Fabricated quotes and gross distortions are used to paint skeptics as conspiracy nuts. The question is, is it a conspiracy, or is it just incompetence?
Guest post by Brandon Shollenberger
Many people have shown interest and scorn for a recently released paper by Stephan Lewandowsky and John Cook (and others), Recursive fury: Conspiracist ideation in the blogosphere in response to research on conspiracist ideation. People have taken issue with a number of aspects of the paper, but to my knowledge, nobody has noticed Lewandowsky and Cook fabricate things in their paper. That’s right. They make things up.
While there are many examples, I’d like to focus on some obvious distortions of quotes. A number of quotes are distorted to make skeptics look bad. This is seen as early as the second quote taken from a skeptic. The paper says:
The notion of “scamming” took center-stage in the blogosphere’s response to LOG12, although not all comments went so far as to suggest “… there are no `Human Subjects’ ” (http://www.shapingtomorrowsworld.org/ccc1.html#198).
It’s hard to imagine anyone being crazy enough to suggest nobody who took the survey was a human. Naturally, nobody suggested that. If one follows the link provided, they find a comment by the user Foxgoose which includes:
The current premise is that there are no “Human Subjects” and as more and more known sceptical blog proprietors add their voices, this will become increasingly apparent. Unless of course Stephan has approached the proprietors of five “sceptic blogs” which no-one in the sceptic community has ever heard of.
If that quote isn’t clear enough, the exchange it is in certainly is. The “Human Subjects” being discussed were the skeptic blog owners supposedly contacted by Stephan Lewandowsky. Lewandowsky claimed he couldn’t release the identities of those because of privacy concerns. Foxgoose suggested there could be no privacy concerns because nobody had been contacted.
What does this have to do with whether or not humans took the survey? Nothing. Lewandowsky et al. took a comment about one subject, stripped it of context and placed it in an entirely different discussion. They completely fabricated this insane claim then portrayed it as a belief some skeptics hold. And that’s not the only time they distorted a quote in such a blatant way. In another case, the paper says:
Another commenter applauded the alleged cunning strategy to goad bloggers into paranoid behavior:
“If it’s true they are selectively blocking, I have to begrudgingly respect the skill with which they are playing this audience: there is no way for anyone to complain without matching the stereotypical conspiracist of the study!” (http://climateaudit.org/2012/09/14/the-sks-link-to-the-lewandowsky-survey/#comment-352753).
The comment in question was made by the user Nathan Kurz. Here is what his comment said:
While it’s possible that specific IP addresses are being blocked, claiming that they are reads a lot like a conspiracy theory. The irony is amazing. If it’s true they are selectively blocking, I have to begrudgingly respect the skill with which they are playing this audience: there is no way for anyone to complain without matching the stereotypical conspiracist of the study!
Showing that one can get through via an Anonymizer doesn’t strike me as strong evidence. I think the likeliest innocent explanation is a misconfigured router somewhere, so access from a completely different network doesn’t imply much. Much stronger would be to show that you can access from a neighbor’s computer using the same ISP. If the neighbor get through (and is using the same browser and OS), you have firmer evidence. If the neighbor also can’t access, one could either conclude they are blocking wider swaths of the internet, or search harder for innocent explanations.
Nathan Kurz clearly thinks the supposed strategy is unlikely. He argues against the idea. The paper doesn’t tell you that. Instead, it portrays him as promoting the idea. They quote a skeptic who was being reasonable and not believing there’s a conspiracy, but they hide his beliefs so he seems to believe in a conspiracy…
But that doesn’t compare to my favorite example. In it, the authors simply fabricate a quote:
A further hypothesis supposed that the real purpose of LOG12 was to provoke conspiracist ideation from climate deniers: “Here’s a conspiracy theory for you: This is the subject of the study, not the survey. The reactions of the skeptic community to a controlled publication with obvious flaws, presented as caustically as possible and with red herrings presented for them to grasp at. There’s some evidence for this theory in internal mails at SkepticalScience, where John Cook can be heard talking enthusiastically about his discussions with Stephan about gaming blogs” (http://www.shapingtomorrowsworld.org/news.php?p=2&t=118&&n=161#751).
If you follow the link, you’ll find a comment by the user geoffchambers which doesn’t include a word from him. His comment consists solely of a quote from thomaswfuller and “(-Snip-).” That means the citation given doesn’t show what the authors quote. And it gets better. The quote included from Fuller says:
Here’s a conspiracy theory for you: This is the subject of the study, not the survey. The reactions of the skeptic community to a controlled publication with obvious flaws, presented as caustically as possible and with red herrings presented for them to grasp at..
That is part of the quote Lewandowsky et al published. However, we can see the original comment from Fuller here. It says (emphasis added):
Here’s a conspiracy theory for you. This is the subject of the study, not the survey. The reactions of the skeptic community to a controlled publication with obvious flaws, presented as caustically as possible and with red herrings presented for them to grasp at.
To date, my conspiracy theory makes more sense than what we’ve seen of the primary research that informed Professor Lewandowsky’s paper.
I really hope that I’m wrong, as I will be extremely unhappy if research is used as bait. But it makes a weird kind of sense…
This shows Fuller’s comment is the source of part of the quote Lewandowsky et al published, but it could not have been the source of the entire quote. Presumably, what happened is geoffchambers quoted Fuller and responded by saying:
There’s some evidence for this theory in internal mails at SkepticalScience, where John Cook can be heard talking enthusiastically about his discussions with Stephan about gaming blogs.
Then when Lewandowsky et al copied the text of geoffchambers’ comment, they inadvertently combined the quote from Fuller with the body of geoffchambers’ comment. In other words, they combined parts of comments from two different people into a single quote. As though that wasn’t bad enough, neither comment can be viewed by readers of the paper as the comments were both edited/deleted by moderators of the site associated with two primary authors of this paper!
This doesn’t scratch the surface of the problems with this paper. It also doesn’t address the fact John Cook apparently has no idea what a conspiracy theory is. Still, if the authors of this paper are so lazy, incompetent or whatever else to completely distort and fabricate quotes, how can anyone take them seriously?
And for the record, I don’t think any of this was intentional. I don’t think there is a conspiracy. That would require them knowing what they’re doing!
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Hmmm …….. quite a lot to absorb over the day’s first espresso.
I’d like to thank Brandon & A Scott for the huge amount of work they’ve put in to deconstructing this paper. I must say though that I find the idea that the fraud was unintentional a bit hard to swallow.
To believe it, you’d have to accept that Lew & Cookie put less work and due diligence into their academic papers than we knuckle dragging denialists put into the average blog post.
Either way, whether through intentional fraud or cavalier incompetence, I would have thought Brandons’ revelations are enough to end both their academic careers quite soon – and to seriously damage the careers of those who have promoted their fraudulent garbage.
I have now written to the human research ethics manager at UWA, copied to their chairman and vice-chancellor, asking them to withdraw the paper or accept legal consequences.
If they don’t reply tomorrow, I may paste that email here for the record.
eric1skeptic says:
March 9, 2013 at 10:45 am
That cat of yours has amazing powers. I just discovered/donated to Heifer.
I have been meaning to write to the editor of Psychological Science to ask, the status of the ‘moon’ paper (I’ll compose somthing later)
as it is surely untenable for the journals reputation, now that Lew, is attacking critics of the ‘moon’ paper and citing it in other papers, when the critics have no formal response to the paper in the journal open to them, because it is still in press.
Perhaps if the autho rof this article were to do the same, with a summary of the concerns here, we may get some idea of the status, as it is in the journals reputational interests aswell.
This paper had wide press coverage and debate (yet nobody can formally respond to th epeer reviewed journal yet) untenable for science
Brandon Shollenberger
I’ll try and find all my posts at SkS and Lewandowsky’s UWA site and send them on.
No I don’t know of a working link for the files. They’re 60Mo and I don’t know how to do complicated stuff like zipping. Barry Woods has them. I’ll ask him to forward them to you.
Cohenite:
In Lewandowsky’s defence, it’s doubtful that he understands the scientific method, let alone is an expert in it.
This doubt was first raised, for me, when I read Lewandowsky’s mistaken, bizarre and self-contradictory claim that
The simplest reductio ad absurdum For Dummies of this claim is the demonstrable fact that you can do science without the peer-review system—which is exactly what scientists did for 200 or so years, until the post-WW2 glut in research made it necessary for journal editors to farm out the pre-publication filtering process to domain experts—but you cannot do science without skepticism, and never could, and never will.
In fact, Lewandowsky’s claim is so ridiculous that I asked him point-blank, in a comment at shapingtomorrowsworld,
1. whether he understood what the scientific method is,
2. and if not, how he could claim to know what science is,
3. and if not, why he presumed to sit in judgment of “deniers” for “rejecting” science,
4. and what the heck he meant by “rejecting science.”
I’d link you to my question, but it was deleted by a moderator.
Foxgoose, Queensland has an Act of Parliament called “Public Sector Ethics Act 1994” This Act comes under the criminal code and applies to Queensland University which is specifically named. John Cook can be cited for breaching this act as well as all his higher supervisors. Unfortunately, there is no similar Act in Western Australia. The University of WA would have its own code of conduct to protect its name but it seems the hierarchy there are AGW supporters. and give Lewandowsky free rein to make derogatory comments about people who have better understanding than he does.
geoff:
If you’re on a Mac, highlight all the files, right-click on the highlight and choose “Compress 17 Items” from the contextual menu that pops up.
It will then place a file called Archive.zip (without destroying the original files) in the same folder.
In a way the sad part of this is that no matter how fair or accurate the criticism , for Lewandowsky this criticism will itself be seen has a ‘sign’ of a conspiracy at work out to silence a great ‘truth seeker’ has the follow up paper shows.
In short, has with 9/11 truthers , there is nothing you can say to make him believe his not right .
I wonder if humans will ever get out of the ‘I’m right and your mad’ methodology of passing ones time on earth.
Chris B says:
March 9, 2013 at 9:22 pm
2:56 says it all.
—————————————————————
Odd video. His camera presence reminds my of a character out of Second City TV. Dan Ackryod or Eugene Levy comes to mind.
Re intentional distortions of data versus unintentional:
I’m not sure how much it matters whether these academic failings are from gross incompetence or intention. Lewadowski and the rest clearly demonstrate themselves unfit to hold their positions. Period.
Last month the company I work for (oil and gas exploration) let go several employees that were not performing. No one asked them if they were underperforming intentionally! They were simply unfit and let go.
The minimum standards of performance at universities is clearly appalling.
What does amaze me in this latest in a series of academic abuses, is the following: Are university professors in such high demand, so desperately needed, that universities need to suffer with such incompetence? Are sociology professors so desperately needed that we must even put up with the bad ones that fabricate research?
How sad it is to see university slowly transform from centers of higher learning to scamming half their students out of tuition with useless degrees taught by professional failures. I suspect the transformation of University as expanding business is partly to blame for creating the Lewandowskys. But perhaps I’m revealing my bitterness earned from the 10 years I spent in University!
Brandon, you are a ‘babe in the woods’ when you seek to explain that this was a whoopsie.
If it was a newbie, you just might (although I wouldn’t) proffer this excuse.
These people have been around for years and ought to understand the basics of citation. It was drummed into me long before I got my undergraduate degree. These guys are professors!
Not only that, when I spent time in the working world as a policy adviser to politicians, I and my colleagues busted our collective freckle to make sure that every word we put into our briefs was triple-checked from the source. (I am not claiming that all advisers adhered to this standard).
The point is, you are too innocent. You need to read some Miss Marple. She has a lot to say about young people who are very casual about manners and mores while completely missing the murderer in the room.
Neither my undergraduate supervisors nor my supervisors in providing briefs to Premiers and Prime Ministers would have put up with what you describe for a second.
This kind of stuff doesn’t happen in isolation. People at that level who jumble up, misattribute and make up quotes are not just making a ‘whoopsie’. And if they did, the usual thing would be to acknowledge that and move on. Nobody in academia loses points for that.
You need to understand that it is not about conspiracy theories on either side, but about malfeasance in this particular case. As Miss Marple said, “most unsatisfactory behaviour.”
daviditron, and Johanna
You both make excellent points. I suppose my background thought in urging an assumption of unintentional behavior is that we ought to focus upon the flagrant and unacceptable incompetence which can be so readily documented, rather than debate about motives and intentions which can be difficult to prove (unless there is an actual statement of intended malfeasance available).
I do try to assume the best in people until that proves unwarranted, but in any case what we can prove is that the “Recursive Fury” paper is another train wreck.
This time the egregious abuse of proper sourcing and documentation should really sink these clowns….. Oh wait, they are on the side of politically correct academics so who knows what can happen.
I think Lewandowsky and Cook are alien fifth columnists sent here, along with Mann and friends, to trick the human race into dismantling their most efficient power generating tools and switching to wind and solar energy. Their battle fleet will then unfurl a giant sunshade which will blot out the sun. The resultant massive storms will then wreck all the wind turbines. With Earth unable to generate power, the aliens will then be able to creep up on us in the dark and take over.
There you are Dr Lew = my sceptic gift to you.
Do I really have to say /sarc?
Foxgoose, please go for these charlatans with all you have; thanks to poster above who’ve given you extra ammo.
It’s time decent people stood up to those perverting the scientific process while using their trusted academic status to push a certain political viewpoint. It’s time to expose this farce in its own home wherever we can.
The “Recursive fury” paper fails to consider an alternative hypothesis. If psychology expert L came along and said that you should not be listened to about subject A, (which you believe strongly about,) because:-
(a) Nearly all the “experts” disagree with you.
(b) Some fellow believers allegedly have political beliefs that the person L does not like.
(c) A higher proportion of your fellow believers than L’s group allegedly hold other beliefs that most people view as being “wierd”.
Then you would be somewhat upset – a normal, human, reaction. If you later found out that the claims about the experts were not true, the questions were biased and the statistical conclusions were contradicted by basic statistical analysis, you would be justifiably furious.
Like with people who attribute every extreme weather event to global warming, Lewandowsky bases his case for ignoring sceptical opinions on a distorted opinion of corrupted evidence. When it gets a very predictable response, he interprets this with a distorted opinion of corrupted evidence. The only recursive bit is in the methods Lewandowsky employs.
As an update, thanks to geoffchambers sending me his original comment, I can confirm how the fabricated quote came into being. It is exactly as I suggested in this post.
For those who think I’m being too naive/innocent, tell me this: Who would fabricate a quote like that on purpose when it is so easy to expose? The fabricated quote doesn’t even help their case much so why take the risk?
Over at Skeptical Science, Tom Curtis responded to this post by saying this post is a non-substantive response. All I have to say to that is… wow. It’s already been established the authors grossly misrepresented the views of Jeff Id in their paper, and now it’s been established they misquoted multiple people.
How much deception has to be shown before it matters?
I recently stumbled upon a file from an FOI request I wasn’t aware of before. It shows Stephan Lewandowsky intentionally left his name off messages sent to “skeptic-leaning” blogs to invite them to participate in his survey so they wouldn’t be aware of his association. Given this, consider how many times he said things like:
He intentionally hid his involvement when the e-mails were sent out then mocked people who said they weren’t contacted by him. How can they be faulted for not knowing something he intentionally hid from them? They can’t, of course. Unless you’re like John Cook and Stephan Lewandowsky. Then you’ll publish papers that say things like:
If we follow the link he provides, we don’t find 25 people saying they were not “approached by the researchers.” What we find is is a blogger who says the names are “names of skeptics who confirm they were not asked to host this survey.” That blogger doesn’t include links to the actual words by the 25 people so there is no way to confirm what Lewandowsky et al claim in their published paper.
Did the five people contacted actually deny being contacted? Perhaps. Or perhaps they said they didn’t think they were contacted. Or perhaps they denied being contacted by Stephan Lewandowksy. Either of those alternatives would be completely reasonable and likely caused by Lewandowsky’s intentional effort to hide information from the bloggers. Those reasonable alternatives are excluded from this paper based entirely upon Jo Anne Nova’s possibly inaccurate description of what people said. Is it a misquotation? That’s hard to say for sure. I think it is, but without tracking down the actual words used, it’s impossible to be sure.
One thing I can be sure of is Lewandowsky et al used hearsay rather than actual quotes. It may be accurate hearsay, but it is still just hearsay. That is not acceptable evidence for a scientific paper.
Moderator at SkS cracks his whip at Brandon Shollenberger with the following,
As if ‘sloganeering’ isn’t a vague enough offence already, Brandon is accused of indirect sloganeering based on alleged repetition and meandering. (isn’t a single instance of a ‘slogan’ in his post)
I hope you can live with yourself Brandon, you repetitious meanderer you.
Brandon Shollenberger says:
March 10, 2013 at 1:19 pm
“For those who think I’m being too naive/innocent, tell me this: Who would fabricate a quote like that on purpose when it is so easy to expose? The fabricated quote doesn’t even help their case much so why take the risk?”
Few things with this. 1. What risk? Throughout history people lie, get caught and still people believe them. We can look at classic cases such as news reporters… take the NYTs walter dunley and his cover up of mass genocide. It took over 40 years before people stopped believing his lies. Worse was the facts were well known at the time. Many reports spoke the truth and were ignored.
Look at another case such as old bagdad bob… even though many news groups were showing LIVE footage of him lying…. millions of people in the middle east believed everything he said and were shocked to find out he was lying. If you have all your buddies backing you and know even if you get caught you’ll still have a job and be able to lie again… what risk?
You assume that their is indeed risk… yet I see no risk him him doing this. When we look in both history and in the history of global warming cultistism we can see many supposed scientists being caught red handed lying even breaking the law… climategate was picture perfect in these respects. What happened to those scientists who blocked FOA? Who lied repeated, who likely destroyed research data… among other things.
Were they fired? Jailed? Even shamed a little bit? No….
So I ask you please explain the risk that these people face by lying? By cheating, by faking data, by doing anything… because I have yet to see this risk you speak up.
As to why… have you ever spent much time reading sociology research? Or for that matter really any research paper…
Most are a mess of claims that are not backed up by the research they use. Others are merely huge long winded rehashes of past questionable papers to make the new paper look stronger because it got all these other papers that supposedly support it. Many many papers nowadays are produced to create press release and to create what can be called “evidence by mass citation”. In simplest forms they take some completely BS research thats clearly fake and worthless. Produce a paper… then produce a bunch of papers based on that paper, each becomes more and more “sure” its right because it has more and more citations “supporting it”. Even though the evidence hasn’t changed it becomes more and more accepted…end run is basically they create huge numbers of hypotheis and claim by the mere fact that this paper created all these hypothesis thus the first paper must be correct.
These tactics and many versions of them have been very effective both by cultists and others throughout history.
Lewandowski is a disgrace to both science and the field of psychology. John Cook is his stooge, toady, and lapdog.
Go ahead and analyze that for a conspiracy theory.
Brandon, you have my respect and admiration for trying to clean out the Augean Stables of the Cook/Lewandowsky world but that tedious SkS thread with Curtis, Honeycutt, and Willard is unreal. Even Hercules with river waters could not clean up that bunch….
Brandon,
Jo Nova contacted various people about whether they’d been contacted by Lewandowsky. I’ve obtained copies of the emails from Pielke, Morano and Spencer to Jo Nova. Other than Spencer, no one made categeorical statements that they’d not been contacted. For example, I said that I had no record of being contacted by Lewandowsky (which was true). I was aware that I might have received an email and deleted it and therefore expressed my answer carefully. So did Pielke and Morano.
Contrary to Lewandowsky’s claim, none of us made “public” statements that we had not been contacted. We responded privately to an enquiry to Jo Nova. her blog post reported our information in more categorical terms than I or the others had expressed. I wasn’t following her blog and didn’t notice this at the time. Lewandowsky made no attempt to verify what we had told her with us.