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
More here
Wouldn’t the whole Lewpy and deluded Cook affair make an excellent series research papers in the psychological world?
Even develop a series of courses (freshman level of course) on exactly what an intelligent scientist should not do as they develop a research methodology, approach, tests and practice?
A truly dastardly conspiracy: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kN9LdTkR85Q
Not.
It is a good tutorial on using leading questions to provoke belief, and makes much more sense than Lewandowsky-Cook.
Anthony/mods
May I cross-post a comment I just made at Lewandowsky’s blog to pursue my complaint against them? (just in case it gets disappeared there).
http://www.shapingtomorrowsworld.org/Recursive-Fury-Facts-misrepresentations.html
Thanks guys!
The fact that you’re continuing digging this collapsing hole will provide the sceptic community with more satisfaction than you can possibly imagine.
I think you’ve missed the point that “recursive fury” seems to trigger massive seratonin release in it’s victims – keeping us in a continual state of hilarity.
Now, on a more important note. I made a serious complaint here, and direct to both your universities, about fraudulent falsification in your paper of a quotation I made here.
You twisted a remark I made suggesting Prof Lewandowsky had not contacted sceptic blog proprietors – to suggest that I believed no “human subjects” had taken your survey.
This appears to be one of many calamitous errors in your work based on your clumsy attempt at an apology to Richard Betts above.
My complaint was obvious taken seriously by somebody, since the offending sentence and link have disappeared from the pdf version of the “final published paper” on the Frontiers website.
Sadly, the incompetence that has characterised all your work has prevailed and the offensive material still remains in “full text” online version of the paper on the website.
This raises several issues:-
1. The fact that the fraudulent and offensive statement has been removed from the pdf (and presumably print) version shows that you have acknowledged wrongdoing.
2. The fact that it still appears in the final, published online text means that you have compounded the offence by continuing to publish material you know is wrong and offensive.
3. The fact that there are now at least two current and different versions of the “final published paper” in circulation seems to make it worthless as a contribution to the peer reviewed academic literature.
I will of course continue to pursue my complaint, and potential legal action, with your universities – until such time as a get a public retraction and apology in writing and on this blog.
Meanwhile, I strongly suggest you withdraw this worthless paper, which is really just a mish-mash of its authors’ hysterical prejudices wrapped up in an unconvincing tissue of pseudo-acdemic jargon.
Foxgoose
Mark Bofill says:
March 20, 2013 at 7:15 pm
rts rts rts rts rts rts… …rts rts rts rts rts rts… Am I keeping up with your recursion? rts rts rts rts rts rts.. Oh shit, stack underflow!
Anyone who says they’ve never done it, I call bullshit. 😉
DaveE.
Dare I say Lewandowsky’s behavior borders on insanity. Amazingly enough, he is the one who sees conspiracies everywhere.
(Cook of course needs no comment … simply a clown along for the ride. It is telling that Lewandowsky elected to go with such a co-author given all the academic connections he (Lewandowsky) should have.)
I received a tweet this morning from John Cook so I thought I’d have a little look at the paper.
It seems to me that they deliberately put out a questionable survey and then stood by and watched what would happen: “The overall pattern of the blogosphere’s response to LOG12”
They imagine that “Internet sites such as blogs dedicated to a specific issue have therefore become hubs for science denial and they arguably play a major role in the creation and dissemination of conspiracist ideation.”
So after poking the bees nest with a stick, they google the results every day to see what happens “Each of those 30 sites was then searched by Google for instances of the name of the first author of LOG12 that fell within the period 28 August-18 October 2012. Sites that returned more than 10 hits were considered a principal site, and they are shown in Table 1”
Then they Identify the results as being conspiracies….
“First, the presumed intentions behind any conspiracy (or just the survey) are invariably nefarious.”
“[Second] self-perception and self-presentation among conspiracy theorists as the victims of organized persecution.” But if the survey was in fact a deliberate catalyst then the reaction is not a conspiracy
“Third, during its questioning of an official account, conspiracist ideation is characterized by … an almost nihilistic degree of skepticism” Isn’t skepticism supposed to be the bedrock of science – especially when the survey is as flawed as it would appear this one is.
“Fourth, to the conspiracy theorist, nothing happens by accident” The methodology here did not happen by accident. Perhaps the only thing that did happen by accident was an outage of Cooks website.
“Fifth, the underlying lack of trust and exaggerated suspicion contribute to a cognitive pattern whereby specific hypotheses may be abandoned when they become unsustainable, but those corrections do not impinge on the overall abstraction that “something must be wrong” and the “official” account must be based on deception (Wood et al., 2012).” So in other words – when a hypothesis is falsified it is dropped but this does not detract from other observational hypotheses – No conspiracy here.
“Finally, contrary evidence is often interpreted as evidence for a conspiracy.” which they choose not to back up at all.
They then move on to discuss “Recursive Hypotheses” but notice that no other peer-reviewed psychological articles on conspiracist ideation published in 2012 score on this at all – making their paper an outlier.
They then go on to examine the survey responses:
“Survey responses “scammed” (1)” The evidence now suggests that some responses were indeed scammed – therefore not a conspiracy’
.
““Skeptic” blogs not contacted (2)” They themselves admit that “a further 5 “skeptic” (or “skeptic”-leaning) blogs were approached but none posted the link.” Therefore from the viewpoint of any participants, links were indeed not posted on any skeptic blogs – therefore no conspiracy, When the skeptic bloggers looked back and found that they had indeed been contacted they posted to this effect and thus the lack of initial invitation was accepted as being false and thus dropped as a hypothesis.
I do like their section:
“Critics might furthermore argue that our analysis of the response to LOG12 was over-extensive, and that some of the hypotheses advanced by the blogosphere in fact constituted legitimate criticism.” – There’s a surprise eh!
“This criticism is rendered less potent by the fact that our analysis was conducted at a psychological level,” Move along now – nothing to see here, and even if there is you won’t understand it.
Then they do a bit of tarring the skeptic community as all being far right types. It’s a well established fact don’t you know!:
“Our research also points to at least two issues that merit further investigation. The first issue arises from the well-established fact that the rejection of climate science is strongly associated with right-wing political leanings and the embrace of a “fundamentalist” laissez-faire vision of the free-market
Still, there was an interesting bit about Skydragons tucked away in the middle…
The claims of LOG12 amounted to stating that skeptical views were the result of people blinded by ideology and cranky beliefs. The implication is that they are utterly unable to see the truth of prospective catastrophic global warming and the policies necessary to prevent the catastrophes from happening. The implication is that the general public and media should be highly prejudiced against anything a skeptic has to say.
All along this saga has demonstrated the opposite. The is no singular truth to be defended. The small minority of skeptics who support conspiracy theories is no larger than those who accept the consensus. Given the biases of the questionnaire, it might be the other way.
The best reaction in any democracy is not tighter control, but pluralism. That is to promote alternative hypotheses and to encourage people to compare and contrast the differing points of view. A hypothesis with overwhelming evidence in its support would be bolstered by its ability to withstand attacks, or to show much greater support from real-world evidence than alternative hypotheses. It is the same as in a criminal trial. The general public will more strongly accept a guilty verdict if the accused has strong representation, who try to undermine the prosecutions case, than if the accused is denied any defense.
arthur4563 says:
March 20, 2013 at 7:38 pm
After all is said and done, L & C’s silly nonsense is seen as an example of an ad hominem logical fallacy repackaged using psychobabble pretensions.
you nailed it down arthur, more is not needed to say.