Reversing Curie
Guest post by Tom Fuller from The Lukewarmer’s Way
The online journal Frontiers promises open access and peer review. They have recently published Stefan Lewandowsky’s paper ‘Recursive Fury: conspiracist ideation in the blogosphere in response to research on conspiracist ideation’. So yes, access there is pretty open. Not so sure which peers reviewed this one, though.
In it, Lewandowsky describes the reactions of commenters to the publication of another paper, “NASA faked the moon landing|Therefore (Climate) Science is a Hoax: An Anatomy of the Motivated Rejection of Science”.
This paper was based on an internet survey so bad that it beggars belief. Invitations were posted on the websites of climate activists and Lewandowsky and John Cook of Skeptical Science discussed the survey and nudged activists to go over there and phony up the results. They did.
Lewandowsky is a charlatan. His latest paper, co-authored by John Cook, is a flight of fantasy that ignores the fact that most of the comments that he labels ‘recursive fury’ were polite mentions of the fact that he Cooked the books in his survey–a survey he claims is published, but is not.
I play a minor role in this. As someone who has worked in the field of online research pretty much from the day online research started, I have participated in literally thousands of online surveys. I commented on Lewandowsky’s weblog posts concerning his survey, pointing out some of the (many) issues with what he had done and asking for a look at the questionnaire.
Lewandowsky deleted all of my comments. And his latest paper, which has a Data Supplement showing the ‘recursive fury’, which apparently means cherry picking a few of the comments he didn’t like, doesn’t mention my deleted comments for some reason.
In addition to biasing the sample, Lewandowsky presented different versions of the survey to respondents coming from different websites. His ‘conspiracists’ from the skeptic world were outnumbered by ‘conspiracists’ from the climate activist community. He has not published the data, despite promising to do so and claiming that he has.
He has clearly read the criticisms of his paper–indeed, he includes some of them in his data supplement. So there is no real reason to excuse him for what he has perpetrated on the scientific community in his latest effort.
He’s not doing either his field or science in general any favors. In fact he’s helping destroy a tradition and methodology that has advanced human progress immeasurably.
He doesn’t care.
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UPDATE: It seems Lewandowsky is seeing conspiracy everywhere, even at the Met Office. Jeff Condon has the details:
Lewandowsky – Strike Three!! What a riot!
Lewandowsky has placed a comment in his supplementary information from the excellent bishop Hill blog, authored by fellow conspiracy theorist Richard Betts:
The thing I don’t understand is, why didn’t they just make a post on sceptic blogs themselves, rather than approaching blog owners. They could have posted as a Discussion topic here at Bishop Hill without even asking the host, and I very much doubt that the Bish would have removed it. Climate Audit also has very light-touch moderation and I doubt whether Steve McIntyre would have removed such an unsolicited post. Same probably goes for many of the sceptic blogs, in my experience. So it does appear to that they didn’t try very hard to solicit views from the climate sceptic community.
Unfortunately for Lewandowsky, this is Richard Betts
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I fear the comments in this thread are merely going to fuel a further recursive recursive fury paper, leading to a potentially hazardous fury loop.
On a serious note, people like the real Richard Betts can’t exist in Lewendowsky’s fevered imagination, where only a fellow villain would treat a CAGW sceptic with respect. His behaviour seems symptomatic of an intellectually failed academic acting out a revenge fantasy on a group, easy to avoid due to their stigmatisation (therefore no real threat) that has become a conduit for his hatred against those who have probably wronged him in the past.
Where are the other academic psychologists? Are they happy with this paper standing as an example of their work? My ideation reels.
I’ve been published too. On WUWT.
very proud of that am I.
cui bono, ” academic psychologists” is an oxymoron.
This is merely stage 2. Stage 1 being when they lose the scientific argument. Stage 2 represents trying to portray the opposition as crazies. Stage 3 is when they get violent.
All this talk about conspiracy is clearly subconscious projection since neighter Lew or Cook can be oblivious to climategate. Someone, maybe a psychologist, more likely a psychiatrist, should write a paper on that.
“See this just makes me furious. In fact, my fury is bounded only by the number of fury frames I can fit on my stack.”
Well using “C” makes you prone to stack thrashes. If you use Forth you can avoid being framed and thrashed.
Dodgy Geezer said:
“Apropos of that, I note that this year is the 800 anniversary of Roger Bacon, the Franciscan friar who invented Scientific Methodology.
It is staggering that there seems to be no recognition of this event being celebrated anywhere in the world.”
-That is a good observation. The scientist who was well-recognized on his recent hallmark birthday was Darwin. In fact, Darwin Day is a fairly well-promoted annual observation.
Darwin received recognition because, of all scientists, he is the one we can go to for denying God, since we now have a fairly workable, although tautological, scientific versus supernatural explanation for where we came from. His theorizing allows us to support our atheism as scientifically-based, placing humans proudly at the pinnacle of all of creation.
“leading to a potentially hazardous fury loop.”
Love it.
A. Scott says:
March 21, 2013 at 1:22 am:
There oughta be a law. We can call it the Lew Law. Which is perfectly fitting.
I believe that is the Loo Law. Circular reasoning at its best.
JJB MKI says:
March 21, 2013 at 2:57 am
I fear the comments in this thread are merely going to fuel a further recursive recursive fury paper, leading to a potentially hazardous fury loop.
On a serious note, people like the real Richard Betts can’t exist in Lewendowsky’s fevered imagination, where only a fellow villain would treat a CAGW sceptic with respect.
——————
Too funny! I don’t feel so all alone now, knowing that Betts is apparently wearing the same tinfoil hat I am. 🙂
Gotta be careful with those fury loops, they’ve got a way of getting out of hand. Pretty soon everybody except Cook and Lewandowski are going to be part of the conspiracy.
upcountrywater says:
March 20, 2013 at 10:07 pm …
Thanks for posting that video link!
Folks, don’t call it psychobabble – call it Nazibabble. These people aren’t crazy – they’re making a conscious choice to do evil.
Dodgy Geezer says:
March 21, 2013 at 1:50 am
…
Apropos of that, I note that this year is the 800 anniversary of Roger Bacon, the Franciscan friar who invented Scientific Methodology.
Ah, that would be gun powder that Roger invented. Conspiracy theory says he really learned of it from wandering Chinese – who had already invented it – but I think it was simply a parallel.
Sir Francis Bacon, who was an Elizabethan, is the “inventor” of the scientific method. You want to look at the New Organon where he delineates his ideas. Bacon’s approach is rather backward to what we consider the SM today. He assumes that lots of things go on in nature, that scientists will observe them, and that from these observations, they will induce (not deduce) explanatory hypothesis. Once these are formed then they can be tested. Modern scientific method emphasizes the importance of how explanatory hypotheses are formed, and focuses on the deductive utility, predictive capacity and general utility of the hypothesis. If it generally meets these requirements, it gets to graduate to the status of theory. Thus, by that standard, the Greenhouse Effect, though misnamed, is a theory, while AGW is still merely a hypothesis. However, we more permissive and democratic these days.
Bacon’s approach was profoundly important because it is based on an assumption of essential ignorance. He emphasized that not only must observations be made of phenomena in nature, but that they had to be repeatable. This repeatability requirement is a weakness in any historical science such as climatology.
philjourdan says:
March 21, 2013 at 5:19 am
This is merely stage 2. Stage 1 being when they lose the scientific argument. Stage 2 represents trying to portray the opposition as crazies. Stage 3 is when they get violent.
Don’t leave out stage 4:
“First they ignore you. Then they ridicule you. And then they attack you and want to burn you. And then they build monuments to you.”
— Gandhi
The FACT that this guy is inept and makes stuff up yet retains his place at the table is proof in a conspiracy theory; The powers that be empower and reward anyone willing to creatify … well, anything that supports their plans/position/agenda/tax-grabs/control-freakery/world-government/&c.,
Duster says:
“… AGW is still merely a hypothesis.”
I prefer “conjecture”, since AGW is neither testable nor measurable. If at some future point someone produces a verifiable, falsifiable measurement of AGW, then it becomes a testable hypothesis.
The alarmist crowd always skirts around the fact that there are no empirical measurements showing that changes in CO2 cause changes in temperature — while there are lots of real world measurements, on all time scales out to hundreds of millennia, showing that ∆T causes ∆CO2.
Climate alarmists simply have cause and effect reversed, so it is no wonder that their conclusions are wrong. They started from a faulty premise, and now they are stuck trying to defend it.
How about this qoute, also from our conspiracy ideation quote-mining climate expert Lewandowsky, about The Australian:
Lewandowsky knows, he just knows as he always has!
Lew & crew are at a similar point in the AGW debacle where Sen. Joe McCarthy was in the Red Scare when he claimed to see commie plots in every part of life. Lew & crew are seeing evil conspiratorialists in every e-mail that dares to disagree with them. And if they have to ‘salt the mine’ to illustrate their point better, well it is all for a good cause. Just ask Peter Gleick or the late Dr. Schneider about the importance of being….flexible…..in the important work of silencing climate denialist scum in the employ of the Koch Brothers and Big Oil. Lew & crew are clearly upholding that tradition and exploring new frontiers to add to it.
Bob says (March 21, 2013 at 4:49 am):
“academic psychologists” is an oxymoron.
—
Lol.
Dodgy Geezer says: (re Roger Bacon)
—–
James Blish’s historical novel about Roger Bacon, ‘Doctor Mirabilis’ seems to be still in print. Highly recommended, although difficult if you’re unfamiliar with the medieval worldview. I have a tattered paperback from a misspent childhood.
Bacon spent 13 years in prison for advocating the separation of scientific and theological knowledge. Perhaps a parallel to today’s climate religionists and ‘heretics’?
No they’re not, because they think they’re doing good, just as Hitler did.
A bit dated, but this thread might need some more true skepticism:
http://www.randi.org/site/index.php/swift-blog/2036-let-the-best-ideas-win-should-skeptics-engage-conspiracy-theorists-directly.html
Sad, in a way…
No they aren’t, because they think they’re doing good, just as Hitler did.
M Simon says:
March 21, 2013 at 6:19 am
…
Well using “C” makes you prone to stack thrashes. If you use Forth you can avoid being framed and thrashed.
——————-
I’m too old to change. I’m afraid it’s my lot in life to be framed and thrashed.
There is a similar use of surveys to produce the conclusion that opponents of windturbines must have psychological problems, from the University of Nottingham. In this case, people who claim to be affected by windturbine noise ars ‘worriers’ and are suffering from ‘neuroticism’.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/earth/earthnews/9946617/Only-worriers-suffer-from-wind-farm-noise.html
Do the contentions of Lewandowsky and this latest survey really represent the best of sociological analysis?