts. This is out of 1145 participants:

Oklahoma City bombing conspiracy: 289
JFK assassination conspiracy: 247
Coca-Cola conspiracy (don't ask): 151
Pearl Harbor attack conspiracy: 146
MLK assassination conspiracy: 90
New World Order conspiracy: 70
9-11 attacks conspiracy: 69
Roswell UFO conspiracy: 47
SARS disease conspiracy: 42
Area 51 UFO conspiracy: 35
Princess Diana assassination conspiracy: 25
Reject HIV-AIDS link: 16
Reject smoking-lung cancer link: 11
Moon landing hoax conspiracy: 10


Why is their title based on the variable for which they have the least data, essentially no data?

Why in the abstract are they linking free market views to incredibly damaging positions that again, they have no data for?

The answer is that they ignored the trivial numbers and ran linear correlations on data for which it was not appropriate. Their analyses are picking up on variance between people who agree that HIV causes AIDS and those who "strongly agree" that HIV causes AIDS (the same for the smoking item, and for the moon item, in reverse.) The items all used this substantively dichotomous 4-point scale:

strongly disagree (1); disagree (2); agree (3); strongly agree (4)

In the abstract, where they say endorsement of free markets predicts "rejection" of established scientific facts, like that HIV causes AIDS and that smoking causes lung cancer, they are converting agreement with those facts into "rejection". This is an egregious example of an all too common practice in social science – using linear correlation statistics to conflate direction with destination. 

This is what happened: Almost everyone agreed that HIV causes AIDS, and smoking causes lung cancer. The dissenters (11, 16) are essentially zero in the context of a wide-open, contaminated-by-fakes online study with 1145 participants. And, most free market endorsers even said they "strongly" agreed with these basic science facts, as did most people who disagreed with free markets. But "most" varied significantly between the two groups. The former was 65%, and the latter 89%. So about 30% of free marketeers said Agree instead of Strongly Agree, which is well within their rights, while about 10% of anti-free market people (the vast majority of the sample) did so. (Some people dispositionally avoid the extreme points on survey items, the stronglys and extremelys – I have no idea if there's a link between free market views and avoiding extreme opinions, but the free market scale here was terrible so we probably can't take anything from this.) That difference in levels of agreement, in saying Agree vs Strongly Agree drove the statistics they reported. When they get a negative correlation between free market endorsement and agreeing with those items, it's driven by that variance in agree vs strongly agree. They took that negative correlation and said free market endorsement predicts "rejection" of those facts, which is simply false.

Implicitly, in their language, they took this non-continuous 4-point scale of disagreement vs. agreement and converted it to a continuous (and inverse) "rejection" variable, where 3 (agree) is a greater level of "rejection" than 4 (strongly agree). We can't do that (and I have a methods paper coming soon that delves into such issues more deeply.) We see it sometimes in social science, but this case is egregious because they had virtually zero cases of actual rejection, they didn't tell us, and they falsely linked free market views to rejection of facts that those participants very strongly endorsed. Recapping:

  1. 95% of people who endorsed free markets agreed that HIV causes AIDS. (167/176) Some of the 9 dissenters are fakes.
  2. 99% of people who disagreed with free markets agreed that HIV causes AIDS. (962/969)
  3. The sample is heavily skewed toward people who disagree with free markets.
  4. As we saw above, almost no one disagreed with the HIV item, or the smoking item, or endorsed the moon hoax. Given the wide open and vulnerable nature of study, we have to refrain from making inferences from 7 or 9 people out of 176.
  5. We cannot quibble with Agree or Disagree. No one is obligated to "strongly" agree or disagree with our scale items. (Simple agreement / disagreement might even be more rational, given that a lot of participants would not have heard of some of these conspiracies.) If people think there's something interesting in the fact that 89% of anti-free market people selected Strongly Agree, while only 65% of free market endorsers selected it, while essentially everyone in both camps chose some level of positive agreement, they should research it, do some IRT and so forth. But there's nothing in this data that will tell us anything about that.


This was a wide open online study mostly posted at environmentalist websites. We have no idea who the participants were – they could be from anywhere in the world, no demographics were reported. The paper implies some of them were minors, that 10 was the cutoff age. (And their subsequent paper at PLOSOne has self-reported minors in the data – 7 of them. Confusing.)

We know there are fake participants, or we should be very confident that there are. Let me introduce you to the all 1s guy (or girl) – this person answered 1 to every scale item, even those that were reverse coded (a 1 meant the opposite for those items, was converted to a 4). Since 3 of the 5 free market items are reverse scored, this person counted as a net endorser of markets, and of course gave a 1 to the HIV and smoking items. They show up as high leverage, naturally, and there are other likely fakes. When you only have 11 or 16 people who reject these facts, fakes are a very big deal. 11 or 16 out of 1145 is already walk-away data. Any whiff of fakes, which was so easy here, and we definitely don't make claims aboout any political camp "rejecting" these facts. (These issues clearly aren't in play out there in society – very few people disagree with the HIV-AIDS link or smoking and lung cancer. We knew that already. We have background data, polls, etc.)

A logistic regression would be the appropriate analysis here, if there was significant data, since these are substantively dichotomous variables, and heavily skewed. But since we only have 16/1145 rejecting the AIDS item, 11/1145 rejecting the smoking, any regression is irresponsible. When you run a wide-open online study that anyone in the world can participate in, or sabotage, you cannot make inferences from such trivial numbers. It doesn't matter if a logistic regression of the HIV or smoking items on free market endorsement (as a continuous variable) shows a significant effect. It's not significant – p-values don't matter if you have no data. We know a search for fakes will reduce those trivial numbers – there's just no way the claims in the title, abstract, or body of the paper can be supported with this data (and eliminating the likely fakes eliminates the significant logistic regression coefficients – try it.)

The title is wildly false as a desciption of any reality or profile of person – it's also quite defamatory and unethical. There's no data, no analyses, to support it. (10 moon hoaxists total, including fakes, and only 3 of them endorsed a climate hoax. That means the title is false.) The abstract is false in linking free market endorsement to "rejection" of these uncontroversial facts, and will only become more false if we clean the data. The body of the paper repeats these false associations, speaks of "denial", and conceals this stark data in overly complex SEM models that we will not be able to validly reproduce (longer story.) Virtually none of their analyses will survive evaluation. This paper must be retracted. The fact that that these false links are very damaging to people, to large swaths of the population, makes an even stronger case for retraction (if we needed one.) When a headline is false, when an abstract is false, when a paper is false, we must retract that paper. When it smears innocent people and falsely attributes ludicrous and damaging beliefs to them, there is no excuse to not vacate it. It's unethical to invite people to participate in a study and then do this to them.

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NOTE: There's a lot of older content below. I'm iteratively updating this post, and will make it much shorter and cleaner soon. I just don't have a lot of time right now – my own research is more important to me. I'm not happy with the quality of some of the writing below, but I'm keeping all the older content for now because there are some non-redundant points below (although much of it is redundant.)




The researchers have had two years to come clean, to admit that there was no significant data regarding belief in the moon hoax or rejection of the HIV-AIDS or smoking-lung cancer links. They've had two years to remove the very-likely-to-be-scam participants identitifed by people who have looked at the data, which will further reduce those trivial numbers at the bottom, and they've not done so. I'm not sure they even talk about it. Lewandowsky still won't tell the public that fewer than 10 participants rejected the moon hoax or HIV and smoking claims – after all this time Lewandowsky is still evading those basic facts and distracting his readers by bragging about the p-values of invalid statistics. Pearson correlations on essentially dichotomous data skewed 1135 to 10? The paper should have been retracted by the authors long ago.

We're not going to be able to do anything with 11 and 16 people out of a sample of 1145. Or with 7 or 9 people out of a sample of 176. Moreover, when you have 1145 participants, and 11 or 16 or 10 or 7 agree or disagree with something, we don't know what that is, even if it was a cleanly controlled study instead of the scattered online study it was – we certainly don't know it's "denial", as they assume in the paper. It could be several different kinds of error. You cannot declare a link to anything based on such numbers. To do so is a scam, made worse by the fact that they didn't tell us, and reported none of the diagnostics that you would need in this case. It's amazing that they didn't tell us. It's incredible that they claimed an effect.

Moreover, their analytical methods are wrong for this data – they shouldn't be treating these variables as continuous, or using linear regression based methods. If they had screened out the scam participants and run a logistic regression, the effects would disappear (I've done it.) This would matter more if they had data.

One participant answered 1 to every item, including conspiracy endorsement and the HIV and smoking facts (which are in the opposite direction of the conspiracy items), then 0 for every question asking for an estimate of the consensus on each of HIV, smoking and CO2. Another participant answered 1 (strongly disagree) to all three science claims, and then gave extremely high consensus estimates for each of them (95%, 95%, and 98%). Perhaps he or she was showing remarkable, dispassionate integrity, acknowledging every consensus as a matter of descriptive reality, but strongly disagreeing with every single one. Perhaps he or she is a neo-Kuhnian, but I have my doubts. In any case, when you're making impossible inferences from 7, 9, 11, or 16 observations in a sample of 1145 online participants, planted individual cases among those 7 or 11 should matter a great deal to you (in this alternate fantasy universe where we would even do anything with such trivial numbers), and it's not good that the authors apparently did no checking. How can you publish data that is so obviously contaminated?

Imagine we had 70 of 176 free marketeers rejecting the smoking-lung cancer link. In that case, we might be able to generate a valid correlation, depending on some diagnostics, but it would be an example of a recurrent, although not common, problem – reporting a linear correlation or regression to imply that people high on one variable are high on the other, when the majority of them are not. For example, self-esteem can predict bullying, but the majority of high self-esteem people, perhaps a very large majority, aren't bullies. Our way of describing effects is problematic, and certainly the way they're understood by the public is – it relies on a rationalistic, proprietary and often confusing definition of "predict". But here we don't even have that problem. We don't have a minority of 70 out of 176 free marketeers driving a misleading correlation. We have 7. We have nothing, and they kept that from us.

(Note that they also say they allowed minors to participate. "
An additional 161 responses were eliminated because the respondent’s age was implausible (< 10 or > 95 years old)..."? Are there 10 and 12 and 16 year olds in this study? They imply it. Misprint? Note also that if 161 participants claimed to be less than 10 or older than 95, this probably tells us a lot about the sketchiness of this study. How many of you have ever had more than 10% of your sample give an out-of-range age? Actually, the fact that 161 people gave <10 or >95 ages suggests some number would've given ages of 10 - 17, and are still in the data. Maybe the 10 was supposed to be 18, but this paper has lots of weird things like that that suggest it wasn't read carefully. Why do political hit pieces get waved through like this?)

Let's go back a bit. Lewandowsky, Oberauer, Gignac titled their paper "NASA faked the moon landing—therefore, (climate) science is a hoax: an anatomy of the motivated rejection of science."

There were 10 participants, in their sample of 1145, who thought the moon landing was a hoax, and most of them did not think climate science was a hoax. The title describes a reasoning process, where a person starts by reminding themselves that the moon landing was a hoax, and "therefore" concludes that climate science is a hoax. It's a directional, even causal claim about the relation between the one belief and the other. There is no evidence of such a phenonemon in their data, even a bare association. This is fraud. Then they link free market views to rejecting the HIV-AIDS link and the smoking-lung cancer link, more bizarre beliefs that virtually no one in the study endorsed.

Back to our list. Sample: 1145 participants, sketchily recruited from politically heated climate change sites.

Oklahoma City bombing conspiracy: 289
JFK assassination conspiracy: 247
Coca-Cola conspiracy (don't ask): 151
Pearl Harbor attack conspiracy: 146
MLK assassination conspiracy: 90
New World Order conspiracy: 70
9-11 attacks conspiracy: 69
Roswell UFO conspiracy: 47
SARS disease conspiracy: 42
Area 51 UFO conspiracy: 35
Princess Diana assassination conspiracy: 25
Reject HIV-AIDS link: 16
Reject smoking-lung cancer link: 11
Moon landing hoax conspiracy: 10


They didn't talk about the conspiracies for which they had usable data, presumaby because they didn't pan out for the drive-by shooting. Some of them are negatively correlated with free market endorsement (e.g. the MLK, 9-11, and the OKC bombing conspiracies), and those correlations might have some hope of being valid, of having meaningful data underneath. Instead, they ignored those and reported completely invalid associations based on 10 or 11 participants. What else did they leave out? The Iraq War conspiracy item – they don't even mention that it was ever collected. Any guesses on how that one bent? When they wrote their title, they had a list of at least 13 conspiracy beliefs in their data, things that might be related to climate skepticism or free market views. They chose to talk about the conspiracy that had the lowest endorsement of everything in their dataset, so low that it's not even there. And most of those not-even-there moon hoaxists, 7 out of the 10, did not endorse a climate hoax (if we even want to talk about such trivial numbers, which we're going to decide we don't.) And it's such a damaging conspiracy to be associated with.

When you have no data, you tell no story. If you're talking about things that are incredibly damaging, beliefs and positions which would marginalize people in public life, you definitely tell no story when you have no data. This is the worst malpractice I've seen. It's especially bad given that these authors did not tell us about their data – they did not tell us they only had 10 moon hoaxists out of 1145 people, or 11 smoking-cancer doubters, or 16 HIV-AIDS doubters. They wrote the entire paper without telling us. And they reported no diagnostics. If fact, they reported no descriptive statistics at all, and their factor loadings are false and uniform – they don't tell us that four items in the conspiracy variable don't load well at all.

Let me touch on something else. When 16 out of 1145 people dispute that HIV causes AIDS, we don't know what that is, as I mentioned before. We have no reason to assume it's rejection/denial. It could be error. It could be the simple error of selecting the wrong response. It could be an error of knowledge. People don't know everything. In any large sample, there will be people who think the sun orbits the earth, who Abe Lincoln was President during WWII, who don't know who America won its independence from. Not everyone is an academic, recurrently exposed to scientific truths. We know from survey data that people have all sorts of quirks like this. Let's even say someone is aware of the link between HIV and AIDS. I would bet that in a large sample, you're going to find some people who think AIDS causes HIV. That's very easy to imagine -- they have the link, but somehow got the direction wrong. Some people might see "HIV causes AIDS" and think it's a trick question with the wrong order, and thus submit their disagreement. That's so easy to imagine. There's no way we can point to 10 or 11 people out of 1145 and say we know what their answers represented.

Surprisingly, climate skeptics got mad about this paper, perhaps because > 97.8% of those who think climate science is a hoax reject the moon hoax idea in Lewandowsky's own data, placing them squarely in the mainstream of humanity. So, Lewandowsky, Cook, Oberauer, and Marriott (2013) wrote a follow-up hit piece that was all about their critics. They wrote a paper that was about the critics of the first paper, the one we've just debunked. It wasn't enough to lie about people and smear them as believing things they definitely do not believe. He needed to take another swipe. The journal, Frontiers in Psychology, wisely ended up retracting that paper, which is exactly what should happen to this fraud here.

A lot of overpolitical social psychologists have rationalized discrimination against conservatives by claiming that they're loons who oppose science. Many of these lazy views are based on "research" like we have evaluated here – scam studies, in other cases rigged in more subtle ways. People need to re-evaluate their beliefs about conservatives, to be sure they don't go around saying things that are false, and should regulate their discriminatory impulses.

If we wanted to identify the people disconnected from reality in this picture, it's the social psychologists, the reviewers, the journal editors who read passages like "Endorsement of free markets also predicted the rejection of other established scientific findings, such as the facts that HIV causes AIDS and that smoking causes lung cancer" and didn't stop and wonder at the plausibility of such a thing, who evidently thought lots of people reject the HIV-AIDS link, or lots of people reject the smoking-cancer link, and that these beliefs go with endorsing free markets. They didn't bother to check. They read this title: "NASA faked the moon landing—therefore, (climate) science is a hoax: an anatomy of the motivated rejection of science", and presumably thought this was plausible, that a lot of people think the moon landing is a hoax, and that this was the springboard for climate skeptics (or hoaxists). They didn't check. If I wanted to talk about disconnect from reality, "denial" and the like, I wouldn't focus on the participants.

If with a sample of 1145 participants, you only have 10 moon hoax endorsers (including fakes; maybe 6 real ones), most of whom are not climate skeptics, and you want to be able to link moon hoax endorsement to your political foes, you have some options:

1. You can go in and fabricate a hundred moon hoax endorsements, make it correlate with climate skepticism or tax cuts or whatever, and then say "NASA faked the moon landing—therefore, (climate) science is a hoax: an anatomy of the motivated rejection of science."

2. You can leave the data alone and just say "NASA faked the moon landing—therefore, (climate) science is a hoax: an anatomy of the motivated rejection of science."

As a field, we define the first as fraud. We don't have a ready classification for the second. I don't think we should distinguish much between the two – we should view them both as fraud. The second is just lazier than the first. The authors should be investigated, obviously the paper retracted – it's a scam paper. It's not real. The title is false. The abstract is false. Many of the claims in the paper are false. The reality of the data is heavily concealed by overly compex statistics and SEM models. The authors made claims they had no right to make, and slandered their participants and the political camps to which they belong. Some of the participants might even have gotten Happy Meals in exchange for their participation. We have no idea what happened in this study. We just know there's no data pertaining to the headline or the key smears in the abstract.

This was an awful thing to do. It was damaging to innocent participants. It's unethical to do this to your participants. It is wildly unethical to invite people to participate in a study, and then do this to them. They are helping us. They are volunteering to participate in scientific research. They've take time out of their lives to help us out. And in return, we slander them? We tell the world that they believe things that they do not believe? What Lewandowsky and colleagues did here was despicable. Why would anyone participate in a social psychology study if this is what we do to them? Why would anyone participate in our research if our goal is to marginalize them in public life, to lie about them, to say that they think the moon landing was a hoax, to say they don't think HIV causes AIDS, to say they don't believe smoking causes lung cancer – when none of those things are true. Do we hate our participants?









Stats Primer:

The authors of this study conducted incorrect analyses for all their effects. I don't know what's going on at Psych Science – the stats here were amateurish and deceptive. First, the data here was go home data. If you want to link moon hoax nonsense to your political foes, and in 1145 participants there are only 10 people who endorse that hoax (fewer after you delete the fakes), only 3 of whom endorse the climate hoax idea (fewer after you delete the fakes), you go home. It's over. If you see similar trivial numbers for the HIV and smoking items, you bail. Go to a show, discover a new restaurant, think about the design of your next study. Those are go home numbers – you definitely don't write it up.

But let's say there was actual data in such a study, let's say we lived in a universe where free marketeers had deep doubts about the link between HIV and AIDS, because you know, free markets, or something.

The key DVs here were wrongly treated as continuous variables. A 4-point scale of disagreement/agreement is not a continuous variable. A scale of disagreement and agreement is special. It's not like temperature or cholesterol. Disagreement and agreement are opposites, and a 4-point scale is virtually binary. For example, agreeing that HIV causes AIDS (3 on the scale) is very, very different from disagreeing that HIV causes AIDS (2 on the scale). But strongly agreeing that HIV causes AIDS (4) is not as different from agreeing as agreeing is from disagreeing. The difference between 2 and 3 is far greater than that between 3 and 4.

It goes even deeper than that. It's not just that the 1 point difference between 2 and 3 is much larger in true quantity than the 1 point difference between 3 and 4. It's not just different in true quantity, it's different in kind. It's substantively different – agreeing with something is fundamentally different from disgreeing with something, in most cases.

At minimum, the responsible practitioner will treat such scales as ordinal, and perform ordinal regression. However, when there are only 4 points, a mere 2 for disagreeement and 2 for agreement, the responsible practitioner will in many cases treat these variables as dichotomous, since there is a profound substantive difference between agree and disagree, there is no midpoint or neutral option, and there is so little texture in a 4 point scale. Failure to treat them as dichotomous risks making wrong inferences from variance between levels of agreement, or levels of disagreement, where there is little variance across the scale. That is, you might have a situation where most or all of the variance on one side of the scale, for example between people who agree and people who strongly agree.

That's exactly what happened here, and it happens a lot. Social scientists use linear correlation invalidly sometimes, and make false inferences. (More on this in an upcoming journal article.) What social scientists sometimes do is like standing on a street corner in St. Louis, seeing a car heading west, and proclaiming "That car is going to Los Angeles". The misuse of linear correlation statistics (including SEM models so structured) is to conflate direction with destination, and it leads to a lot of false inferences and assertions.

(That there are only 4 points is not the central in the above. The central issue is the nature of the scale – it is a disagreement/agreement scale, with 4 points, which in combination suggests we treat it as dichotomous.)

The authors of this paper treated these 4-point scales as continuous, which obscured the fact that there was no significant variance across the scale – it was all on one side for the items they advertised. On the HIV item, all the action was between agree and strongly agree. On the moon item, it was all about those who disagreed and those who strongly disagreed.

When the variables in question are extremely serious matters that would damage the reputation of those who are associated with a particular position on them, the responsible practitioner will have even more reason to treat answers as dichotomous, and not hang people by the noose of their failure to click the "strongly" option on the enlightened side of the issue. No one is under any obligation to say that they strongly agree or disagree with something, and in most cases, with 4-point scales structured as these were, the researcher should be satisfied with simple agreement/disagreement.

When the distribution is so skewed that only 6 or 9 people out of 1145 endorse a view, while 1139 or 1136 reject the view (say, the moon hoax), there is even less justification to treat it as a continuous variable, and more cause to treat it as dichotomous.

The correct analysis here is logistic regression, where you would code disagreement/agreement as dichotomous, here 0 for moon hoax disagreement, and 1 for agreement. (Both levels of disagreement would be coded as 0, and both levels of agreement as 1).

Logistic regression still assumes some things about your predictor. Their free market ideology predictor was extremely non-normally distributed, heavily skewed toward people who rejected it. They did not disclose this either. They told us nothing about their data. I think the SEM assumptions would be a bigger problem – SEM assumes multivariate normality, which they did not satisfy. 85% of their participants rejected free market ideology to some degree (mean scores below the neutral midpoint of 2.5). Their acceptance of other sciences variable (two items apparently, the HIV and smoking items) lies entirely on the acceptance end, with for example only 11 out of 1145 rejecting the smoking link at any level. You would have to transform your data in such circumstances, which they apparently did not do (and again, this convsersation assumes they had meaningful data, which they did not – if after cleaning, you have 6 moon hoax people in over 1100 participants, you don't need to transform your data. You just need to go home.)

It's also unclear why they have only two items in an SEM latent variable. (There are only two items that pertain to other sciences – just the HIV and smoking items. I assume they didn't throw the consensus variables in there, since those are just descriptive assessments of percentage of consensus in various fields, and do not imply acceptance or rejection of any consensus – a number of participants rejected the HIV item for example, while later giving a 9X% figure for the consensus there.)

The SEM analyses here will have to be thrown out. The conspiracy ideation variable will also have to repaired. In the factor analysis, many items don't load well on F1, and would be discard by normal practice. (The paper should be retracted since it flatly says things, incredibly damaging things, that aren't true, in its very title and abstract, and the authors never disclosed the nature of their data, the trivial number of relevant cases, or even bothered to clean out the fake participants. It's incredible that they're so comfortable publishing fake data, and that even with the fakes, they never had anything to talk about.)

Their New World Order item is defective, and they probably lost some movement there because of it. They refer to a secret group called the New World Order. The NWO is an outcome, a state of affairs, a (new) world order, to those who promote the idea. It's not a group of people.

(Every ten minute increment spent looking at this data reveals serious problems. Look at the factor analysis for their conspiracy ideation construct. Try to reproduce their EFA, see what the loadings are, what you'd retain, and what happens to the predictions of that variable when you remove the bad items... Try to reproduce the SEM... None of this ultimately matters, since it needs to retracted for making false and defamatory claims or insinuations in the title and abstract. But they made very simple data much more complicated than it had to be, with bizarre SEM models concealing the fact that there's nothing to talk about. They even say incredible things in the discussion, as though free marketeers actually reject the HIV-AIDS thing and the smoking thing, stuff like this: "The fact that HIV causes AIDS, by contrast, seems of little relevance to one’s views on the free market at first glance. However, the association between ideology and rejection of the link between HIV and AIDS is in good agreement with our finding that perceived consensus and acceptance of science were associated via general factors that transcended pairwise correlations." It's incredible to go on talking like that, like you're actually talking about a thing, a phenomeon, when 95% of those people agree that HIV causes AIDS – there's nothing there, there's nothing to talk about. The data is here.)
84 Comments
Barry Woods
8/5/2014 08:19:53 pm

HI

I assume you have seen University of Western Australia's point blank refusal to release the raw data..
http://climateaudit.org/2014/03/30/uwa-vice-chancellor-johnson-circles-the-wagons/

and the major methodological error and lies in the Moon hoax paper methodology.

http://unsettledclimate.org/2014/04/05/i-requested-data-from-the-university-of-western-australia/

The factual error is:

The LOG12 methodology states that the survey was posted at the SkepticalScience website, when in fact the survey was not posted at the Skeptical Science website.

This has the following implications for LOG12, which will require corrections to the paper:

The methodology of LOG12 states that the survey was posted on the website http://www.SkepticalScience.com (1 of 8 websites) This claim appears to be falsified.

The methodology also states that the survey was potential visible to 390,000 visits from readers, including 78,000 sceptical visits at the http://www.SkepticalScience.com website. This is a key claim of the paper that the survey was potential viewed by a large, broad audience, (with a 20% sceptical audience) representative of the wider general public. As the survey never appeared at the http://www.SkepticalScience.com website this claim is falsified

Additionally, the content analysis of http://www.SkepticalScience.com is used to assert that there was a diverse representative audience across the other 7 blogs that linked to the survey. As the survey was never show at http://www.SkepticalScience.com the claim of diverse and wide readership for the whole survey, based on a content analysis of http://www.SkepticalScience is now unsupported by the evidence in the supplementary material. New content analysis will be required for the other 7 blogs, including readership traffic volumes as well
So that I may submit my invited comment to the journal of Psychological Science, may I request from the School of Psychology:

1 The raw Kwik Survey data for the LOG12 survey

2 Evidence that the survey was held at the Skeptical Science website –
(please note the Wayback machine archive, shows that it is impossible for a survey to have been held at Skeptical Science, to match the LOG12 paper claimed content analysis. Also a Skeptical Science contributor/author and moderator at the time, Mr Tom Curtis has stated publically that the survey was not held at Skeptical Science. Mr Tom Curtis has also publically stated that he contacted the authors prior to the paper publication in the journal to inform them of this error.)

3 The exact Start date/time and End date/time for the Content Analysis performed on the comments at Skeptical Science.

4 The rating criteria used by John Cook (founder of Sceptical Science) to classify the comments as sceptical or (this is not provided in the Supplementary Material for LOG12.

---------- end extract


The follow up paper Recursive Fury was an even bigger car crash for the filed of psychology-

Reply
Barry Woods
8/5/2014 08:27:54 pm

The blogs surveyed were all hardcore anti-sceptic blogs, who Lewandowsky surveyed by contacting the Planet 3.0 email group list (a private collection of bloggers) that John Cook (Skeptical Science) and Lewandowsky were involved with..

Very early criticism of the paper (1st August 2012) is listed in the comments here of Dr Adam Corners blog (he reproduced his Guardian article, about Lewandowsky's paper):
http://talkingclimate.org/are-climate-sceptics-more-likely-to-be-conspiracy-theorists/


4 of the people commenting were named in the Recursive Fury paper, (including me) the blog in question is the psychologist Dr Adam Corner, who Lewandowsky sent a pre-press release copy of the paper, and Adam duly wrote it up, uncritically in the Guardian.

in the comments Dr Paul Matthews is very harsh towards Adam's lack of 'scepticism'

Reply
Newminster
8/5/2014 08:35:23 pm

Thank God someone has at last called out Lewandowsky for the arrogant, self-opinionated adolescent this paper showed him to be.
Your conclusion says it all. Many thanks.
Unfortunately the answer to your question, "Do we hate our participants?" is, in this case, "yes". This was never intended to be genuine research. It was always an attack on those who disagreed with any part of the climate change paradigm with the intention of marginalising them at a time when the science (supposedly "settled") was becoming evermore threadbare.

Reply
Barry Woods
8/5/2014 08:35:47 pm

How many ‘actual’ scep­tics will have seen these survey, or answered them.. as this paper based its research only from hardcore ‘anti-sceptic’ blogs. -

The 7 - not 8 blogs actu­ally sur­veyed were so called ‘pro-science’ blogs ! (who are all very anti-sceptic, with a lot of very derog­atory lan­guage & rhet­oric about deniers.

http://www.skepticalscience.com
The link was never posted at Sks - Cook and Lew have lied about this

http://scienceblogs.com/deltoid/
http://tamino.wordpress.com
http://bbickmore.wordpress.com
http://www.trunity.net/uuuno/blogs/
http://scienceblogs.com/illconsidered/
http://profmandia.wordpress.com/
http://hot-topic.co.nz/

even the locals didn’t think the ‘den­iers’ would fall for such a trans­parent survey…

http://tamino.wordpress.com/2010/08/28/survey-says/#comment-44097

“Yeah, those con­spiracy theory ques­tions were pretty funny, but does anyone think that hard­core den­iers are going to be fooled by such a trans­parent attempt to paint them as paranoids?”

Actual links to the ori­ginal art­icles..(which Lewandowksy left out of the paper and the supplementary material) these were the links I found:

http://scienceblogs.com/illconsidered/2010/08/counting-your-attitudes/
http://profmandia.wordpress.com/2010/08/29/opinion-survey-regarding-climate-change/
http://scienceblogs.com/deltoid/2010/08/29/survey-on-attitudes-towards-cl/
http://hot-topic.co.nz/questionnaire/
http://tamino.wordpress.com/2010/08/28/survey-says/
http://bbickmore.wordpress.com/2010/08/28/take-a-survey/
I haven’t found the links yet to:
http://www.skepticalscience.com
http://www.trunity.net/uuuno/blogs/

where even the locals thought it was a trans­parent and poor survey, an attempt to try to describe scep­tics as para­noids or nut..

It is very likely, by the com­ments that the ‘anti-sceptic’ locals had some fun with it.. they even say so (the scammed responses)

Reply
stacey
8/5/2014 08:47:36 pm

"......despicable and fraudulant...."
97% accurate :-)
Well said and a very well written post.

Reply
Barry Woods
8/5/2014 08:51:29 pm

First posted 3 May 2010, 1:30pm - Prof Lewandowsky
The Drum - Evidence is overrated when you're a conspiracy theorist
http://www.abc.net.au/news/2010-05-03/33900

looks like Prof lewandowsky then set out to prove his own predjudices, the whole point of the paper seems to be to a soundbite for the media in the 'climate wars' (Tm M Mann).

to generate a message to be repeated endlessly by activists - 'look - peer reviewed science says, sceptics are conspiracy theorists' (ie ignore them)

Reply
HK
8/5/2014 11:32:05 pm

I've thought for a long time that this study was an unadulterated pile of BS, most obviously because, as Barry Woods points out, it wasn't posted at any "skeptic" blogs, or even blogs that skeptics might plausibly spend time at, so responses were highly likely to have been gamed by at least some participants. (If you survey differences between North and South Korean attitudes on eating babies, but only ever ask people in Pyongyang, you might find that the South comes out rather worse than common sense would suggest.)

Well done. This article is a fascinating and fresh look at yet more reasons why the study was utter nonsense and should never have seen the light of day. It is a great shame that more people don't call it out in the way that you have.

Reply
hunterson
8/5/2014 11:35:23 pm

Lewadowsky merely demonstrates that it requires lies and fraud to sustain his beliefs regarding climate.
I like the paper. I like that Lewadowsky's fellow academic, Cook, has been quoted by leading climate obsession promoters such as the US President as a credible source of information regarding climate issues. I like it because their behavior signals that they are unable to deliver factual honest information in support of their beliefs and must rely on deception to win in the public square. That is good for all rational people because it strongly implies that there is not a climate crisis. Lewandowsky, Cook, Oreskes, etc. are simply current versions of Lysenko and the old eugenics promoters of 100 years ago. They deserve to be called out for the disrepute they have brought to science and academia.

Reply
Richard Arrett
8/5/2014 11:38:45 pm

Thank you very much for blogging your analysis of the Moon Hoax paper. This paper was very bad - nothing more than ad hom dressed up and published as science. The paper is on the level of plain old name calling and says more about the Authors than the participants. Again - thank you.

Reply
Doug UK
8/5/2014 11:54:13 pm

Thank you - this needed to be said. Your analysis is clear and unequivocal.

Let us all hope that this despicable individual that has prostituted his morals and ethics, now gets what he surely deserves.

Reply
geoff chambers link
8/6/2014 12:29:33 am

There's a lot of fun to be had too following up the references in the introductory section of the paper, (and of the follow-up paper, the now retracted “Recursive Fury”). It seems to be a fashion in social science papers to quote dozens of references which are completely irrelevant and provide no support for whatever argument is being made. Thus Lewandowsky quotes a paper on antisemitism in Malaysia which finds no evidence of anti-semitism in Malaysia, and a couple about homophobia among men who have sex with men in South Africa, which have nothing at all to say about conspiracy theories among climate sceptics. He also manages to cite six times a fellow psychologist who coincidentally turned up as peer reviewer of the follow-up “Recursive Fury” paper.

Reply
Katabasis link
8/6/2014 04:10:23 am

Great catch Geoff.

I'll be sure to browse through Lewandowsky's references in future on that basis.

Is there *anything* he has done so far in relation to this debacle that hasn't been embarrassingly suspect?

Reply
The Iconoclast
8/6/2014 12:38:23 am

So clear negative correlations are hyped as positive ones in the title, abstract and conclusions? And the paper went through peer review and will probably never be retracted, right?

Why the attack on free markets? Is freedom itself a necessary casualty for the agenda of climate alarmists?

Reply
A, M Simpson
8/6/2014 12:47:09 am

Sir, you are a brave man. But I fear, you are marked for the Tarpeian Rock.

Reply
Don B
8/6/2014 12:51:40 am

Thank you for your evaluation of this paper.

Can there be any doubt? Lew's intent was to attack those who do not believe anthropogenic warming will be horrendous. His "study" had nothing to do with science.

Reply
MikeN
8/6/2014 01:05:01 am

It appears that the survey participants were recruited along with a description of the paper and what it was analyzing.

The methodology of the paper was analyzed by Brandon Shollenberger The same method can be used to say that global warmers support genocide.
http://hiizuru.wordpress.com/2014/01/15/warmists-are-never-wrong-even-when-supporting-genocide/

Reply
geoff chambers link
8/6/2014 01:10:20 am

There's an important meta-story here about the reception of Lewandowsky's papers by science and environmental journalists in the serious press. “Moon Hoax” and the follow-up “Recursive Fury” paper got extensive coverage in the British Guardian and Telegraph, the New York Times, Los Angeles Times, New Yorker, Huffington Post, etc. plus a long admiring interview by Chris Mooney. Not one of the journalists (who included Adam Corner, Psychology Lecturer at Cardiff University) raised the slightest question about the survey. Barry Woods and I pointed out on a number of these sites that Lewandowsky lied to Woods, and his co-author John Cook (who also authored the most recent “97% consensus” paper) lied to me about the sources of respondents to the Moon Hoax survey. The false claim that the survey had been posted at Cook's “SkepticalScience” website went into the paper when it was published, six months after the error had been pointed out. Several people wrote to Professor Eich, the editor in chief of Psychological Science eighteen months ago pointing out this and other errors in “Moon Hoax”. He promised he'd look into it, but never got back.
Let's hope a working social scientist has more luck in penetrating the Omerta that surrounds a certain kind of social science.

Reply
Anonymous
8/6/2014 01:10:51 am

"Surprisingly, climate skeptics got mad about this paper, perhaps because > 97.8% of those who think climate science is a hoax reject the moon hoax idea in Lewandowsky's own data..."

If I am sceptical of claims that a zero point energy generator can be built then does it mean that I think "physics is a hoax"? Obviously not. So why do you repeat Lewandowsky's crass phrase "climate science is a hoax" as if it were a reasonable characterisation of sceptical opinion?

Reply
Roger Knights
8/6/2014 01:38:12 am

Here's a comment that I liked, from WUWT:
<blockquote>
Francisco says:
September 9, 2012 at 7:25 pm

If you read his paper you see that Lewandowsky believes in the theory of “manufacture of doubt” as an organized effort by certain nefarious organizations to undermine well-established scientific facts they find detrimental to their interests (smoking and cancer, whatever). Okay, maybe there is something to that, but that’s definitely a conspiracy theory. No doubt about it. And he believes the skeptics who write papers questioning the case for catastrophic global warming are an active part of a conspiracy to “manufacture doubt” about what he thinks is a “well-established” scientific fact.

In this case, the negative load of the word “conspiracy” doesn’t seem to bother him. Because it’s his pet conspiracy theory.
===============

See also:
Tuesday 18 June 2013 by Ben Pile
The pathologising of climate scepticism
ESSAY: The shoddy science of sceptic-bashing LOG12 [Lewandowsky et al.] attempts to turn criticism into a psychological illness.
http://www.spiked-online.com/site/article/13716/

(Wonderful takedown of Lewandowsky and his enablers)

Reply
Russell Cook link
8/6/2014 03:20:58 am

There is an additional problem with the pop-sociologists like Lewandowsky and others who are on the pro-AGW side: to bolster their assertion that we must analyze why skeptics and the public go against the scientific grain (a.k.a. 'consensus'), they rely on a single-source talking point about skeptics being 'paid industry shills'. I covered that in a WUWT guest post and in a post at my own blog:

"The OTHER problem with the Lewandowsky paper and similar 'skeptic' motivation analysis: Core premise off the rails about fossil fuel industry corruption accusation" http://ow.ly/nXXny

"Robert ‘dark money’ Brulle & Other ‘Skeptic-Trashing Environmental Sociologists’" http://gelbspanfiles.com/?p=1237

Reply
Simon Marsden
8/6/2014 03:46:13 am

Thank you for speaking out.

Reply
Katabasis link
8/6/2014 04:16:39 am

Thanks very much for your posts on Lewandowsky, Jose. This one in particularly is an eloquent and informative take down. It's also heartening to read as one academic to another because I've not been able to escape feeling that the whole thing is utterly surreal.

By rights, Lewandowsky should have been hounded out of his career by now for these kind of machinations and yet has somehow been rewarded for it. It's a dark time indeed for science and academia.

Reply
Katabasis link
8/6/2014 04:17:24 am

Thanks very much for your posts on Lewandowsky, Jose. This one in particularly is an eloquent and informative take down. It's also heartening to read as one academic to another because I've not been able to escape feeling that the whole thing is utterly surreal.

By rights, Lewandowsky should have been hounded out of his career by now for these kind of machinations and yet has somehow been rewarded for it. It's a dark time indeed for science and academia.

Reply
Katabasis link
8/6/2014 04:18:33 am

Apologies for the double post, please delete the second!

Reply
Andy West link
8/6/2014 05:29:38 am

Thanks for shining the light of reason into a particularly dark corner of the discipline of psychology. Though this may be a worst case event, unfortunately there seems to be plenty more bias towards the climate consensus, and sometimes explicitly against skeptics, within the discipline.

Reply
NikFromNYC
8/6/2014 06:30:24 am

Your discovery of fraud orbiting climate "science" is but the tip of a vast iceberg of brazen fraud within the field itself that now amounts to a pure in your face power play, as complicated mathematical black boxes are no longer even used to conceal it, but just something like re-dating of input data to afford the latest hockey stick sensation blade via spurious data drop-off at the end, even though there is utterly no blade in *any* of the input data outside of the noise level:

http://s6.postimg.org/jb6qe15rl/Marcott_2013_Eye_Candy.jpg

-=NikFromNYC=-, Ph.D. in carbon chemistry (Columbia/Harvard)

Reply
dougieh
8/6/2014 11:12:59 am

your comment -
"Or perhaps they're more cautious about probabilistic truths, or have a more careful scientific mindset, not seeing the use of "strongly agree" (the smoking thing is a complex probabilistic truth – a large majority of smokers don't get lung cancer; I'm not sure people know that; it's only a comparative risk, and lots of cases are not smokers; some philosophers would be paralyzed for hours by that item). Perhaps, and I think this is likely, many of these conspiracies, and notions about smoking and HIV, were unfamiliar to a lot of participants. If a conspiracy is unfamiliar to you, you might not be comfortable saying "strongly disagree". A natural reaction could be "huh...disagree?". They might seem confusing, and I can imagine the default for confused people would be cautious disagreement."

nails it for me, this paper was/is a joke, how sad we even comment on it.

Reply
geoff chambers link
8/6/2014 07:35:42 pm

“How sad we even comment on it”.

It's important we comment on it, because British government ministers quote it, and Obama's Twitter account, and Chris Mooney, and the New York Times and dozens of science journalists who wouldn't be seen dead giving credence to homeopathy or water divining (though it's quite hard to disprove homeopathy or water divining).
Not one of them did what Katabasis did (ask for the data) or Barry Woods did (check the websites Lewandowsky claimed to have linked his survey from) or I did (check his references) or Steve Mcintyre and Manicbeancounter did (check his statistics). They missed a scoop (“Royal Society gives medal and a five figure sum to charlatan – academic editors and top professors defend phoney research”). José Duarte has got that scoop. It'll be interesting to see where the story goes now.

Reply
Kevin Marshall link
8/7/2014 10:26:06 am

The reason for commenting on this paper, and calling for its retraction is to be found in the opening words of "the DEBUNKING Handbook" Prof. Lewandowsky co-wrote with John Cook.

"It’s self-evident that democratic societies should base their decisions on accurate information. On many issues, however, misinformation can become entrenched in parts of the community, particularly when vested interests are involved. Reducing the influence of misinformation is a difficult and complex challenge."

Reply
Nony
8/6/2014 12:01:29 pm

If you want a community with conspiracy thinking tendencies, check out the peak oil blogs.

Reply
Fernando Leanme link
8/9/2014 07:46:34 pm

I used to read "the Oil Drum" and wrote comments when I felt I could contribute. That site didn't sound to me like it included "conspiracy theorists". Over the years I have noticed a reluctance by some organizations to acknowledge that we are running out of oil, and sometimes I wonder if some governments may not be playing along with the global warming hysteria to convince their populations to consume less energy. By the way, I'm still consulting for oil companies on a spot basis, what I have in my head wasn't picked up reading magazines or blogs.

Reply
Peter C
8/6/2014 08:21:29 pm

"It should've been retracted by the authors already"

Well I don't expect the Authors to agree with that.

It should have been retracted by the publishers already on multiple grounds.

Reply
Doubting Rich
8/6/2014 08:33:20 pm

"Do we hate our participants?"

In this study, this researcher does, yes. That is one of the problems with the debate, that many alarmists hate their interlocutors. They are arrogant and ignorant, they do not believe that their views can be honestly and rationally challenged, and they hate anyone who tries.

Reply
Brad Keyes
9/18/2014 10:47:25 am

"That is one of the problems with the debate, that many alarmists hate their interlocutors. They are arrogant and ignorant, they do not believe that their views can be honestly and rationally challenged, and they hate anyone who tries."

They also fear us. Or rather, our reasons. That is why academics explaining why we "deny" cannot bring themselves to simply ask. The internet is a godsend for Lewandowsky—he can do a whole paper without ever being in the same room as us.

How many "deniers" did Oreskes question, contact or interview when researching her 400-page conspiracy yawner Merchants of Doubt?

Guess.

And Oreskes, as far as Joe knows, is "a scholar."

Reply
Gail Combs (Chemist)
8/6/2014 11:40:56 pm

<i> ...If this is what we're doing, we should just call it a day and go home – we can't trust journals and science organizations on this topic if they're going to pull stunts like this.....

The abstracts for many papers won't even have the information such studies are looking for, and are simply not written at the level of abstraction of "this study provides support for human-caused warming", or "this study rejects human-caused warming". Most climate science papers are written at a more granular and technical level, are appropriately scientifically modest, and are not meant to be political chess pieces...."</i>
>>>>>>>>>>>>>>
Unfortunately most climate science papers ARE written as political chess pieces. To get into the journals you need a AGW Get Out of limbo Free Card.

Dr Joan Feynman Jet Propulsion Lab (NASA), and E.W. Cliver and V. Boriakoff of the Air Force Research Lab have a great example of a very grudging;y given nod to AGW in the paper: <i><b>Solar variability and climate change: Geomagnetic aa index and global surface temperature</b></i>
In the ABSTRACT:
<blockquote>....Our analysis is admittedly crude and ignores known contributors to climate change such as warming by anthropongenic green-house-gases or cooling by volcanic aerosols. Nevertheless, the general similarity in the time-variation of Earth's surface temperature and the low-frequency or secular component of the aa index over the last ~120 years supports other studies that indicate a more significant role for solar variability in climate change on decacal and century time-scales than has previously been supposed....
<blockquote>
And again in the Discussion:
<blockquote>....Even these reduced estimates, however, indicate that the Sun has played a more substatial role vis-`a-vis anthropogenic effects in the global warming of this century than has generally been supposed. For example, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change <i>[schimel, 1996]</i> estimated that the change in solar forcing between 1850 and 1990 was only ~0.3 W/m^2 at the top of the atmosphere vs 1.5 W/m^2 for forcing by anthropogenic CO2 <i>[cf., Reid, 1997]</i>. <b>While acknowledging the importance and threat of such anthropogenic forcing, we are reminded that there is evidence,</b> albeit mixed <i>[Folland et al., 1990: Crowley and North, 1991: Hughes and Diaz, 1994; Grove and Switsur, 1994]</i>, </b>for temperatures comparable to present day values from 900-1250 A. D., well before the industrial age. The latter part (1100-1250 A.D.) of this so-called Medieval Warm Period had inferred solar activity comparable to present levels</b> <i>[Jirikowic and Damon, 1994]</i>....</blockquote>

OUCH, talk about being damned by faint praise. That is about as close to open rebellion as a bunch of government employees dare to come.

Now tell me WHY in Hades those non sequiturs are even needed in a science paper about solar influence if not as a bow to the CAGW Gods who control the journals and the funding?

So why is the Get Out of Jail Card needed in a 1998 paper?
First there is the definition of <i>"Climate Change"</i> by <b>The UN Framework Convention on Climate Change</b> (USA ratified the treaty in 21/03/94)

The official definition:
<blockquote>“Climate change” means a change of climate which is attributed directly or indirectly to human activity that alters the composition of the global atmosphere and which is in addition to natural climate variability observed over comparable time periods.
http://unfccc.int/essential_background/convention/background/items/2536.php </blockquote>
The new definition of "Climate Change" specifically excludes all natural changes in the climate and even excludes any caused by humans due to, for example, land clearance or city building, and considers only atmospheric changes.


The IPCC mandate is similar:
<blockquote>
The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) was established by the United Nations Environmental Programme (UNEP) and the World Meteorological Organization (WMO) in 1988 <b>to assess the scientific, technical and socio-economic information relevant for the understanding of human induced climate change, its potential impacts and options for mitigation and adaptation. </b>
http://www.ipcc-wg2.gov/ </blockquote>
The IPCC's ROLE:
<blockquote>
The role of the IPCC is to assess on a comprehensive, objective, open and transparent basis <b>the scientific, technical and socio-economic information relevant to understanding the scientific basis of risk of human-induced climate change, its potential impacts and options for adaptation and mitigation.</b> IPCC reports should be neutral with respect to policy, although they may need to deal objectively with

Reply
Alex Cull link
8/8/2014 08:57:55 am

As Geoff said, I think it important that junk like the "moon landing" study is commented on and its shortcomings exposed.

Also, many thanks to José Duarte for his commendable stance; for me, the mystery is why more social scientists haven't spoken out.

Reply
John McDougall
8/8/2014 09:27:39 pm

Thank you Jose for this succinct response to the Lew/Cook BS. I have crossed swords with a university over Mr Cook. I am 72, a graduate Engineer from the University of Queensland where this Cook person hangs out. I have worked in many parts of the world, and, at one time, was a regular visitor to Tucson; to a spot in the desert west of that city (among the Suguaro cacti).
I have retired from the mining industry and returned to the city of Brisbane to relax; as a number of my American friends from the US Mining Industry used to do in Tucson.
I started to get begging behaviour from the U of Q because they figured that an alumni would be generous. At the same time as the Brandon Schollenberg troubles began with the University administration over the Cook "beat-up". It was enormously pleasing to be able to tell them that they were a disgrace, that Cook should be fired, and that the university administration had succeeded in destroying their credibility.
I suspect they will never talk to me again. A comparison with a rat's ass would describe my response.
More strength to your arm ...

Reply
geoff chambers link
8/9/2014 04:30:51 am

The relation between Cook and Lewandowsky and their respective universities is complex and baffling. In May 2010 Lewandowsky announced his theory about the psychology of climate sceptics, as Barry Woods notes above. Then in August 2010 he sent out links to the survey, and announced the preliminary results at Monash University on September 21st 2010, before the fieldwork was completed.
At about the same time John Cook, a cartoonist who was running “SkepticalScience”, a website devoted to attacking climate sceptics, announced in an internal forum to his colleagues that he'd just met Lewandowsky and a bunch of cognitive psychologists and was very excited about performing some psychological experiments on his site, for example by using spambots to leave fake comments on articles. He referred to his friend Steve 56 times on the part of the internal forum which became public, saying how he “enjoyed kicking the ants' nest”. None of his fellow site authors showed any interest.
In late August Lewandowsky wrote to eight website owners, all of them running sites criticising climate sceptics, inviting them to link to his survey. All of them did, except Cook, who said he'd link it when he put his own survey up, something he never did.
When the Moon Hoax paper was pre-published in August 2012 Barry Woods wrote to Lewandowsky asking about the non-existent link at SkepticalScience. Lewandowsky replied that the survey had been linked there, that he'd had the URL, but had lost it.
Independently, I posed the same question on a thread at SkepticalScience, but was told that Cook was too busy to answer my questions. Then Cook emailed me, and there was a long evasive exchange, ending with him saying “I did link to the survey”. (It turned out he'd linked to it on his personal Twitter account).
Steve McIntyre later picked up the story and accused Lewandowsky and Cook of lying on his site ClimateAudit.
In August and September 2012 a number of prominent sceptic websites took up the story attacking the paper from a number of different angles. Lewandowsky replied with nine articles in twenty days on his University of Western Australia blog Shapingtomorrowsworld, apparently written from his hotel room in Germany. At the same time he hired Cook, who was now a student at Queensland University, and another anti-sceptic blogger Marriott of the site Watching the Deniers, to perfom a “discourse analysis” of the criticisms of “Moon Hoax” appearing on sceptic blogs. This analysis appeared as a paper “Recursive Fury” in March 2013, which was retracted in March 2014. Moon Hoax was finally published in June 2013, still containing the false claim that it had been linked at SkepticalScience.
One of the mysteries of this saga is why Lewandowsky, having been seriously let down by Cook who promised to link to his survey and didn't, then hired Cook to work on his paper, making him co-author of a peer reviewed paper while he was still a student. Cook made a complete dog's breakfast of the job of course, falsely accusing people of holding opinions they didn't hold, mangling and misattributing quotes, and even listing Professor Betts of the Meteorological Office as one of the scores of sceptics identified as irrational and suffering from feelings of persecution. The paper was republished twice, correcting a couple of errors defaming two bloggers, and, after a year's deliberation and an exchange of letters with Lewandowsky's lawyers, was finally retracted.
But Moon Hoax is still there. I wrote to Psychological Science suggesting they retract it last year, and in April 2013 received this reply from Professor Eich, Editor-in-Chief:
“Dear Mr. Chambers
Your email to the Sage central office has been relayed to me, and in turn I have sent it to Dr. Lewandowsky and asked that he respond to your criticisms. I’ll write to you again once I receive his response, but please note that may be quite a while: my understanding is that Dr. Lewandowsky is in transit from Australia to England, and he will need time to settle into his new surroundings. 
Eric Eich”
I'm still waiting. Lewandowsky has clearly had time to settle in to his new surroundings, since he's giving a talk at Bristol University about the Moon Hoax paper next month. Michael Mann and John Cook will be there.

Reply
Barry Woods
8/10/2014 05:12:23 am

As you saw, lewandowsky's PLOSONE survey data included several responses of 'minors' between the ages of 10 and 17, also a star date age...

So what of the moon hoax paper LOG12
I wonder if any of the responses who gave a belief in a conspiracy response were 10-17 year olds ! (A possibility if a genuine child, or a fake response)

So given PLOSONE data included minors, when he says he excluded under 10's, he may have included minors aged 10-17 responses.

Otherwise why not just say excluded all under 18?

Lewandowsky stripped out age from the data that was released!
Copy here. http://www.bishop-hill.net/blog/2012/8/31/lewandowskys-data.html

As reported in an earlier link I have been point blank refused the raw survey data(which would include all those excluded results, as well)

Imagine a scenario where some of those minors included were the scam results for "moon hoax"? Maybe not, but he refuses to release the raw data... A suspicious person would say over 10's were included because otherwise he might have lost a proportion of the scammed results..

Who knows.. I don't. He won't release the full survey data.
Which makes this an intolerable position for this paper.

I wrote to the head of the psychology department at the University of Wester Australia to get the raw data. I had asked professor lewandowsky first for it, but he said he no longer worked at UWA and I should ask them.

The vice chancellor of UWA (copying UWA's senior legal counsel) with a point blank no, noting whilst I needed it to submit a comment to Psychological Science (at the chief editors suggestion - I even copied UWA,Erich Eich's email to me) he said no they would not acede to such requests.

The raw data could also show, how many participants came from each referring domain. Deltoid and Tamino have vastly higher traffic ranking than the other blogs.. Which would suggest most responses came form these 2 blogs.. Making it predominantly a survey of 2 blogs..

But these 2 blogs high traffic blogs had a number of comments criticising the survey, and even how much " fun" they had with it.. And Most scammers might not even leave comment to say they had messed with it...

So a very good question to ask UWA, is can Jose have the raw data (after all he is an academic in social psychological) and he could see how many 10-17 year olds participated. And there answers, and where did the responses get referred from (basic online survey data collection)

It would be really bad for Lewandowsky's paper, if even a few of the conspiracy responses were from self described, 10- 17 year olds...

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geoff chambers link
8/10/2014 07:10:49 am

There were 1300+ responses to the survey, of which about 200 were eliminated for incorrect age, or for coming from the same IP address (i.e. were attempts to scam the survey). So 15% of respondents were either fraudulent, or were lying about their age, but the survey went ahead without them, on the assumption that the rest were bona fide.
Some of the commenters whom Barry Woods mentions above complained about the lack of a “Don't Know” category, and noted that they couldn't finish the survey if they left out a question. Sceptics are people who like to admit that they don't know things. Some of the questions were about events happening years 50+ years ago. Most of the sites linking to the survey were in Australia or New Zealand. How many Australians have an informed opinion about the social habits of the Oklahoma bomber? Yet the survey, linked uniquely on sites specialising in attacking climate sceptics picked up about 250 sceptic respondents.
There were about 130 comments on the sites linking to the survey, from about 90 unique commenters. Commenting is fun, (otherwise we wouldn't do it). Filling in an anonymous ten-minute questionnaire with no immediate comeback is not. Yet we're invited to believe that respondents to the questionnaire outnumbered commenters 15 to one.
I don't believe it. I think Lewandowsky or his associates made up a large part of the responses. Would someone with the necessary statistical skills like to look through the raw data, looking for tell-tale patterns?

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Joe Duarte
8/10/2014 08:49:19 am

Hi Barry -- I expect the study to be retracted. It would be difficult for any journal to justify not retracting a study that made up a false effect in its title, and a very damaging one at that. And more false claims in the abstract, severe issues with the provenance of the data, etc.

If for some reason the journal didn't retract, then we would need the raw data since the paper says it used minors. They actually have minors in the PLOS One data, which is incredible. Having declared that they're using minors in the Psych Science paper, they need to either come back and say it was a typo, or say that it's true. If it's true, the paper will have to be retracted. If it's a typo, we would need their raw data to confirm -- since they removed the age variable from the dataset they released. If we didn't get the raw data to investigate this minors issue, the journal would have to retract it. There's no way we can have studies using minors for this purpose, and no way we could accept their word that it was a typo, given that they have minors in another dataset.

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lucia link
8/11/2014 06:30:42 am

I wish you the best of luck getting this retracted.

There were so many things wrong with the way the survey was conducted. Many were just mindbogglingly slip shod. For example: They used an online survey mechanism that permitted people to use free online proxy IPs like "hidemyass". I commented on the proxy issue here: http://rankexploits.com/musings/2012/multiple-ips-hide-my-ass-and-the-lewandowsky-survey/ You'll find many of the criticism you call out in your post mentioned in comments. (Comments also includes a lot of silliness. It was happy hour.)

I'd never heard anyone call out the age of participants issue. But clearly, the fact that some participants were indicating ages over 95 or under 10 is yet another issue.

I have to admit, people getting together and egging each other on to enter garbage during a happy hour induced binge is the sort of thing I always imagined could happen in a situation of this sort. I'm no expert in designing valid online surveys. But I don't think one needs to be an expert to identify some clearly boneheaded designs. Lewandowsky and coworkers managed to create one.

geoff chambers link
8/11/2014 07:41:26 am

José
I hope you don't mind Barry and me hijacking your thread like this, but it's important, because 1) you've hit on some new angles to this old story, 2) you're not a climate sceptic, and 3) you're a social scientist who understands the philosophy of science and who believes in it- a rare combination.
On the age thing: the survey was posted at a free on-line survey company which was later hacked and went bankrupt. There were complaints that it was difficult to fill in, since attempts to correct errors led to the whole questionnaire being wiped. You know what filling in on-line forms is like. It's quite possible that the age question was so arranged that it was easy to get wrong and impossible to correct. There was a question requiring a response in the form of a proportion that was never reported because the responses were unanalysible (“50%”, “about a half” “less than two thirds”) There was another question on Iraq that wasn't analysed because Lew didn't like the answers.
If you really want to get to the bottom of this heap of detritus you need
1) the emails between Lewandowsky and the blog owners obtained via FOI by Simon Turnill of AustralianClimateMadness
2) The questionnaire, which is somewhere on the internet, (Barry may know where)
3) The information on the survey company going bust, which was in a comment at Lucia's RankExploits
4) Everything published on sceptic sites. I've devoted 20+ articles to the man. This one
http://geoffchambers.wordpress.com/2013/03/24/lewandowsky-timeline/
attempted a chronological listing of all the major blog articles dealing with the subject. My final word on the paper was at
http://geoffchambers.wordpress.com/2013/03/28/the-moon-hoax-has-landed/
In the meantime I'll write to Professof Eich, asking him about the reply he promised me 16 months ago.
Good Luck

Barry Woods
8/10/2014 05:15:12 am


Please excuse any typos/grammar.. I'm typing on a smartphone, whilst on holiday and am away from my PC.

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David, UK
8/10/2014 06:19:33 am

Not only is the NWO a "state of affairs" as opposed to a secret group, the fact that some high-rank political players support it is not even *secret*. There is enough documented/televised evidence of certain political leaders openly espousing a NWO. Either the authors are oblivious to this, or are in a state of denial over the fact.

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Joe Duarte link
8/15/2014 11:01:11 am

Hi David. Thanks for stopping by. I don't know about the reality of which you speak, but if I recall correctly President Bush Sr. famously coined the phrase "New World Order", and then a bunch of people ran with it as a sinister and feared outcome.

Actually, just checked on Wikipedia, and it looks like it's an older term, but Bush revived it: "Until now, the world we've known has been a world divided—a world of barbed wire and concrete block, conflict and cold war. Now, we can see a new world coming into view. A world in which there is the very real prospect of a new world order. In the words of Winston Churchill, a "world order" in which "the principles of justice and fair play ... protect the weak against the strong ..." A world where the United Nations, freed from cold war stalemate, is poised to fulfill the historic vision of its founders. A world in which freedom and respect for human rights find a home among all nations."

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_World_Order_(conspiracy_theory)#History_of_the_term

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David, UK
8/15/2014 04:24:14 pm

@Jon: Exactly. The NWO is based on such Leftist ideology as "social justice" and other such BS. And who administers such justice? (I don't really need to answer that, do I?) Our own Gordon Brown also espoused a NWO openly. That "bunch of people" (as you refer to us) who see the proposed NWO as undesirable happen to be freedom-loving people who don't want an all powerful World Government.

Barry Woods
8/10/2014 06:28:11 pm

Looking at the PLOSONE data two 14 year olds believed in the moon conspiracy..

Why would LOG12 include 10-17 yeard olds, unless the include some needed make up the numbers,participants that believe in conspircies

whilst i admire your confidence that the journal should and will retract the paper. It would be admitting that peer review clearly failed in the ase of tbis paper, showing that the flagship journal of the APS in a ery bad light..

additionally the journal has been told by multiple people over the last 2 years, about the fraudulent nature of the title of the paper based on limited (non existant) data

the fact that The authors and UWA point blank refuse to release the raw survey data (including ages, referring domain urls, the removed responses, etc, etc) should cause a major concern for the journal. The journal should then demand the raw data be made avsilable and if not simply retract it against the authors wishes.

let us not corget there were 3 co-authors for that paper. A number of peers reviewed it. The UWA ethics department approved it. Based on a modification of an ethics approval for a completed paper, with a completely different methodology (interviewing people one to one on the street showing them trend data)

Yet the journal has refused to retract, despite all the above being shown to them

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Barry Woods
8/10/2014 06:43:22 pm

Prof Erich Eich has personally told that whilst he sympathises with me that UWA refuses to release the raw survey data, that there is nothing he could do about it..

When I replied that he could retract the paper, as it is intolerable for a science journal that the authors / UWA refuse to release the data. I then recived an email from a senior executive at the APS that they had previously had investigated the journal conduct and found nothing wrong. So despite the authors now refusing to release the data, they would not look at it again.

The Retraction Watch website observed that Psycholical Science has had a number of papers retracted recently. This paper has had a very high profile in the media and elsewhere, to retrsct it now woukd be really embarassing for the APS and very damaging to the authors and UWA as well.


6 months previously. I had asked Prof Erich Eich, if he would help me get the data from the authors/UWA so that I could submit a comment to the journal

Erich's response then was a point blank. No

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geoff chambers link
8/11/2014 10:08:13 am

Here's my original complaint letter to Psychological Science:
Subject:
“NASA Faked the Moon Landing—Therefore, (Climate) Science Is a Hoax: An Anatomy of the Motivated Rejection of Science” by Stephan Lewandowsky, Klaus Oberauer, and Gilles E. Gignac
 
I am writing to suggest you withdraw this paper, due to the many serious errors. 
 
One is the statement in the Method section that “Links were posted on eight blogs that have a proscience stance but a diverse audience”. 
 
In the pre-published version of this paper made public in July  2012 the eight blogs were listed, and they included SkepticalScience, which is probably the most prominent blog defending climate science orthodoxy against the criticisms of sceptics. However, no link appeared to have been posted at SkepticalScience.
 
This was pointed out to Professor Lewandowsky and to Mr Cook, who runs the SkepticalScience blog, in August / September 2012. Lewandowsky assured the enquirer Barry Woods that it had been posted, and Mr Cook made the same assurance to me. As a result of further investigation and the release of emails under an FOI request,  it was confirmed that no link was ever posted at Skeptical Science, and that Lewandowsky and Cook knew their statements to me and to Barry Woods to be untrue at the time they  made them.
 
In the quote from the paper above, it is stated that the blogs linking to the survey had “a proscience stance but a diverse audience”. By “proscience” is meant “anti-sceptic”, and it was precisely the opinions of sceptics which was the subject of the survey.
 
The  evidence for the blogs having “a diverse audience” is in a content analysis carried out by Mr Cook on the comments to his blog which is published in the Supplemental Information to this paper. But since readers of his blog took no part in the survey, this analysis can have no value, and its publication in the supplemental information is deliberately misleading.
 
Besides the false information about the methodology, there was much criticism of the validity of the results. The “Moon Landing Hoax” claim in the title was based on just ten respondents - less than 1% of the sample - who believed this particular conspiracy. The most trenchant criticisms of the analysis were made by Steve McIntyre at his blog ClimateAudit.org
 
The evident errors in the paper, and Professor Lewandowsky’s refusal to answer polite and reasonable requests for background information led to huge amount of criticism on sceptical blogs. This criticism formed the basis of a second paper, “Recursive fury: Conspiracist ideation in the blogosphere in response to research on conspiracist ideation” by Lewandowsky, Oberauer, Cook and Marriott, posted at
 
http://www.frontiersin.org/Personality_Science_and_Individual_Differences/10.3389/fpsyg.2013.00073/abstract
 
on February 5th 2013, but almost immediately removed from the website following a complaint from a sceptic that a quote attributed to him was false and defamatory.
The paper was reposted last week but has again been removed following complaints from Barry Woods and myself.
 
This paper named a number of people, (including myself, but also Professor Richard Betts of the Meteorological Office) in a way that is clearly defamatory. Steve McIntyre is also named, as is Anthony Watts, whose very popular blog Wattsupwiththat has been voted best science blog three years running.
  
In the paper  you have just published, McIntyre is mentioned by name, and Watts is clearly referred to, in the following passage: 
 
“The influence of blogs should not be underestimated: For example, one skeptic blogger (Steven McIntyre of the “Climate Audit” blog, at climateaudit.org) has triggered several congressional investigations ... Popular climate blogs can register upward of 700,000 monthly visitors...” 
 
Later, the purpose if the study is described as follows:
 
“We designed the study to investigate what motivates the rejection of science in individuals who choose to get involved in the ongoing debate about one scientific topic, climate change. As noted earlier, this group of people has a demonstrable impact on society, and understanding their motivations and reasoning is therefore of importance”.
 
The latter quote clearly designates prominent bloggers like McIntyre and Watts as being the subject of the study, the purpose of which was “to investigate what motivates [their] rejection of science”. Leaving aside the fact that the rejection of science by sceptics was both an assumption that motivated the research and a major conclusion, the mention of McIntyre and the allusion to the blog of Watts is disturbing in the report on a survey of anonymous respondents, particularly as both Wat

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geoff chambers link
8/11/2014 10:16:41 am

My long post has been truncated. Here is the end.

….particularly as both Watts and McIntyre were later defamed in the paper published by Frontiers in Personality Science and currently removed pending an investigation.
 
This paper contains known falsehoods and is based on a survey whose methodology and analysis have been shown to be worthless. It should be withdrawn. 
 
The clearest exposition of the misleading statements by Lewandowsky and  Cook is at 
http://climateaudit.org/2013/03/28/lewandowsky-doubles-down/
I have compiled an incomplete list of blogs discussing these two papers here
http://geoffchambers.wordpress.com/2013/03/24/lewandowsky-timeline/
Please don’t hesitate to contact me if you require further information.
Yours
Geoff Chambers

And here's the mail I've just sent, 14 months after Professor Eich promised to contact me as soon as he had a resonse from Professor Lewandowsky.
Dear Professor Eich,
In April last year you said you would be writing to me once you had received a reply from Professor Lewandowsky, who was settling in at Bristol University. Not only has he settled in, but he's found time to write a couple of articles on the subject and address the American Geophysical Union in Colorado on his way from Australia to Britain, and next month he's discussing the subject at a meeting in Bristol, with Michael Mann and John Cook in attendance.
Did Professor Lewandowsky reply to you? Since your last mail, his paper analysing our criticisms of his paper has been retracted. Our criticisms therefore stand unchallenged. New criticisms have been aired at
http://www.joseduarte.com/blog/more-fraud?
I have repeatedly called out Professor Lewandowsky as a liar and a fraud on the many media outlets on which he has been peddling his lies. He hasn't responded. Will Psychological Science retract this article? Or will they suffer the ignominy of New Frontiers In Psychological Science, who, with respect to Lewandowsky's follow-up article, were obliged to twice correct the article, then retract it, then twice correct their explanation of their retraction?

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Joe Duarte link
8/11/2014 07:36:18 pm

Thanks Geoff. The paper must be retracted given the false effect in the title, and the false links/effects in the abstract and body. I consider it fraud to just declare effects not present in the data, especially when the falsely declared findings are defamatory to millions of decent people.

I'll be in touch with Dr. Eich this week on status. I might want to talk to the action editor, and I may request release of the original reviews. How this work was published is a mystery -- we have a serious problem with invalid research, sometimes complete junk, being waived through the review process if it's unfavorable to conservatives. In this case we have fabricated false effects and apparently minors as participants. This is an unusually bad case.

I think the reason it's taken this long to get it retracted is that a lot of the initial criticisms sounded like nitpicks from partisans. Editors aren't interested in nitpicks usually. Issues like which website the study was posted on are not the kinds of issues editors normally deal with. And Steve Mc has serious skills, but he sometimes misses the forest for the trees, seems to be obsessed by minor issues. He could've just talked about the false claim in the headline, the false claims in the abstract, etc. Instead he's digging into an irrelevant correlation between moon hoax and HIV or something, which isn't one of the defamatory ones. And focusing on whether all the ethics paperwork was taken care of. That tends to look like partisan sniping and obstruction. This probably made it harder for me to get through to Psych Science at first.

But the big issues, like a false and defamatory title, false claims about people rejecting the HIV-AIDS link and so forth -- these are major, substantive, and ethical problems. Having minors in the data is a huge issue. Nothing in the study survives. Everything will collapse on evaluation. Their conspiracy items are broken, they're calling the New World Order a secret group, the OKC item doesn't describe a conspiracy, the JFK item is too rational and open-ended to be lumped with the others. Several of their items don't load on their ideation variable, and they didn't disclose this. They hid it by giving false uniform factor loadings, possibly weights, hiding the true loadings. Nothing survives here.

Barry Woods
8/12/2014 08:16:05 am

Now that we've noticed that there were two 14 year olds in the PLOSONE data.. 'believing' in CYMoon

what do you reckon the odds are that the LOG12 paper includes minors believing in conspiracies.. especially given that the data that was released had Age of the respondents removed..

I really would like to see that raw survey data. Because whilst the paper is fraudulent on such a tiny data set given the title.. and my comment saying as much, earned me a place in the retracted Recursive Fury dataset..

IF Lew depended on minors to get even those tiny numbers believing in CYMoon or CY911 or CYDiana, that gets into the realms of unbelievable fraud or academic misconduct.. including 'minors' to get the headline from an anonymous online survey to generate a soundbite headline in the 'climate wars' to attack 'sceptics' means his peers should disown him.. but then again some of his peers and a journal editor got this paper through peer review. Also let us not forget there were 2 co-authors for this paper who should be equally accountable.

Jose. As you are an academic in the field do you think that UWA might supply you with the full raw survey results.. have you thought of asking UWA

I suppose it is possible that Lew or his co-authors or UWA no longer has the unprocessed raw survey. which would be equally as bad

Geoff. I wonder if Swami or Wood were a reviewer of this paper ( it would be tragically funny if Corner was - or Pidegeon)

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Rational Optometrist
8/12/2014 10:44:01 pm

Jose - thank you for your stance on these issues. I hope you pursue the retraction of these papers as far as possible. People like myself have followed the excellent efforts of Geoff and Barry (and others) with great interest and have been frustrated and disillusioned by the academy response. I look forward to further updates from yourself - please do keep us informed. Thank you also for engaging in the comments sections.

This comment of yours at Judy's sums up nicely the unfortunate rot at the heart of the climate debate: "This is just the worst issue I’ve ever encountered. People will hate you, will try to attack your motives, and never have any arguments. There’s no shared standard, no basic commitment to valid reasoning. After these couple of egregious papers are retracted, I am so out. "

I hope not.

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geoff chambers link
8/13/2014 10:04:59 am

José
“How this work was published is a mystery - we have a serious problem with invalid research, sometimes complete junk, being waived through the review process if it's unfavorable to conservatives.”
As a left-wing climate sceptic used to having my political views rubbished by my sceptic allies, I advise you to ease up on the political angle. Yes, there's an element of groupthink in the social sciences. I'm up against the opposite tendency in the tiny world of climate scepticism, where sociology is often considered to be a synonym of socialism, and Obama is considered to be a dangerous Marxist.
“I think the reason it's taken this long to get it retracted is that a lot of the initial criticisms sounded like nitpicks from partisans.”
If and when a serious historian/sociologist of science takes a look at this story, the first thing he will notice is that each critic has his own take on the article. You're not the first to have lamented that the criticisms of others were preventing their own criticisms from coming to the fore. Some of us, like myself, Brandon Schollenberg, and A. Scott, had some experience in survey technique, and were shocked that a peer-reviewed paper could be based on a survey that wouldn't be considered acceptable by any market research organisation in the world. Others, like Steve McIntyre took a more forensic attitude. I expressed my disagreement with Steve's opinion that certain respondents should be eliminated from the survey because they “agreed strongly” with each conspiracy theory. It seemed to me that, as a matter of principle, respondents should be free to be as irrational as they liked. My views received no support at ClimateAudit.
“Nothing in the study survives. Everything will collapse on evaluation”.
Yeah, well, maybe. I'm aware of a peer-reviewed paper in the works which may kill LOG12. Or not. It all depends on the sayso of certain editors and certain
peer reviewers.
Like you, I don't bow to the opinions of the scientific mafia which insists that the only way to counter a pile of manure in the scientific literature is to erect a more impressive pile in the same place. Lewandowsky is a liar. In a pre-internet age, the simple iteration of this truth would have provoked a libel action and a resolution of the question. I don't know how it works nowadays, but Lewandowsky will be repeating his lies about the Moon Hoax paper in Bristol in September.
Be there, in spirit if not in fact.

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Joe Duarte link
8/14/2014 02:44:23 am

Hi Geoff -- Political bias in social science is a major focus on my work on methodological validity, and we have a paper in press on the subject, so I'm not going to ease up on the political angle. That was a major angle here -- this would not have been published if it made false claims about liberals or environmentalists. But false and defamatory claims about conservatives, climate skeptics, et al appear to be quite publishable.

A lot of the criticisms of the paper were counterproductive. Scientists care about substance, about data. Journal editors don't want to get a bunch of e-mails from people complaining about whether or not the study was posted on the crazy SS website. Nobody cares if it was posted on SS. Or the strange complaint that the sample wasn't 20% skeptics, which people falsely claimed the authors claimed. Who cares? The number of skeptics is knowable by looking at the data -- there's no point wasting time complaining that it wasn't some abitrary number like 20%.

What matters here is that the claims the authors made are false. That's what matters. It matters whether things are true or not. Their headline is false, fraudulent even. Their claims about free maket views predicting "rejection" of the HIV-AIDS and smoking-cancer links were also false. Those are big claims. They were completely false. There was no data behind those claims, and they misused linear correlation and converted agreement into "rejection".

If people had just focused on those basic facts, we probably wouldn't be here today. It would've been retracted a while ago. Or if people had noticed that they say they include minors. That matters a great deal. Or if people had noticed that their whole "conspiracist ideation" construct falls apart if we reproduce the factor analysis. It was never a valid construct here. Or if people had noticed that some of the conspiracy items are brooken, that the NWO item called the NWO a "secret group", that the OKC item doesn't describe a conspiracy, that the JFK item is open-ended and doesn't refer to any specific conspiracy or conspirator, such that many reasonable people and journalists will agree with it.

The data collection, as you note, is complete garbage. They tell us nothing about their participants, removed the age variable from the data, don't even have country or gender. The fact that anyone in the world could participate in a study about American politics and American conspiracy theories would also vacate the study.

Similar distractions happened on the Cook study. Militant political activists were subjective raters of science abstracts -- that's an impossible method. We will never be interested in the divinations of political activists empowered to interpret science abstracts that they wouldn't even understand. If someone had noticed that they included social science studies, psychology papers, public surveys, etc. as scientific evidence of endorsement of the consensus, it would've been retracted some time ago, I think. I'll be exposing this shocker more formally soon. The world thought they were talking about climate science. Of course, we'd have to be complete morons to expect seriousness in a "study" where political hacks rated science abstracts, and there was no possibility that people as militant and anti-science as the SS crowd would deliver a credible scientific product. They lied about almost everything, even about their core rating method. It's the only rater study I've ever seen that did not report interrater reliability, which becomes moot because they're political activists with the same aims, and because they collaborated online in direct contradiction with their stated method.

But instead of pointing that out, people like Tol are nitpicking, making entirely unclear arguments about reliability based on random numbers and graphs. This is 2014. Rater reliability is something we know very well, and have lots of statistics for (Cohen's kappa, Krippendorf's alpha, etc.) But even more important, it's meaningless in the Cook case because they were political activists with the same aims -- they should have high interrater reliability, but we wouldn't care, because the method is fundamentally invalid and untrustworthy. Validity is different from reliability, and more important. Tol would have a much stronger argument if he just noted that they collaborated online -- there's no point in talking about reliability anymore if we know they collaborated. There's no point in nitpicking if we know the basic method was invalid, or we know that they lied about their method (a method that would still be invalid even if they hadn't lied.) The fact that they have a bunch of irrelevant psychology and survey studies in the 97% kills the paper too.

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geoff chambers link
8/16/2014 05:01:17 pm

“...this would not have been published if it made false claims about liberals or environmentalists.”
Probably true, but you can’t prove it, so you’d do better to avoid mentioning it in criticisms of the paper.
“A lot of the criticisms of the paper were counterproductive.”.
You’re not the first to have made this criticism. It’s the nature of the internet, and of us internet blog critics. We’re like the blind men describing the elephant in the Buddhist fable, each with their own take on reality. The guy holding the ear or the trunk has a more useful take on reality, but he can’t know that.
I’d also go easy on the Minors angle. Lewandowsky can shrug it off by saying “someone wrote in 06 instead of 66”. It’s sloppy, but it’s not a capital offence.
On how the paper got published, you should know that the first article on the prepublished paper was at Huffington Post in July 2012, by Psychological Science’s “Writer in Residence”. The journal has its interests. Their Editor in Chief Professor Eich is a full time academic and has rather different interests, involving his professional reputation.
Let’s see what replies we get from him.

Joe Duarte link
8/14/2014 08:28:54 am

You are right about the strangeness of such a sloppy, haphazard study being accepted by a journal -- that no private payer would pay for such research, no market research firm or corporation. That's an interesting reality. We evidently have extremely low standards for data collection. It truly is amazing that a prestigious scientific journal would publish a study of skeptics collected on anti-skeptic websites, with no information about the participants, not even their country, age or sex, except for the suggestion that some were minors. When laypeople hear about this kind of thing, they become very confused. They think science is this hard, rigorous thing, featuring great exactitude and smarts. This isn't what they thought science was. Especially when we get to just make stuff up and lie.

Your last point about the mindset of needing to refute invalid work with more data is something that's been on my mind a lot for over a year. I'll be writing about it soon, and also for a methods paper in a journal. Research psychologists have inadvertently combined rationalism with empiricism, a classic dichotomy. Too many of us don't understand what it means to say that a study is invalid, don't understand what validity is, and don't understand the epistemic authority that logic and valid reasoning can have, sans data.

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John Galt
8/13/2014 09:47:16 pm

Jose, I don't blame you for wanting to get out of the Climate debate, it was never about science and always about politics and money. When you dig into this arena in detail it does look more and more like a conspiracy but when you step back and take a deep breath you realize that you don't need a full blown conspiracy to get people to see which side of their bread is buttered.
A convergence of interests drives the whole debate, from noble cause corruption to greed, all manner of motivations are here. The atmospheric science is a side show.

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John M
8/14/2014 05:27:19 am

What is you take on Lawandowsky's Recursive Fury: Conspiracist Ideation in the Blogosphere in Response to Research on Conspiracist Isolation (2013)? The response by Lawandowsky and his defenders is that it was retracted due to legal fears and the official retraction notice stated their investigation found no problems with the academic or ethical aspects of the paper. I'm curious what you think about it.

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Joe Duarte link
8/14/2014 08:18:32 am

Hi John -- I've never read it. A paper about one's critics is unlikely to be interesting from a scientific standpoint. It seemed extracurricular, and I've never dug in.

It will be seen in a different light given that the original substantive paper is a fraud. The title reported a link between moon hoaxism and climate hoaxism that did not exist. It was just made up. So were a lot of aspects of the paper. I'm stunned by these sentences, that we live in a universe where a "scientist" could just make stuff up, could lie in the very title of the paper. I'm going to propose that data be included in the review process -- all it would have taken was for reviewers to spend five minutes with the data, and they would've known the paper was false, that the title and the abstract were false.

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Paul Matthews link
8/15/2014 03:57:25 am

Joe

I think it is worth your while looking at the retracted "fury" paper for several reasons.

(a) It shows how L responds to criticism, which is
"You criticise me, therefore you're a conspiracy theorist".
For example, your claim here that there were fake participants makes you guilty of "conspiracist ideation".

(b) It shows his unpleasant and dishonest tactics-
(i) Write a paper which is as you say, a fabrication and defamatory, with a "goading" title.
(ii) Wait for the inevitable storm of protest and questions
(iii) refuse to answer the questions, to encourage speculation about the answers (more goading).
(iv) Label those who speculated as conspiracy theorists.

(c) It is interesting to follow how the retraction occurred at the Frontiers journal. They made at least 3 statements, gradually changing their story, first claiming there were no ethical issues with the paper, then admitting that there were.
http://www.frontiersin.org/blog/Retraction_of_Recursive_Fury_A_Statement/812
Clearly the journal started off trying to defend Lew and work with him, then eventually realised he was indefensible.

Barry Woods
8/15/2014 11:26:43 pm

Professor Henry Markram (co-founder of Frontiers) issued a stronger statement, after Lewandowsky's media (and by proxy, Dana in the Guardian) attacks on Frontiers

http://www.frontiersin.org/blog/Rights_of_Human_Subjects_in_Scientific_Papers/830

which is well worth a read, he added this comment to his article:




Henry Markram
My own personal opinion: The authors of the retracted paper and their followers are doing the climate change crisis a tragic disservice by attacking people personally and saying that it is ethically ok to identify them in a scientific study. They made a monumental mistake, refused to fix it and that rightfully disqualified the study. The planet is headed for a cliff and the scientific evidence for climate change is way past a debate, in my opinion. Why even debate this with contrarians? If scientists think there is a debate, then why not debate this scientifically? Why help the ostriches of society (always are) keep their heads in the sand? Why not focus even more on the science of climate change? Why not develop potential scenarios so that society can get prepared? Is that not what scientists do? Does anyone really believe that a public lynching will help advance anything? Who comes off as the biggest nutter? Activism that abuses science as a weapon is just not helpful at a time of crisis.

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ishi crew link
8/17/2014 02:13:28 am

This is a very interesting set of blog posts and related articles.I'm actually a pretty hard core environmentalist and believer in the 'scientific consensus' mostly because it seems to be based on CO2/earth physics (and i read about it in scientific american in the 80's before alot of the recent kinds of data were in, and i was slightly skeptical because I looked at the local plant fauna and at that time I had noticed in fact some of the ones which at one time confined to the mountain tops were actually showing up at lower elevations---but that could be due to 'microclimate' or regional differences, and since 2000 or so it seems to have somewhat drastically reversed, and also many trout populations seem to be getting somewhat scarce except at higher elevations).

However, I read both realclimate and wattsup (and actually the discussion of slutsky's theorem regarding the hockey stick graph is one reason i keep glancing at it, as well as the fact that physicist N. Scafetta of Duke is discussed there---he co-authored some interesting physics papers, but I think his sociopolitical positions are offensive as i infer them from some of his papers). (Curry also seems to know her 'chaos theory' though thats an involved and nuanced topic and i haven't read her carefully, but it sems right. I'm not all that impressed with what Haidt I have seen ---it doesn't seem to be very profound, and mostly a sort of point of view (a fair amount of it almost truisms or common sense armchair philosophizing dressed up as academic expertise and financially, status wise, etc. compensated just like a physicist or computer scientist -----my view i guess might be the only ones whose 'marginal utility' meets their actually work would be Rush Limbaugh (he invented agriculture by warming the planet with his breath), Dick Cheney, George W Bush, Rice, etc. as well as the rioters in Livingston Mo. who created a sustianbable 24 hour news cycle), like alot of things such as sociobiology, evolutionary psychology, the '5 factor' and other WEIRD models')

I see Duarte has co-authored a paper with Haidt of U Va ; alot of these issues do seem to mostly about political psychology including those of the scientists (supposedly) studying them (they may actually be in Plato's Cave or mistaking objective reality for their reflection in a mirror ('i'll be your mirror'---lou reed, nico and the velvet underground). .
Andrew Gelman of NYU discussed the paper a bit on his blog, and while he didn't really criticize or find flaws with the statistics, said it was a sort of throw away paper which sjhoulnd't have been published (any more than say, your elementary school math homework or 'what i did on my summer vacation' paper).

My impression is the major and very important finding of the paper was a large grant and new position for the author in the UK. So, it passes the highest standard of science because its not based on some delusions or fantasies which don't correspond to anything in the real world, but rather objective, logical and empirically valid causality, which money and jobs. Not only that, maybe a further paper will document how the Australians discovered the island of UK.

I'd also add that while I am a bit of an ecological/hard core leftist type (i even was at OccupyDC) sometimes it seems the people who you most identify with from their written or expressed views and concerns (including family, friends, ideological and scientific/rationalistic allies, etc.) are actually your greatest enemies (mostly in my view because they don't 'practice what they preach' or 'walk the talk'---they come across too often more like, say, anti-gay Catholic priests who also use their churches to find children to be involved with, consensually or otherwise). Alot of the 'global warming' activist types i run across seem to promote the view that they should be funded (by me or anyone else they come across) to help spread the word of ecological destruction, so they'll write a book, make a movie, put up a blog (all as startling as the recnt Australian discovery of the UK) (eg they saw Gore's movie, and now are experts who want to be compensated for their difficult research, or they came up with the idea of 'not littering' and 'recycling' and want to show people how to do this by flying around the world in their private jet and showing people how to use a trash can in the jet rather than throw the crap out the window---and also guilt trip anyone who ever has done that.

(I'm no statistician though I did study and apply some statistical mechanics (physics, second law) to biological problems and there is alot of overlap, but i'm glancing at things one vs 2 sided t tests, statistical signifance , bayes vs frequentism----and this is widely speculative but alot of it looks (like alot of mathematical economics, a very bad 'religion'/formalism since if you start with stat mech you can take a shorter path (of least action); while they likely get to the

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ishi crew link
8/17/2014 02:20:53 am

looks like my comment got truncated; i really should just blog on it since i don't even use my blog much except to remember some stuff. ola

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Jim Jelinski
8/24/2014 03:42:06 pm

Hello Mr. Duarte!

I have been sporadically checking your blog and website for updates, as I like reading what you have to say. I learn something from your writing, as you appear to be a pretty sharp guy, and the field is one in which I never studied. (I’m a mechanical engineer, so I’m more ‘hardware oriented’ you might say.)

I see your article dated 31 July 2014 regarding the falseness of the Lewandowski paper.

If I may put in a relatively ‘low-fo’ comment;

-It is pretty obvious even to me that Lewandowski and the other authors KNEW the paper was false, and DID NOT CARE.
-The paper was written to gather some headlines, and to discredit conservatives and anyone opposing the great Global Warming Scam.
-The authors KNEW that the mainstream media (ABC, NBC, CBS, NYTimes, AP, Washington Post, etc) would trumpet the headline, then the issue would die, get thrown on the ash-heap, and be quickly buried under a pile of new lies.
The value was that it was another beat on the drums, in the endless media drumbeat that Left-wingers are PROGRESSIVES- for PROGRESS!- and are ‘cool’ and SMART.
Conservatives, on the other hand, are STUPID SQUARES.
No-one in the media would ever READ the paper, much less actually go poking around to see if anything in the paper had any basis at all in fact.
By the time anything like your paper came out, the great media machine would be well down the road, having dumped another few thousand stories on a gullible public.
Any facts you bring to light….. never see the light of day, as far as the great bulk of the public are concerned. The media will NEVER report your paper. It may as well not even exist.
For the mainstream media-
-The Truth DOES NOT MATTER.
-It’s NOT about FACT, it’s about POLITICAL PROPAGANDA.
-It’s NOT about increasing peoples knowledge, it’s about DEMONIZING the (conservative) OPPOSITION.

For another example,
Do you recall Al Gore and Bill Nye ‘The Science Guy’ doing a so-called ‘simple high school physics experiment’ that ‘proved’ CO2 causes Global Warming?

When it first came out, the video of the experiment was everywhere on the news. Even I, who long ago learned how slanted the mainstream news is and avoids it when possible, saw the video, or at least what the media decided were the ‘important’ parts.
Mostly, the media echoed what Gore said… ‘it’s HIGH SCHOOL PHYSICS’ in a tone of voice that made it CLEAR that ANY normal person would instantly understand how obvious it was, and it would take a real CONSERVATIVE DUNCE to try to disagree.

If you remember it, has ANYONE replicated the experiment…. and obtained the same results?

I don’t think so.

The only person I am aware of to try to replicate the experiment is Anthony Watts.

If you go to Anthony Watt’s web page ‘WattsUpWithThat’, and click on the ‘Climate FAIL files tab, you will find the video where Anthony honestly tries to duplicate Al Gore/Bill Nye’s experiment.
It quickly becomes rather obvious that the Gore/Nye video is a fraud from one end to the other.

Also, if you do a quick web search, you will find a BUNCH of articles where the ‘experiment’ is debunked.

No matter.

The great, dull bulk of the electorate have NOT seen the ‘experiment’ debunked.

Again, it is NOT about TRUTH, it is ALL about PROPAGANDA.

But amongst the darkness, there are places where the light of knowledge still shines.
Your web page is one of those places.

Keep writing!
and I’ll Keep Reading!

All the Best!

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Joe Duarte link
8/26/2014 03:50:08 pm

Hi Jim,

I think you guys are too cynical :-) The world is a very complicated and surprising place. It's not as simple as a good vs. evil contest.

The media (meaning, *some* media) is sometimes biased, but they're not totally corrupt or dark. Journalists are often driven by idealism -- many people choose to become journalists out of idealism. They don't set out to make the world worse, or to do evil. Many of them have strong political identities, but many of those still care about broader principles of truth and good reporting. Liberal reporters will sometimes report stories that are unfavorable to a liberal figure or cause. Good science journalists will report the Lewandowsky fraud even if they don't care for skeptics. I'm just getting started on it, have hardly talked to any journalists yet -- this is the beginning. The Cook scam or whatever we'd call it is another issue that will be reported, especially after I write up the incredible fact that they included psychology papers and surveys of the general public as "climate papers".

I haven't had time to post much lately, and I might have to go dark for a month or so on the Lewandowsky case. It might be a bigger story than the one paper, or the authors of that paper.

More broadly, there are many things you all can do to improve this situation. I've not sure if people have given it a lot of thought, but there are lots of courses of action to combat fraud and scams in scientific journals. Blogs are just one thing. I might write more about this. Don't just write off science -- there are ways to make it better, to improve it, to drive out the scammers, etc.

p.s. I don't know what paper of mine you're referring to as something that won't be covered by the media. And I'm not familiar with the Gore-Nye experiment.

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Bryson Brown
8/27/2014 10:50:10 am

Interesting to see so much ink spilled on a red herring-- that is, the title of the article, which, of course, does not express a causal claim or any other conclusion of the article, instead expressing a silly inference that (tongue-in-cheek) represents a generalized dismissal of science as a reliable source of information. For the rest, of course, the article is fairly straightforward and perfectly sound. I'm sorry to have run across one more echo-chamber of climate deniers engaged in information-free mutual support displays.

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Joe Duarte link
8/27/2014 01:59:57 pm

Hi Bryson -- Yeah, we can't falsely assert an effect in a title, citing variables that were measured in the study, and call it "tongue-in-cheek". Science doesn't work like that, and hopefully never will. We especially can't do that when the false effect claimed in the title is slanderous and could damage millions of people by linking them to a loony belief they do not in fact hold.

The paper will never be "perfectly sound". That's not a credible position to take when a paper asserts several false effects, apparently includes minors, has broken items and invalid scales, conceals the true factor loadings, and whose main construct falls apart upon factor analysis.

The post you're commenting on has all sorts of specific claims, makes various references to the data, and so forth -- and is mostly not about the title, so the title issue can't be a red herring here, especially since the argument about the title is very similar to the other arguments about other false claims. Saying the paper is "perfectly sound" won't do anything in the face of specific arguments and data -- it certainly won't refute those arguments.

I discourage the use of unscientific smears like "denier". I'm not aware of any body of evidence that validates that term, or a construct of "denial". It would have to be carefully defined from both an epistemological and psychological standpoint, and then validated as something that is real and meaningful out in the world. Since it's trivially easy to simulate and model how a reasonable person could end up being an AGW skeptic, the term seems to be false in its core premise when applied indiscriminately.

Politics is often the enemy of truth. If we find ourselves defending any piece of garbage or fraud when it emerges from our political camp, that's not a viable place to be. Your standards should be miles higher than this paper -- it doesn't get much worse than this. I think this paper is likely to be used in textbooks and graduate seminars as an example of multiple forms of malpractice and deception. It's a disgrace, many times over.

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Barry Woods
8/28/2014 01:44:03 am

Bryson - To be clear are you calling Jose a 'climate denier', or just the people commenting here?

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Barry Woods
8/27/2014 07:29:39 pm

if this is the same Bryson Brown -

https://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_detailpage&v=rYGdKXXxabo#t=652

fascinating

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Joe Duarte link
8/27/2014 08:23:56 pm

Wow, that's pretty bad. He's saying that "deniers" deny that the earth is 4.5 billion years old, the safety of vaccines, and AGW. I'm not aware of any evidence of such a population -- of people who believe all these things.

The attempt to link AGW skeptics with denying the well-established age of the earth (ballpark) is very disappointing, because he provides no data, no evidence. It's just asserted, like it's the kind of thing we can just assert. He's trying to do the same thing that Lewandowsky and colleagues did -- link AGW skeptics to much crazier views.

He also commits a very well-documented and well-refuted version of ad hominem -- the argument that skeptics aren't doing research of their own, or what he calls inquiry. That's an extremely bad argument. It perverts the burden. No one is obligated to be a climate scientist. The arguments people make are either valid or invalid, consequential or not, right or wrong, etc.-- none of this will be impacted by who they are, or whether they're into inquiry. In my book, I've called this fallacy the Insider Fallacy, the Pompous Academic Fallacy, and a couple of other things, depending on the draft.

This is very poor quality scholarship. People who are quick to smear AGW skeptics as "deniers" never do the epistemological work this would require. There are so many obvious criteria and heuristics a person could use to come to AGW skepticism, like the relative newness of a field, the apparent unreliability of its models and methods (here I'm simulating what an engaged person might read about the failure of climate models -- I don't think broad skepticism toward such models is correct, but that's irrelevant. What matters is whether a reasonable person could conclude that the models are unreliable. That's easy.) A person could read about Climategate (which I know very little about), could observe the behavior of Michael Mann and the fact that famous climate scientists actually support him and circle the wagons -- in a lot of fields, I don't think such behavior would be rewarded, and I'm not sure what to make of that. But a person could easily conclude something is wrong with the field, that it's corrupt, etc. based on the fact that Mann is not penalized for his behavior.

A person could note that estimates of transient and equilibrium sensitivity seem to be going downward, as from IPCC4 to IPCC5, and be a lukewarmer, or just a skeptic. One thing we know more than anything is that the estimates will change. That's very interesting, and unusual. We know the estimates climate scientists have for TCS and ECS, for the effects of aerosols, and probably cloud feedbacks will all change. At least we know this with high confidence or probability. Why? Because they've done nothing but change in the past. Climate science is dynamic, and it is more dynamic than other sciences. This is very important, epistemologically. Or at least, it's entirely reasonable for someone to think this is important.

We don't know whether such heuristics and features of the field are rational considerations for weighing the findings of the field. These intuitions might turn out to be very good predictors. Skeptics who use these cues might be more accurate, iterated across fields and issues, than non-skeptic self-style rational people who simply follow an algorithm of "They say there's a consensus. I believe the consensus." We don't know. There's no reason to assume the consensus-obedience rule is better. A whole lot of work needs to be done before we get anywhere near "denier".

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Joe Duarte link
8/27/2014 08:38:25 pm

It also surprises me when people try to ascribe the basic phenomena of bias and motivated reasoning exclusively to their opponents, to those who disagree with them. That's amazing to me. I think it's incredible, completely stunning, that a mature adult would embrace such a worldview. We know that it's false. Any wise person knows that it's false. And as a matter of empirical research, we know, again, that this is false.

Behavior like repeating talking points is not remotely exclusive to AGW skeptics. That's a trivial behavior anyway. But the bias processes he ascribes to skeptics are largely universal, and it pains me when someone who is so political about this issue, in other words, tribal and biased, tries to make the other side out to have a monopoly on bias. I really want to fast forward to a civilization where this kind of kindergarten level argumentation and arbitrary empirical claims sans evidence are just not possible in an academic setting -- I expect much more than this from scholars, and the fact that this is what we're getting in 2014 is alarming to me. I don't think I'll ever get used to this reality. It's amazing.

Anyway, here is some empirical research on the near universality of certain sources of bias and intolerance:

Brandt, M.J., Reyna, C., Chambers, J.R., Crawford, J., & Wetherell, G. (in press). The ideological-congruence hypothesis: Intolerance among both liberals and conservatives. Current Directions in Psychological Science.

Chambers, J.R., Swan, L.K., & Heesacker, M. (in press). Better off than we know: Distorted perceptions of incomes and income inequality in the America. Psychological Science.

Chambers, J.R., Schlenker, B.R., & Collisson, B. (2012). Ideology and prejudice: The role of value conflicts. Psychological Science, 24, 140-149.

Crawford, J. T. (in press). Ideological symmetries and asymmetries in political intolerance and prejudice toward political activist groups. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology.

Crawford, J. T. & Pilanski, J. M. (in press). Political intolerance, right and left. Political Psychology. DOI: 10.1111/j.1467-9221.2012.00926.x

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Barry Woods
8/28/2014 01:42:40 am

ref motivated reasoning.

Dr Adam Corner (psychology Cardiff Uni) was one of the first to promote Prof Stephan Lewandowsky's work in the Guardian. Stephan sent him a copy a month before the press release..

Adam added his own opinion (plus an obligatory, moon photo)
http://www.theguardian.com/environment/blog/2012/jul/27/climate-sceptics-conspiracy-theorists

"Lewandowsky's research poses difficult questions for the climate sceptic community. Although they are not a homogenous group, they tend to coalesce around common themes relating to the reality and seriousness of climate change. The findings suggest that at least some proportion of the people who consider themselves sceptical about climate change are also willing to entertain conspiracy theories that are not taken seriously in mainstream society."

Adam reproduced his article at Talking Climate, where Dr Paul Matthews was very harsh about his lack of scepticism about LOG12

http://talkingclimate.org/are-climate-sceptics-more-likely-to-be-conspiracy-theorists/

Adam like to push the motivated reasoning and ideology approach to why those on the right (conservative - UK version) are sceptical..

Yet when people suggest that his own motivated reasoning and ideology might be blinding him, to the broad spectrum of scepticism, ie sensitivity looking to be low, models running warm. he thinks people (me specifically) are trying to smear him..

lots of evidence for his 'potential' motivated reasoning...
my point is he cannot suggest others are motivated without reflecting to his own, or other environmentalists..

I am nowhere near as motivated as Adam is..

Dr Adam Corner, Green Party parliamentary candidate was waving Act Now, banners at Copenhagen, (Green party literature)
http://t.co/Hdqz9Wbn
source Green Party News (pg5)
http://t.co/ezqsBusb

Adam painted blue, campaigning 2 weeks before Copenhagen (House of Commons, carrying Stop Climate Chaos Banner, Stop Dirty Coal)
http://www.flickr.com/photos/cardiff_friends_of_the_earth/4190476939/in/photostream
http://www.flickr.com/photos/cardiff_friends_of_the_earth/4191239174/in/photostream

Adam writes it up here at the Friends of the Earth website:
http://www.foecardiff.co.uk/content/cardiff-campaigners-demand-climate-action-record-breaking-protest

He has a blog 100monthsand counting,

tweeted about Gordon Brown (PM) showing the Deniers what for

@AJCorner
loving Brown calling people 'deniers' and 'luddites' on Cif. Tell it like it is Gordy!

http://twitter.com/AJCorner/status/6429777167

Member of Transition Towns, Policy Advisor to Climate Outreach and Information Network (climate activist group, the founder created Deniers - Halls of Shame, and founded the Rising Tide network)

When Adam spoke at a conference about motivated reasoning and ideology of those on the political right, yet he opened with

"I'm a researcher, not a campaigner"

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cLPpOS2BpH0&feature=player_embedded#t=822
http://talkingclimate.org/a-greener-shade-of-blue-communicating-climate-change-on-the-right/

Lying (to himself) or just delusional, or just an activist?

Perhaps the 'sceptics' might reasonably request, yes research us, but not using activists that oppose us? An who will protect the public from activist psychologists?

Bryson Brown probably got his thinking from Prof Lewandowsky

Evidence is overrated when you're a conspiracy theorist - May 2010
http://www.abc.net.au/news/2010-05-03/33900


Barry Woods
8/28/2014 02:03:27 am

Articles Dr Adam Corner, a psychologist who researches scepticism, was cheering on, whilst waving banners at COP15

Gordon Brown attacks 'flat-earth' climate change sceptics-Guardian
http://www.theguardian.com/environment/2009/dec/04/flat-earth-climate-change-copenhagen

".....But tonight the prime minister, his environment secretary, Ed Miliband, and Ed Markey, the man who co-authored the US climate change bill, joined forces to condemn the sceptics.

"With only days to go before Copenhagen we mustn't be distracted by the behind-the-times, anti-science, flat-earth climate sceptics," Brown told the Guardian. "We know the science. We know what we must do. We must now act and close the 5bn-tonne gap. That will seal the deal....."

http://www.theguardian.com/environment/2009/dec/07/gordon-brown-eu-emissions-cuts

"But after lambasting climate deniers as "flat-earth sceptics" and "anti-change Luddites", Brown....."

@AJCorner
loving Brown calling people 'deniers' and 'luddites' on Cif. Tell it like it is Gordy!

http://twitter.com/AJCorner/status/6429777167

http://psych.cf.ac.uk/contactsandpeople/researchstaff/corner.php

Climate Progress lapped up Browns words and rhetoric.
http://thinkprogress.org/climate/2009/12/06/205078/british-pm-gordon-brown-attacks-anti-science-flat-earth-climate-sceptics-while-uk-conservatives-reaffirm-climate-science-and-need-for-desperately-urgent-copenhagen-deal/

yet we have psychologists cheering it on.


Joe Duarte link
8/27/2014 09:02:54 pm

FYI, I should note that I don't think ad hominem is a fallacy. Well, not in the lay sense of a fallacy invalidating an argument. Now, the Insider or Pompous Academic Fallacy, a species of ad hominem, is always a fallacy. But ad hominem as such can be a rational heuristic, especially as it pertains to the reliability or credibility of an interlocutor, source, or speaker.

In such cases, it's a probabilistic rule. The boy who cried wolf is not generally trustworthy when he cries wolf. A known liar isn't credible, which is why courts recognize a concept of witness credibility.

In a strict sense, ad hominem is a fallacy because it relies on exogenous information that is not part of the argument -- it's not in the premises and so forth, not logically connected to the claims. But that's a very constrained, and in some cases rationalistic, view of argumentative validity. A rational knower will not so constrain himself, because a careful use of ad hominem will often pay off -- it will lead to a higher ratio of true beliefs to false beliefs, for example.

The enormous challenge is bias. Ad hominem is far too convenient when we're motivated to believe or reject a claim, when it conflicts with our politics, religion, or our own work/publications. It takes discipline to use wisely, and in many cases we'd be better off taking it off the table and treating it as a fallacy. In the climate debate, ad hominem is almost always used wrongly, in an invalid way -- e.g. "Funded by the Koch brothers" isn't going to work out as a heuristic for evaluable research. If we can just evaluate research, we should. Ad hominem -- or weighing the credibility or conflicts of interest of a source -- is most useful when we can't evaluate the claims, research, etc.

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Brad Keyes link
9/16/2014 07:01:09 pm

Ad hominem may have some uses, but they are very limited ones in science.

This gets back to what I was saying about the imprescindible importance of distinguishing *scientific* epistemology from the other kind. Blanket advice that treats them interchangeably is doomed to invalidity.

In science you don't "listen to" people. You don't trust anyone's opinion, and you'll never be asked to. (If that happens, as it has in the climate debate, then check your wallet.)

Nullius in verba. The only "source" whose "credibility" comes into it is nature.

Unless you suspect the author of *fraud*, their identity is irrelevant. Their IQ is irrelevant. Their past scientific achievements are irrelevant. The prestige of the journal they publish in is irrelevant.

By the way, here is a very simple proof of the fraudulence of the entire climate-problem movement:

Remember the hockey stick graph? Remember what it looked like, more or less? Of course you do. It was everywhere.

Remember the *corrected* version? (You know, the one that came out 5 years later and showed what the signal would have "looked like" without the various biases introduced by inappropriate statistical handling?) Remember what it looked like, roughly?

I'm pretty confident you don't.

Because it was rarely seen. The climate movement lost all interest in MBH98/99 the minute its result changed.

When it "proved" there was no climate change until 1900, we were told to believe it.

When it "proved" something different, it all of a sudden meant nothing.

That—right there—is the opposite of scientific.

You CANNOT choose whether or not to pay attention to a paper depending on the "answer" it gets. In a non-pathological world the corrected graph would have got the same star billing in IPCC propaganda as the earlier, spurious version.

ishi link
8/30/2014 10:13:40 pm

i have a relative who is a science journalist (who has neither a journalism nor hard science degree---he studied environmental science so has a fairly basic if traditional background). A fair of amount of stuff done at his place is debunking or investigation of science fraud, etc. One issue involved a Japanese scientist in biological sciences who committed suicide due to fraud, the case of marc hauser, a 'fake' paper submitted to many 'pay to publish' journals which say they are peer reviewed but really aren't, the new group in psychology trying to reproduce psychology studies (many can't be apparently).

To me the real issue here is even more basic than some things psychological type reasoning supposes---confirmation bias, etc. Its economics. People want to survive, and try to join survival groups in any way they can, generally by mouthing the party line, and singing in or preaching to the choir. In this case one has some social psychologists who want to have nice jobs in academia (rather than truck driving, coal mining, walmarting), and don't want to learn more than basic statistics, nor (in my view) really care about global warming, social psychology, or what people think. They may be like cops who join the police because they really want to protect and serve, but see that half the police force spends their time accepting bribes, and doing as little policing as possible (ie pick up prostitutes but then decide to spend some time fraternizing with them instead of fillling out forms). Alot of scientists (like businnses that periodically roll out an 'all new' potato chip) look for some 'research paper' to do which can be done in minimal time/effort. I think this is in all fields.

One thing i find interesting is the (relatively small) number of scientists who are not 'wack' but often endorse wack poistions generally when older. In Aids, Montaigner and Mullis, physics---brian josephson, a few in climate science, and in general every science. There are 'borderline' cases like 'race, iq, income etc' in biology (and also economics), anv even 911truthers Also foundations of physics (nobleates Laughlin on the big bang, t'Hooft on quantum theory).

(My own view is i believe with climate consensus 90 to 95%, evolution 95-99%, aids 95%+ (though at first i was open to environmental causes), and am much more open to nonstandard views of quantum theory than the consensus (up to 30% chance t'hooft is correct for example).
However some of these differences are 'semantic' , 'syntactic', or ideological. Some biologists' explanations (eg Dawkins' 'selfish genes' and 'anti-group selection') i find absurd, but here the debate is more like between sunnite and shi'ia islam, or proterstants versus catholics.

As for AGW, while i agree with the 'consensus' in many ways (and come across many people delaing with those issues in various ways----from research to journalism) to an extent some of their 'alarmism' is not part of their science. Before all they got was an academic pulpit, peer review in basically obscure journals, and a few conferences possibly. Now they can speak to crowds, publish best sellers, walk the halls of congress and corporations, etc. Some is sincere (one can get legislation, or development of energy effificiency and solar power, etc.) but alot of it is just the same motivation as someone else who goes 'anti-AGW' and then gets feted in 'denialist' circles. In sum, alot of them dont care, actually. (in my view if they did they would 'walk their talk', but they need to revise their 'party line' since they left out some variables (and that may have been because they were in one discipline. Its like religion---the Pope often talks about poverty, but he runs the Vatican empire which is basically a major corporation which partly lives off poverty).

Scientists (defined by peer review as members of their guild) often talk about 'truth' but 'go along to get along' (like the 'blue line' cops use to protect their group, as catholic priests often have done). They'd have to do a sort of cost-benefit analyses to see how much 'truth' they produce at what salary. Now they measure it by Hirsch index, etc. ---US News and Report rated our college as #1 producer in truth by C02 weight (we produced 1 Billion lbs of hot air this year, though we had to hire alot of adjuncts at half price so we could really pump it out). (eg you get lewendowsky type terms like 'conspiricaist ideation'---a new form of psychological potato chip to be sold in texts through the coming ages.

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ishi
8/30/2014 10:36:02 pm

p.s. to be very redundant, alot of papers (scientific truth) seem driven by 'obfuscationism'----they pass of expertise by using alot of 'rigor' or formalism. (Some discussions on this were recent on a math list i saw---the issue is should use simple methods to solve a problem, or bring in 'big artillery' (use the most advanced math theory to prove it---to be lauded as brilliant. ) Its like Ferguson Mo. shooting---if faced with a nonviolent protest due you bring in tanks? Or if you want to teach arithmatic, should you use a text Pincipia mathematica (1000 pages in logic form) or a 4th grade text? The 'moon landing' paper which i glanced at seems to use the 'rigor' approach----they give you a standard statistical table showing the correlations, etc. which aren't all that self-evident. The discussion on this list gives the raw data, which just about anyone can understand. Also, if one looks at their original 'coding sceme' (4 values) one could ask what would happen if you instead asked people for their percentage of belief to get 100 values. Also not discussed (from what i saw) was exactly what samples one is dealing with to find 'statistical significance'. Several possible samples seem possible (eg comparing 10 to 7, versus 993 to 7).
"If out of 1000 people, 10 have the same last name. One finds 7 are wealthy and 3 are poor. So, that last name is correlated with wealth. This explains who you should believe and emulate, and also suggests social policy for naming people, as well as how expert psychologists should.advise propential parents, and how geneologies should be edited'. (On 'names', freakonmics book has some related discussions.
I actually if there was something like a 'guaranteed income' (milton friedman, thomas paine, von Parijis) it might be ok for everyone to publish anything of whatever value---sort of 'public transit' versus competetion on a highway mediated by road rage to determine who gets a salary). The there would be more time to access results---31 papers so far cite the 'moon' paper, but none i glanced at were critical. (Citing is often driven by friendship, self-citation, or laziness (copy someone else's list). None discussed the issues raised by analyses of raw data.

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Brad Keyes link
9/14/2014 05:37:07 am

Jose,

the motive for Lewandowsky's "work" here—which is not science but hate speech—is obvious to you, right?

You don't really think Lewandowsky runs around in his white coat pseudoscientifically "diagnosing" RANDOM subpopulations with a mental disorder, do you?

Lewandowsky's place in scientific history is secure.

His findings will be talked about, generations hence, as second only to the bombshell announcement by phrenologists that they had finally proven black inferiority, something scientists had always known was obviously true but had never had any evidence for.

Likewise, Lewandowsky—who has always been SURE, and has been saying as a matter of fact for years, that skeptics are crazy—entered the pantheon the day he found the first, and likely last, piece of evidence of that truth.

That's what science is. The eternal human quest for proof of our beliefs.

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Barry Woods
9/15/2014 10:38:21 pm

relevant - ie 3 data points, minors included, and refusal to release raw survey results....

New Scientist - It's time to criminalise serious scientific misconduct
http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg22329864.100-its-time-to-criminalise-serious-scientific-misconduct.html#.VBgdgo10yUn

There are many examples in which researchers have simply carried on with their careers. I believe scientists should be held to a higher standard. Those who commit research misconduct cannot be trusted. It's too easy to be tempted into ignoring or destroying data that undermines your work. It may seem an inhuman way to be, but a true scientist is delighted when his or her favourite hypothesis is destroyed by good data.

Reply
Brad Keyes link
9/18/2014 12:46:07 am

José,

To state what's obvious, "rejection of science" is like "rationalization of inequality." It's an insult disguised as a variable. And while some conservatives might be rationalizing (I have no idea if they actually are), I know I'm not rejecting science. So Lewandowsky doesn't even seem to be able to write a title without lying.

We do not reject science. We never said we rejected it; we don't reject it; we trust it; some of us, like me, adore it. We even "agree with" or "believe" it, to the extent that's meaningful.

Even Lew's blog categories are sleazy, low-level defamation. "Pro science" and "anti science" sites?! LOL....

I have very rarely come across an *opponent* of science. That is, someone culpably working *against* human evidence-based knowledge about nature.

In fact it's hard to imagine what they'd sound like. Oh wait, here's an antiscientist's quote...

"The two MMs have been after the CRU station data for years. If they ever hear there is a Freedom of Information Act now in the UK, I think I’ll delete the file rather than send to anyone."

Those are the words of our enemy, Joe.

Anyway next time you get pissed off about Lewandowsky, here's a lighter take:

http://climatenuremberg.com/2014/05/15/lewandowsky-literacy-in-five-minutes-a-cn-faq/




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Recipes with Tom link
12/12/2020 02:41:52 am

I enjoyedd reading this

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robertfilippiss
8/29/2022 09:08:47 pm

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    José L. Duarte

    Social Psychology, Scientific Validity, and Research Methods.

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