Guest post by Thomas Fuller
The medicalization of dissent is a delicate topic to bring up in conversations about climate change. If you use it about somebody you’re almost instantly associating them with really evil people who used the tactic to further Stalinism, Naziism, Maoism, etc.
But the tactic, which really is nothing more than a fancy term for calling your opponents crazy, exists. It is reprehensible. So when I accuse climate alarmists such as Chris Mooney, Kevin Prall, John Mashey and now Stephan Lewandowsky of using the tactic of medicalizing dissent, I am not trying to say they are Stalinists, Nazis or Maoists. That would be like calling people deniers… a thuggish tactic if ever I’ve seen one.
Medicalizing dissent was perhaps first used by Dr. Samuel Cartwright in 1861, when he invented the term drapetomania to describe a new disease, suffered only by slaves. The disease was a desire for freedom. It had to be a disease, you see, because Cartwright had to justify slavery. As you can see, it’s hard to talk about medicalizing dissent without being offensive.
The latest attempt is Stephan Lewandowsky’s paper, ‘NASA faked the moon landing, Therefore (Climate) Science is a Hoax: An Anatomy of the Motivated Rejection of Science’, scheduled to be published in Psychological Science in the near future. The paper describes the findings of an internet survey and finds a correlation between belief in a ‘laissez faire’ conception of free market economies and rejection of climate science.
The paper is badly flawed, primarily because the internet survey is junk science. I am a market researcher who has extensive experience with online surveys. I’ve done them for government, non-governmental organizations, companies and volunteer groups. I’ve done a lot of them. Over 1,000, most of them in the UK when we were cranking them out like sausages to the tune of 25 a week for two years.
Stephan Lewandowski has not described the details of the fielding of his survey, which is probably wise on his part. The few details that emerge by chance in his paper are enough to invalidate his conclusions.
If you’ve been following the story you’ve probably seen most of this but it’s worth recapping:
1. Lewandowsky’s survey was advertised and linked to on 8 climate alarmist weblogs. So although his survey is supposed to be of skeptics, he put links on weblogs where skeptics rarely go and, if by chance they do visit, they’re hardly likely to stay.
2. Lewandowsky used four different versions of the survey with questions in differing order. Sometimes you want to randomize questions (although usually you randomize responses) so that people who always pick the first answer won’t prejudice the results. But Lewandowsky doesn’t describe which site got which version and hasn’t released the different versions. The next point shows why that’s important.
3. Several questions in the survey are not covered in the analysis. This isn’t really unusual. Researchers analyze and report on what’s interesting to them. But in an Excel spreadsheet Lewandowsky released, the data from excluded questions is removed. That’s very unusual. It’s okay not to analyze some of the data–it’s not okay to prevent someone else from doing so.
4. Lewandowsky allowed multiple responses from the same IP address. This means that someone could spam the survey, entering time and again to influence the results. Would they? One of the sites that linked to Lewandowsky’s survey has as part of their secret tribe of activists a person who wrote, “...people like us have to build the greatest guerilla force in human history. Now. Because time is up…Someone needs to convene a council of war of the major environmental movements, blogs, institutes etc. In a smoke filled room (OK, an incense filled room) we need a conspiracy to save humanity” and another who wrote of skeptics, “Sometimes you just want to let loose and scream about how you want to take those motherfucking arseholes, those closed-minded bigotted genocidal pieces of regurgitated dog shit and do unspeakable violence to their bodies and souls for what they are doing to the safety of what and who we all hold dear.” So, yes, they would probably do so in support of their cause.
5. Lewandowsky discussed the objectives of the survey while the survey was open for responses, so those who wanted to prejudice the results knew they could do so. This alone amounts to research misconduct and is cause for throwing out the results of the survey as well as the paper based on it.
Lewandowsky’s inability to address any of these issues, despite writing a paper describing it and hyping it on a weblog with 8 blog posts in the past week, is evidence that he cannot address them. He simply decided before his research began that climate skeptics are conspiracy theorists and gamed a survey to produce the results he wanted.
Is that exaggeration? No. He has written on the same subject before without any data and came to the same conclusion. In this case, he just manufactured data to support the same conclusion.
As for torturing the data, he did and it confessed. Steve McIntyre is working on a discussion of how, and I’m going to let him do the heavy lifting. I will just note that the numbers of skeptics believing in multiple conspiracies does not seem to be sufficient to produce statistically significant results and that in more than one case, both the number and percentage of warmists who believed in a conspiracy theory was greater than that of skeptics.
I’m not a climate skeptic–I’m a lukewarmer. But I have a message for readers who are skeptics. Lewandowsky, like Mooney, Prall, Mashey, etc., is not writing to you. He’s writing about you. His desired audience is those who have been fighting not to get involved in the climate debate–the vast majority of people in the developed world, in other words. He wants to convince them that you are lunatics.
Much like a slave who wants his freedom is obviously sick.
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TimC says:
September 15, 2012 at 8:05 pm
……..”Why not just get on with the practical science work?”
================
Still searching for it, in the survey.
Tom Fuller: I prefer the word “pathologization” of dissent to “medicalization.” Pathology, in the nature of disease. Soviet CP functionaries specialized in this. “If you fail to see the supreme logic of Marxist-Leninism, why then you must be crazy and we will make sure you are treated for it.”
Lewandowsky’s study was obviously rigged. To call it “scientific” is laughably inaccurate. It should be noted that both Lewandowsky’s bachelor’s degree and his master’s degree were in the arts and not in science. He has a B.A. and an M.A., although his C.V. curiously does not say what the fields of study were. In other words, he’s not a scientist, he’s a propaganda artist. There’s more pernicious, biased creativity in his work than honest science.
Billy says:
September 15, 2012 at 8:38 pm
“I find the mention of evolution/creation to be a bit amusing.”
Socialism which is what these people believe is can not tolerant evolution. Capitalism the very mortal enemy of socialism is basically economic evolution. If someone really believed in evolution they would highly likely to be strong capitalist as well.
Now that being said socialists believe in “proper” evolution… they in fact created a very large field of research to cover this “proper” evolution. They called it eugenics(or state controlled evolution) and far to many people still believe in it.
Mondo.
This is ‘I’….
and this is ‘we’.
Can you tell the difference? Good.
Now go back and read that sentence again…the one where Mr Fuller said
‘I have done a lot of them, over one thousand of them, back in the UK when we were doing 25 a week for 2 years.’
See?
If you’re going to nitpick…nitpick.
TimC says:
September 15, 2012 at 8:05 pm
With respect, wouldn’t it be better to concentrate on the “junk science” flaws in the Lewandowski paper rather than to extrapolate these into the proposition that he seeks to “medicalise dissent” (to convince real and potential warmists that sceptics are just right-wing nutcases – as if they needed any further convincing).
Isn’t this just another variant of the name-calling that seems all too prevalent in the climate debate? Why not just get on with the practical science work?
>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>
Name calling without evidence is one thing. Presenting the evidence and naming the condition that the evidence supports is another. Thomas Fuler has presented the evidence that justifies many of the egregious terms used to describe Lewandoswky and his work.
As for your request to get on with the practical science, that is precisely what the skeptic and lukewarmist communities have been asking for this past decade or more. When confronted with evidence, the warmists dismiss it and resort to name calling with no evidence, or in this case, fabricated evidence at best, to justify the name calling.
What do these things tell you about the warmist position?
Lewandowsky syndrome!
I believe that replication is part of science. Has anyone replicated Lewandowsky’s findings?
I would tell you Anthony, this will be my last attempt at asking about investing (and helping make it better) in this site prior to creating a similar site. You have my info from “REP”
God rest his soul.
.
Ready, willing, and able, on this end……
Gnight, from the East Coast t>
So, Scientists are supposed to be skeptical about everything in order to advance scientific understanding and advance human knowledge in small, but replicable steps using data obtained from experiments or from measured observations.
Except, it seems, for the ClimateChange modeling skeptics.
In this case the “Nation” of Climate “Scientists Warmers”, who have no experiential results nor data. Its similar to the believers of the flat earth or that the sun revolved round the sun. This is not new. Wasn’t the idea that the earth revolved the sun conspiritorial, or that the earth was round, also conspiritorial. Were not those contrary ideas held to be against faith-based beliefs?
This Warmer’s regime is faith based and its respondents are acting out according to dogma. Wouldn’t it be more appropriate for Hansen & his related disciples to declare this premise as a religion, kind of like Scientology and manage all believers, kinda like Scientology? Looks like they are trying, they just haven’t admitted that that is what they are trying to do.
I wish I had a suggestion how to hoist them on their on petard. Perhaps someone else has an idea on this subject.
Perhaps we should start referring to this Lew… person as a personification of Ron Hubbard himself. It might take awhile for the believers in Australia to get it. But it might be fun. Seems to fit. Lets hope he doesn’t enjoy Kool-Aide and mandatory Kool-Aide parties.
I would gladly be called a lunatic. The term (originally Lunarticks) came from the Lunar Society of Birmingham, which met once a month on the Monday closest to the full moon, so that the roads would be better lit for the members that had to travel in darkness. They met beginning around 1775. Fourteen individuals have been fairly clearly identified as participating during the years of its greatest activity. Eleven of the fourteen later became Fellows of the Royal Society.
The fourteen(from here):
Matthey Boulton (built Watts’ steam engines)
Erasmus Darwin (granfather of)
Thomas Day (abolitionist, a Rousseau follower, author of Sandford and Merton)
Richard Lovell Edgeworth (Irish inventor and “idealistic follower of Rousseau”)
Samuel Galton, Jr. (Quaker manufacturer)
Robert Augustus Johnson
James Keir (classmate of E. Darwin, chemist, glass maker, soap manufacturer)
Joseph Priestley (chemist, isolated oxygen)
William Small (Scottish physician and mathematician)
Josiah Wedgwood (Unitarian, described as just a potter here and the other grandfather of Charles Darwin)
John Whitehurst (clockmaker, hydraulics expert and geologist)
William Withering (also a physician)
This reference says that the following were also members:
James Watt (steam engine)
William Herschel (organist and astronomer that discovered Uranus)
John Smeaton (designer of the Eddystone lighthouse)
I have read but couldn’t find a reference that Ben Franklin was a corresponding member.
To be called a lunatic is quite an honor.
They are described as non-conformists, but (i)t would be wrong, however, to think of them all as radicals and dissenters.
A toast to the Lunar Society of Birmingham, which did so much to better the lot of all mankind and a raspberry to those who would wish to undo by force the great advances pioneered by this august, yet informal, group.
[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bdcIPUC-4XY&w=560&h=315%5D
Medicalizing dissent was perhaps first used by Dr. Samuel Cartwright in 1861
Hardly. Its as old as the healing profession, when some totalitarian realized he could use such propaganda to influence people.
Jesus Christ was said to be crazy by not only the religious hierarchy of his time, but “beside himself” by some of his own family.
The US Government, state, and local propaganda machines are astonishingly well funded examples of the age old practice of squashing opposition by “medicalization of dissent”. The irony, if you will, or tragedy, is that the dissenters are the ones footing the bill.
Lewandowsky is clearly guilty of breaking two of the 11 commandments:
No. 9: You shall not bear false witness.
No.11. You shall not be caught out.
The newest one, number 11, is clearly what he is most worried about. Those in the alarmist camp rarely worry about number 9.
Of course the problem then pops up that Stephan Lewandowsky can’t really medicalize anyone for the simple reason that he’s a psychologist. He has no medical training. Psychologists can’t make diagnoses because they’re not trained for it. They’re not medical professionals. They are a fourth wheel for therapy, nothing else, and more often than not they’re actually a fifth wheel, at least that’s from my personal experience with them. The same personal experience with them leads to a very deep distrust for the entire profession.
Yeah, I don’t trust them. I’ve seen them how they are: manipulative, dishonest, twisting what you just said and all based on whatever Freud and Jung wrote decades ago, again proving that they’re actually lacking any understanding and training for both science and medicine. A friend of mine was in therapy for many years. The therapy ended with his suicide. Heck, I’ve been in therapy for six years, because then I was dumb enough to believe in the system. When I realized that they were really just twisting my words into what they believed to be right and that the only thing they were really good at was turning molehills into mountains, I stood up and walked out.
But this is pretty common today. Look at all the “phobias”. Islamophobia. Homophobia. Xenophobia. None of them are actual phobias by definition of what an actual phobia is. They are political attempts to instill the thought that people with different opinions are insane.
I’m sick and tired of this. There are too many people trying to be scientific without having any clue about scientific work. Heck, psychology and my own academic discipline Japanese Studies are listed under “social sciences” these days, which is pretty damn ridiculous. I’m not a scientist. I’m a scholar. Different thing really. At times we employ basic scientific methods but most of the time they turn into statistics anyway, and statistics aren’t science either. If I make a poll with 1,000 people and 600 of them answer they believe aliens have visited us then this proves nothing except that these 600 people believe aliens have visited us. That’s it. There’s no science behind any of that. It’s just a poll. It’s just a numerical discrepancy which I would have stumbled over. Discovery of a numerical discrepancy is not science. Accounting for that discrepancy in a reproducible manner is science.
Edohiguma says:
September 15, 2012 at 10:47 pm
Well said! I have noticed these “social scientists” they’ve been getting a free ride lately, why are there so many now? while our engineers get toss to the dirt.
This whole think is so surreal that I’ve begun wondering who will throw who overboard first?
Will the warmists denounce Lewindowsky as a rogue researcher who is quite mad and doesn’t represent the real scientists?
Or will Lewandowsky announce that he is really a skeptic and pulled off this whole charade to prove how gullible warmists are and how easily they could be co-opted into joining a conspiracy?
Will John Cook announce that he was in on the plot with Lewindowsky? Or claim to be a victim of it?
Will Al Gore make a film about it called “An Inconvenient Affair”?
Will there be cameo appearances by Bill and Monica?
Obviously; I said the same thing. As usual, the warmist paper mill feeds the MSM. Lewandowsky doesn’t give anything for reactions from the skeptics.
The backlash is that it works to discredit science, the involved institutes and scientists, the MSM, the governments behind it. We’re still being forced to pay for Lewandowsky and his fellow crooks through our taxes but we don’t like it as much as we used to…
Excellent article.It’s so difficult to deal with the issue of medicalising those you disagree without getting excessive. Tom manages this difficult feat, and demonstrates the methodological flaws which precede the flaws in the statistical analysis of the data. It wouldn’t matter if Lewandowsky had found what he says he found. The lousy methodology makes his survey null and void.
A point no-one’s made yet, I think, is that the first two pages of the paper are devoted to proving that the science is fixed, and that there’s a conspiracy to deny it, quoting all our old friends (Oreskes, Anderegg, Doran & Zimmermann etc). This move allows Lewandowsky to characterise his source blogs (Deltoid, Tamino etc) as “pro-science”. So when he later names McIntyre as a prominent “skeptic” he’s effectively calling him and all skeptics “anti-science”. I wonder if libel is grounds for demanding a paper’s withdrawal?
and I love nikfromNYC’s quote from van Gogh. (7.43pm) I didn’t realise he’d been following the global warming debate.
As I said in an article last year about SkS tendencies to snip and imply opponents have mental problems:
It’s a scarily brief step from
“The professor is in denial” to “The professor is delusional” to “The professor would be better off keeping quiet” to “The professor has been removed to a mental institution for the good of himself and society”.
First they came for the professor…
http://tallbloke.wordpress.com/2011/05/31/cooking-the-books-snip-snip-go-the-censors-scissors/
The last sentence is ambiguous and needs fixing. (Who does it apply to).
OK – to whom does it apply.
Sage Publications publishes Psychological Science. the Australian editor for Sage is:
Sage Editors, Australia: Nick Haslam
Affiliations:
University of Melbourne, Australia
http://www.uk.sagepub.com/editorDetails.nav?contribId=506311
University of Melbourne: Melbourne School of Psychological Sciences
Psychological Sciences has been very successful in the 2011 national competitive grant funding schemes, with almost $4 million dollars in research funds from the ARC and NHMRC…
(includes) Dr Dan Little ($$765,000): From fluid intelligence to crystallised expertise: an integrative Bayesian approach (along with Professor Stephan Lewandowsky)…
Psychological Sciences has been very successful in the 2011 national competitive grant funding schemes, with almost $4 million dollars in research funds from the ARC and NHMRC…
ARC Discovery Grants ($2,394,446 in total):
(includes) Professor Nick Haslam ($339,446): Humans as animals and objects: the psychology of dehumanisation
http://www.psych.unimelb.edu.au/
University of Melbourne
Daniel R. Little
Other Affiliations:
The University of Western Australia, Psychology
Advisors:
Stephan Lewandowsky
Robert Nosofsky
Richard Shiffrin
http://unimelb.academia.edu/DanielRLittle
wish someone could contact Haslam to ask if Psychological Science will ACTUALLY publish the silly paper. surely Sage Pubs would not approve if they had all the information that is now available.
Thanks to Thomas Fuller for an interesting and thought-provoking post. Of the comments already showing when I started typing, I’d say that ‘temp’ was about right – if understated – when he said “Its starting to get to the point where its getting dangerous….” and polistra likewise in pointing out that “The important point is which side has the POWER to institutionalize their opposition”. A disclaimer before I go on (and on …): this comment represents my own opinion only, and is no reflection on WUWT other than on its openmindedness.
There’s a populsr theme at present on many sites tarred with the “conspiracy” brush, namely that those in power (not only Eisenhower’s ‘military-industrial complex’, but including international banking, the media, politics and academia – essentially, any body with the power to influence the crowd either directly or indirectly) are psychopaths. Although this might seem to be ‘just another’ case of pathologising those with whom you disagree, it is far from a new idea: I recall quite clearly hearing an item on BBC News around thirty years ago, reporting an academic paper which had found precisely that categorisation to apply to (IIRC) successful business people and politicians. I’d bet someone at the BBC got a good slap for letting that one get out.
The idea has, however, remained in the back of my mind for half a lifetime now, and the more I see, the more I agree. I won’t go into detail about the characterisation of psychopathy here – as said, there are many sites discussing it, go look. It boils down to Baron Acton’s famous dictum, “Power tends to corrupt; absolute power corrupts absolutely. Great men are almost always bad men.”
As such, as polistra notes, it can be very dangerous speaking out against them, or trying to reveal things they do not want known. Ask David Kelly. Oh, you can’t. He “committed suicide” after being identified as the man behind “inconvenient” revelations about the bogosity of Blair’s claim about “Saddam’s WMD”. And you can’t consult the records to find out more about his death either because, uniquely, his unusual death has not been investigated in a public inquest – as UK law requires in such circumstances. Funny, that. But what do I know? I must be a “conspiracy theorist” even to notice it, after the Powers That Be have declared it a suicide.
As I commented in another thread the other day, “conspiracy theorists” (such a useful phrase, now it’s been redefined in popular usage to mean “gibbering loonies who aren’t worth listening to”) fall into two main groups: those that replace science with science fiction, and those alleging venal corruption on the part of politicians and their owners.
The first lot, while they can be highly entertaining (I used to read a lot of SF in my youth, too) can generally be discounted, although it is the most overblown of these which are invariably quoted to validate the “loonie” label, like Lewandowsky’s “moon landing” example. Those about politicians are better assessed by checking out the article “33 Conspiracy Theories That Turned Out To Be True” (it’s all over the net, very easy to find) and thinking. All political, and sure enough every one was branded a “conspiracy theory” in its day … until the facts came out and they were shown to be true. Only this week, in the UK, we’ve been hearing the sick truth behind the Hillsborough disaster a quarter of a century ago, when 96 football fans lost their lives and the police rewrote the “evidence” to hide official ineptitude and throw the blame onto the dead. Again, the “conspiracy theorists” were right.
Although I hated history lessons at school, I’ve been reading a lot more about it as I’ve got older, and when you look at the detail it makes your blood run cold. I’m not talking about little paperbacks with titles like “History of the Twentieth Century”, which only skate over the surface, but heavyweight stuff like Eustace Mullins and Carroll Quigley. Read Quigley’s “The Anglo-American Establishment”. The same names, the same groups, crop up generation after generation, as does the evil that they perpetrate. It is, in the truest sense of the word, shocking. Then go back and look again through those political “conspiracy theories”. Things aren’t “starting to get to the point where its getting dangerous”. They are dangerous.
It is telling that, even now, Lewandowsky casts the “New World Order” as a conspiracy theory, despite numerous international politicians using the phrase over many years now in speeches puffing words like “technocracy” to describe their goal of a tiny number of (already) powerful people running this “new world” to their own absolute advantage. The “Carbon Cult” is merely one of the more recent lies in this fight for power: ration the plebs’ access to everything and keep them poor, weak and in their place. As many have noted here, every time something like this fake poll comes out, it gets saturation coverage in the bought-and-paid-for media worldwide. OMG, these deniers are a bunch of crazies! Look, a “doctor” says so! Unclean! Unclean!
Thankfully, more people are beginning to wake up and realise a little more about just how true Acton’s comment was and is. Sadly for the wellbeing of humanity, it isn’t “we the people” who control the military, but the very groups Quigley et al list, and those they’ve bought over the decades. When whatever they’re planning hits the fan, it’s not going to be a good time to be “unclean”. The stakes are high, and the guilty, who don’t fight clean, are fighting very hard to make sure it’s not them tied to those stakes when the fire is lit. Look at the state of the world these people run and shudder.
What a start to a Sunday, it makes me feel unclean just thinking about it. I’m off for a bath.
To Charles Nelson at 8:55pm. Thanks for pointing that out Charles. Fair enough.
Try SpS for Socket puppet Science.
Phil,
“I would gladly be called a lunatic. The term (originally Lunarticks) came from the Lunar Society of Birmingham…”
I don’t think this is where the term comes from.
And that’s why the whole CO2 – demonization meme must be definitively and publicly defeated, with maximum exposure and publicity and drama. It is poison injected into the heart of productive industrialized society.