The Daily Lew – Issue 6 – drill baby, drill.

LewWorld has increased its spin and is now “drilling into noise“. The resulting increased spin and precession looks to be creating dangerous wobble on LewWorld. Meanwhile while Lew is drilling for noise, McIntyre has tried to get the same results as Lewandowsky’s paper by taking Lewandowsky’s noisy data and applying the same techniques listed in the paper. Replication doesn’t appear possible. It looks like the paper is a dry hole even though it is gushing superheated air. Meanwhile, Lewandowsky’s coauthor, John Cook, has been host to his own oily conspiracy fanboy club. If you have not read it yest, be sure to read: ‘…we need a conspiracy to save humanity’, because it seems to be a true window into the soul of “Skeptical Science” denizens.  Also of interest, Tom Fuller analyses Lewandowsky’s medicalization of skeptics.

A. Scott takes a look at some of the drilling logic being applied by Lewandowsky in this essay below. Finally, at the end, I have a short poll about Michael Mann and Stephan Lewandowsky.

I have 10 fingers and toes, therefore I faked the (Moon) Landing hoax

Motivated Rejection of the Lew…by A.Scott

There’s a new story up – “drilling into noise” – by the lead author, Stephen Lewandowsky, of the recent paper “NASA faked the moon landing – therefore (climate) science is a hoax: An anatomy of the motivated rejection of science.”

For the first time, in a now total 9 blog posts on this paper, this most recent story is more talk, less condescension and derision towards those who would dare challenge his work. Well OK, mostly, sorta less. It is a long story, with lots of fancy terms, initials, equations and descriptions.

In it he reminds us lowly unwashed masses that we are knowledge-less simpletons – merely “toying” with his data. That we couldn’t possibly understand all the important stuff real scientists like him know. Or maybe he didn’t say it exactly that way, but it’s just how it came across.  

He takes the long way around to re-tell us why skeptics are somehow conspiracy theorists who believe the moon landing, and (science), is fake, or something like that. I guess the parentheses mean because the answers to some of the other questions about science were true, that we can perform a latent variable analysis, and prove we actually DO believe in that fake old moon landing even though we said we didn’t. Or maybe not.

That’s this cool new idea he shares – we can’t just look at the simple answers to the questions – like whether we believe the moon landing was fake, nah, those 10 people don’t know nothing – they’re just noise. Nothing to see here – no one behind this curtain – now move along …

No – we must look to the answers of the other questions, to determine if we believe the moon landing was fake and thus are nasty old science rejecters. And motivated ones at that. Or something like that.

Of course he cannot go into the details in a place such as his own blog, but never fear he assures us, they mixed up some particularly resilient associations between latent constructs, and hypothesized that pesky measurement error right outta your clothes. I might have mixed that up a little though – its tough for us mere mortals to follow all that complicated sciencey stuff you know. I think I feel a definite conspiracy ideation coming on after that. Better take an aspirin.

I may be a bumpkin, but I think I can help simplify his story.

I have 10 fingers and 10 toes. So I can usually count to 20, or sometimes a few more, without much trouble.

I don’t need to even take my shoes off to count the total number of folks who agree the NASA Apollo Moon Landing was fake – and filmed in Hollywood … Beverley Hills that’s is …

Just 6 poor saps said they “Strongly Agree” the moon landing was a hoax. And 4 more said they “Agree.” A whopping 10 science rejecters right there I tell you. Of course some of them might be fake. We might only need one hand to count them.

I have a fancy technique too. Well, more of a rule really … my rule is if you can counts it on fingers and toes – its probably correct – they usually don’t lie.

I rarely need pivot tables, linear regression, informed judgment, uninformed judgment, deep statistical competence or incompetence, SEM, latent constructs, latent variables, latent prints, clean socks, pretty rocks, or any other special highfaluting whizbang stuff to count numbers that fit on my fingers and toes.

I submit a new theory too, that if a number fits on your fingers and toes, it ain’t that darn unhelpful noise he’s sqwaukin’ about – unless of course you’re snappin’ your fingers ’cause you just figured out the answer. That could be noise – at least if you’re good at snappin’ your fingers.

I can also tell you if you have a number that fits on the old “digit-all” calculator (its a joke son, get it – digits) and someone tries to claim it has some latent construct or any such thing if you compare it to to a room FULL of hands and feet, there just might be something in common between that fella and what ‘ol Bessie’s out in the pasture making right about now. He just might be one of them types, if they can’t dazzle you with their brilliance, they start trying to baffle you with their … err, well … Bessie byproduct.

I guess the moral of the story is you can always trust your fingers and toes.

Any time you can use those good old fingers and toes to solve a tough question you usually don’t need nothing fancier – and you can pretty much trust the answer. Even if you’re a scientist. Well, unless you’re a rocket scientist and you might send your pal Zeke the chimpanzee to Pluto instead of Mars. Then you should probably break out the slide rule.

Or at least take off your shoes to double check your work.

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[added] also worth reading is Willaim Brigss essay: NASA Faked Moon Landing—Academic Psychologists Swoon, Tie It To Climate Change

One day a terrific psychological study is going to be written on the madness and mass lunacy which arose after climate change swam into the public’s ken. I don’t mean the actions and thoughts of the man-in-the-street, which were and are no different in this area than they were and are in any political matterhe . No: the real curiosity is what happened to academia, inside departments which haven’t anything to do with climatology.

Given the bizarre work of Dr. Stephan Lewandowsky, his hilarious protestations over the questions raised about his data gathering methods and his methodology, plus his “muted for prime time” hatred that you can read between the lines (as well as what we see on his mouthpiece wesbite, Skeptical Science, I decided it was time to ask this question:

Has Dr. Stephan Lewandowsky usurped Dr. Michael Mann as the most irrationally emotive spokesman for climate alarmism?