Wow, this Lewandowsky story just keeps getting more bizarre. It’s like nothing I’ve even seen before.
On DeSmog Blog, Lewandowsky says we are victims of “conspiratorial thinking” and promises “four more people will have egg on their faces.” Great, bring it.
So now there’s a conspiracy theory going around that I didn’t contact them. It’s a perfect, perfect illustration of conspiratorial thinking. It’s illustrative of exactly the process I was analysing. People jump to conclusions on the basis of no evidence. I would love to be able to release those emails if given permission, because it means four more people will have egg on their faces. I’m anxiously waiting the permission to release this crucial information because it helps to identify people who engage in conspiratorial thinking rather than just searching their inboxes.
Newsflash perfessor. We HAVE searched our inboxes and as I reported on Lucia’s blog:
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To be extra thorough, I also searched again just now for “kwiksurvey” which is the name of the survey website Lewandowsky used. Nothing. I repeated all the searches I made above using two methods.
1. Email search tool for my email client
2. Computer file search tool – looking at every file (including the thousands of emails I have back to 1998)
While I found some files with the keywords, none of them were the survey participation invitation.
So explain to me professor Lewandowsky, how failure to receive or be able to find emails supposedly sent, without any other mode of contact or attempts at communication is somehow conspiracy theory.
If Lewandowsky sent an email, it likely ended up in SPAM. Lots of “take our quick survey” emails are spam these days. He should know better than to trust email as the only contact medium for something he deems important. Instead, he accuses us of being conspiracy theorists when we ask for proof.
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Jo Nova (via Andrew Bolt) points out this little incongruity:
There are even more strange things about this. Deltoid had already hosted the survey before McIntyre was even emailed once. McIntyre apparently did not recieve the same invitation or a link to the same survey. Deltoid got their invitations from Professor Lewandowsky, not the assistant. Lewandowsky said no skeptic hosted the survey, but Junkscience did. Did Lewandowsky not even check the sites of skeptics he emailed?
Anything goes in climate conspiracy theory science it seems.
Anthony Watts (Comment #102455)
September 1st, 2012 at 2:03 am
Add WUWT to the list. If he sent me an invitation, I surely can’t find it. Jo Nova asked me to search a couple of weeks ago, didn’t find it then, nor now.
That comment on WUWT referenced by “ob” upthread is not an invitation, and certainly not from Lewandowsky or one of his co-authors. It is from PaulW, who isn’t from Australia.
and…
Anthony Watts (Comment #102580)
September 4th, 2012 at 7:34 am
Regarding Steve McIntyre’s note at 3:11PM.
I understand his problem, I get hundreds of emails a day. Sometimes I miss important emails in the deluge.
So far, on my home computer (where I do most WUWT work) I have not been able to find any evidence that WUWT received an invitation from uwa.edu.au” or Charles Hanich about that time. That doesn’t mean there isn’t any, as it is also possible it ended up in the spam filter and was deleted.
I’ll search my office computer today and get a second look, to see if perhaps it resides there.
Lewandowski should know that if you really want to reach people in this day and age, don’t assume email is reliable. Back in the DARPA days, before SPAM accounted for a significant portion of Internet traffic, it was reliable. Now today, for anything truly important I follow up with a phone call and repeated emails until I get a response.
Lewandosky’s assistant apparently made an assumption not supported by a reply, Lewandowsky made a further unsupported assumption about “privacy”.
and…
Anthony Watts (Comment #102588)
September 4th, 2012 at 10:06 am
Per my previous comment, in addition to my home computer, I did a search on my office computer for:
“uwa.edu.au”
“Charles Hanich”
“Hanich”
And got no emails.
So either it was never sent, or ended up in SPAM and was deleted.
I see a lack of due diligence on the part of Lewandowsky if he really wanted skeptics to take the survey. The fact that he delegated the task to an underling, did no assurance follow up, and went with one-sided sampling tells me he his goal was to create a paper that fit his pre-conceived notions.
There’s no science involved in this paper, just opinion and confirmation bias of the highest order.
The fact that this paper passed peer review is even more troubling.