UPDATE: After a cursory look at the percentages in the response to the Lewandowsky survey from the blogs he listed as participating, it seems the outcome doesn’t fit the title. See below.
====================================
From the “free the metadata” department, we have this gem. Dr. Stephan Lewandowsky of the University of Western Australia’s Cognitive Science Department devised some sort of survey where he supposedly contacted skeptical climate blogs to ask we post a link to gather opinions for his survey. He says he contacted five and they all declined. Only one problem with that; none of the mainstream skeptical blogs appear to have any knowledge of being contacted. That includes WUWT and Climate Audit, among others.
I keep all my email, and I see no such contact or invitation. I’ve searched WUWT and found nothing in comments from him inviting to participate either. To be thorough, I also searched for any communications from his co-authors Klaus Oberauer and Gilles Gignac. I’ve found no invitation of any kind, but I did find that a commenter in the USA, PaulW left a note about it on WUWT here: http://wattsupwiththat.com/2010/08/29/new-wuwt-sstenso-page-now-online/#comment-469869 But, he’s not affiliated with UWA or the authors, and it was purely a comment of curiosity. One of our moderators, D.B. Stealey took the survey (now deleted) after seeing the comment, and noted “Interesting questions.” but he didn’t note any invitation to post it on WUWT, nor did I.
Similar lack of confirmed invitations are being reported in other skeptical blogs, and the list is growing. But, for some reason, Dr. Lewandowsky refuses to divulge which skeptical blogs he contacted.
Jo Nova and Lucia Liljegren are asking some very pointed questions. Given the sheer lunacy on display in the paper…
Lewandowsky, S., Oberauer, K., & Gignac, C. E. (in press). NASA faked the moon landing—therefore (climate) science is a hoax: An anatomy of the motivated rejection of science.. Psychological Science.
…I think Jo Nova nailed it with this line:
It’s as if Stephan did not want to know what real skeptics think?
Lucia asked Lewandowsky in a direct email about it and got this response:
Sorry, no, they likely replied to my requests under the presumption of privacy and I am therefore not releasing their names.
The blogs that did post the link (thereby publically identifying themselves, unlike those who declined) are:
%http://www.skepticalscience.com
%http://tamino.wordpress.com
%http://bbickmore.wordpress.com
%http://www.trunity.net/uuuno/blogs/
%http://scienceblogs.com/illconsidered/
%http://profmandia.wordpress.com/
%http://scienceblogs.com/deltoid/
%http://hot-topic.co.nz/
“…they likely replied” That seems to me to be pretty weak data for a scientist. Either they replied requesting confidentiality or they didn’t, there’s no “likely” about it when gathering hard data.
Time to fess up, perfessor. Show the list and proof of contact and confirmation that they declined the invitation. You have my full and complete permission to release my name. Other skeptical bloggers have also granted permission on Lucia’s website, so there’s no reason to hold back now.
In comments at Lucia’s, Steve McIntyre notes:
The University of Western Australia has fairly standard academic misconduct policies.
http://www.research.uwa.edu.au…..guidelines
http://www.research.uwa.edu.au…..rch-policy
If Lewandowky’s claim about 5 skeptic blogs was fabricated, it appears to me that it would be misconduct under university policies. The person responsible for investigating complaints appears to be the Pro VIce Chancellor (Research) ,Robyn Owens, dvcr@uwa.edu.au.
She is in a position to get an answer, given Lewandowsky’s refusal to disclose the information.
In other news, the Lewandowsky survey data was put online at Bishop Hill. See it here.
Make of that data what you wish, but it seems to me that if you only ask questions of one side, as shown is the blog list above, you’ll get one-sided answers. That’s hardly science.
UPDATE: After looking at the survey data provided on the Bishop Hill blog here, it is beginning to look like the answers were skewed by participants at those blogs for what they think he wanted to hear, rather than a true sample.
For example: If you look at column R in the Excel spreadsheet, labeled CYMoon, which according to the paper in question:
Lewandowsky, S., Oberauer, K., & Gignac, C. E. (in press). : An anatomy of the motivated rejection of science.. Psychological Science.
It says:
CYMoon The Apollo moon landings never happened and were
staged in a Hollywood studio. .742
That is the result of this question structure:
Unless otherwise noted, all items used a 4-point scale ranging from \Strongly Disagree’ (1) to \Strongly Agree” (4). Table section headings correspond to latent variable names in
Figure 2.
OK do a simple scan of the 1’s and 2’s in column R, which correspond to ‘Strongly Disagree’ and ‘Disagree’ and you get them as the majority, with a smattering of 3’s and 4’s. So I decided to use Excel’s function for counting occurances. =COUNTIF(R2:R1146,”1″, and =COUNTIF(R2:R1146,”2″ =COUNTIF(R2:R1146,”3″ =COUNTIF(R2:R1146,”4″
The (corrected, I had the 1 and 4 counts backwards originally, thanks Lucia) distribution of responses to the Moon Landing question are:
1067 Strongly Disagree
68 Disagree
4 Agree
6 Strongly agree
Total responses are 1145 (Rows R2 to R1146, top row R1 is title, so subtract 1 from 1146). Therefore 1067+68 = 1135 1135/1145 = 0.9912
Only 0.9% of respondents actually believe that the moon landings “never happened and were staged in a Hollywood film studio”. So what does that say about the title of the paper:
NASA faked the moon landing—therefore (climate) science is a hoax
I see a retraction for this paper in the very near future.
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Greg Laden says:
September 2, 2012 at 8:02 am
“…you feel left and important…”
Anyone care to explain Greg Laden’s incoherent comments above? I doubt that he will since it seems to be a drive-by kind of sneer, not an attempt at rational discussion. Typographical struggles aside, he wants to say no big deal. Does he have an actual argument or only blather?
btw, would it be this (link below) Greg Laden who commented above? Interesting for what the Tallbloke episode suggests about Laden’s (lack of) scruples, accuracy, and rigor…. I wouldn’t waste clicks looking at Laden’s own blog since he has proved his lack of elementary fairness and decency in the past.
Greg Laden discussed at Tallbloke
“Total responses are 1145 (Rows R2 to R1146, top row R1 is title, so subtract 1 from 1146). Therefore 1067+68 = 1135 1135/1145 = 0.9912
Only 0.9% of respondents actually believe that the moon landings “never happened and were staged in a Hollywood film studio”. So what does that say about the title of the paper:
NASA faked the moon landing—therefore (climate) science is a hoax
I see a retraction for this paper in the very near future.”
————————————————–
It’s worse than we thought, “out of the sample of 10 that believe the moon landings were faked, a majority (60%) accept the consensus position on climate science.”
Source: http://www.australianclimatemadness.com/
Geoff Chambers from Bishop Hill seems to have achieved a considerable success at Skeptical Science blog in persuading SkS author & moderator Tom Curtis to demand a withdrawal and rewrite of Lewandowsky’s paper.
http://www.skepticalscience.com/AGU-Fall-Meeting-sessions-social-media-misinformation-uncertainty.html
Quote:-
Given the low number of “skeptical” respondents overall; these two scammed responses significantly affect the results regarding conspiracy theory ideation. Indeed, given the dubious interpretation of weakly agreed responses (see previous post), this paper has no data worth interpreting with regard to conspiracy theory ideation. It is my strong opinion that the paper should be have its publication delayed while undergoing a substantial rewrite. The rewrite should indicate explicitly why the responses regarding conspiracy theory ideation are in fact worthless, and concentrate solely on the result regarding free market beliefs (which has a strong enough a response to be salvageable). If this is not possible, it should simply be withdrawn.
Coming from Skeptical Science that’s a significant step in the direction of scientific integrity and should be applauded.
When you have to add the word “science” to your discipline’s name you know its too far out to be obvious. I hated it when they took the beautiful term Geology and changed it to Earth Sciences. It is a diminutive of Geology. Cognitive Science – give us a break. It is the looseness of these terms that leaves lots of room for very lightweight thought.
I gather than no one here is familiar with Psychological Science. In fact, it’s the flagship publication of the Association for Psychological Science, which is perhaps the premier association of experimental psychologists in the world. I’m amazed that drivel like this got accepted by that journal; hopefully, there’ll be some embarrassment in that neck of the woods. I don’t like this kind of paper-and-pencil research anyway, but this may even be at the bottom of that barrel.
I’d say that Lewandowsky is another fine candidate for the Climate Prat award!
I originally searched for Lewandowsky and had had no returns. In a comment above, I gave permission for Lewandowsky to identify me if they had sent me an email that I hadn’t located.
In Lewandowsky’s post today, he reported that the inquiry was not sent out by him personally but by his research assistant. I searched again this time under the term “uwa.edu.au” and located an email from Charles Hanich on Sep 6, 2010 asking that the survey be posted by Climate Audit and a second request two weeks later.
Like many people, I get lots of emails. I didnt know Hanich and I didn’t pay any attention to the request at the time. I didnt reply.
Lewandowsky stated that the blogs in question “likely replied to my requests under the presumption of privacy and I am therefore not releasing their names.” Given that I made no reply, I don’t understand why their original inquiry would raise confidentiality issues.
The study itself looks pretty goofy and to be compromised by fake (Gleickian) answers from readers of Tamino, Deltoid etc , but that is another story.
Regarding Steve McIntyre’s note at 2:14PM.
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.
Lewandowsky should know that if you really want to reach people in the 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.
That doesn’t negate the fact that the rest of the paper is biased and worthless though. Clearly Lewandowsky didn’t care. If I did a sampling like that, I’d be excoriated. But anything goes in climate science when it supports the meme.
Anthony Watts says:
September 4, 2012 at 6:27 am
========
“But the plans were on display…”
“On display? I eventually had to go down to the cellar to find them.”
“That’s the display department.”
“With a flashlight.”
“Ah, well, the lights had probably gone.”
“So had the stairs.”
“But look, you found the notice, didn’t you?”
“Yes,” said Arthur, “yes I did. It was on display on the bottom of a locked filing cabinet stuck in a disused lavatory with a sign on the door saying ‘Beware of the Leopard.'”
– Douglas Adams
[Snip. d-word Policy violation. ~dbs, mod.]
Anthony says: “…if you only ask questions of one side, as shown is the blog list above, you’ll get one-sided answers…”
Did you really write that, Anthony? If the study was truly one-sided there would be no skeptics amongst the respondents to analyse. Furthermore, the study does not talk about the proportion who are skeptical (which may well have been small); it looks at the patterns of beliefs of skeptics and non-skeptics to determine differences between them. In so doing it found that climate skeptics proved to be more prone to being conspiracy theorists. This may not be that surprising; but neither is it one-sided. It is just pattern recognition – the null hypothesis (that there would be no difference between skeptical and non-skeptical respondents) was disproved.
BTW, I agree with you that it is odd that you cannot determine who the 5 skeptical blogs were/are. I believe we all deserve to know. Therefore, although I do not approve of your publication of the email address of pro-vice chancellor at UWA, I would like to know who they were. However, not knowing does not invalidate the findings of the research.
Jimbo @ur momisugly September 1, 2012 at 6:50 am
” Not only do skeptics agree that the moon landing was real, two skeptics actually went to the moon and took photos (that’ll be Harrison Schmidt and Buzz Aldrin).”
Sorry but Aldrin is not a skeptic. He believes in the “god” conjecture, for which there is not the slightest shred of evidence. Belief in anything without evidence in support of that belief is unskeptical.