UPDATE: Steve McIntyre has an interesting letter about the Lewandowsky and Cook affair here.
Retraction Watch writes:
Last week, we covered the complicated story of a paper by Stephan Lewandowsky and colleagues that had been removed — or at least all but the abstract — from its publisher’s site. Our angle on the story was how Frontiers, which publishes Frontiers in Personality Science and Individual Differences, where the study appeared, had handled the withdrawal. It happened without any notice, and no text appeared to let the reader know why the paper had vanished.
Today, Frontiers posted a note to readers on top of the paper’s abstract:
This article, first published by Frontiers on 18 March 2013, has been the subject of complaints. Given the nature of some of these complaints, Frontiers has provisionally removed the link to the article while these issues are investigated, which is being done as swiftly as possible and which Frontiers management considers the most responsible course of action. The article has not been retracted or withdrawn. Further information will be provided as soon as possible. Thank you for your patience.
More: http://retractionwatch.wordpress.com/2013/04/03/update-lewandowsky-et-al-paper-on-conspiracist-ideation-provisionally-removed-due-to-complaints/
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Matthew W says:
April 3, 2013 at 7:53 am
philjourdan says:
April 3, 2013 at 6:54 am
Definitely a case of egg on their face. I wonder how they will eventually react to the embarrassment?
========================================================================
By announcing that they had an extremely thorough investigation that found absolutely nothing wrong with the paper and that we all are indeed conspiracy nuts for challenging the paper.
*
I think Matthew W has it spot on. Until that paper is retracted, it’s not gone. Look how the second paper fed off the first – this isn’t a paper, or a theory – it’s a saga.
@ur momisugly A.D. Everard
“I think Matthew W has it spot on. Until that paper is retracted, it’s not gone. Look how the second paper fed off the first – this isn’t a paper, or a theory – it’s a saga.”
========================================================================
I wish I could say both you and Matt are wrong. Unfortunately, I doubt you are. Thanks for the replies. As I indicated, not the answer I was looking for, but it is an accurate one.
Taken down, not explicitly posted, still available. Wink wink.
Frontiers has provisionally removed the link to the article while these issues are investigated…
Let’s hope the investigation takes forever.
I am aghast that this paper seems to be entirely based on the “poisoning the well” fallacy and informal association. Since the belief in conspiracy theories can correlate with low faith in scientists, anyone who disagrees with any current science is likely to also be a conspiracy theorist. If A implies B, B must imply A.
How this was accepted for publication in a “science” journal is beyond me.
Why are any of you wasting time on critiquing complete trash?
Thats not the survey, but the creep that compiled it.
As for the survey….all you need to know is in the term “survey”.
Frontiers’ (an open access journal) article submission cost Euro770 – Euro1600. Presumably the University of Western Australia paid this. In the event that the article is withdrawn, does Lew have to repay the institution?
Believing that CO2 has no measurable or statistically demonstrable effect on climate is not saying it has NO effect – only that the effect ia meaningless in practical terms and should not be the basis or justification for dismantling the energy economy. This can only be “paranoia” in the minds of the ultimate paranoiacs, the AGW crowd. THEY are the ones constantly taking about conspiracies, Big Oil, rightwing nuts, etc. THAT is where the paranoia is.
As for the AGW paranoiacs thremselves, I don’t think they all necessarily represent a conspiracy, per se, for the following reason: a pride of lions doesn’t conspire, it just goes 0ut and hunts. When you have a number of like-minded individuals, of a paranoid-criminal-reactionary-leftist (PCRL) mindset, you can figure they’ll act alike, regardless of whether they are in communication with each other – no conspiracy required. Not to say that there isn’t conspiracy going on among the people at the center of AGW – the Climategate emails provide plenty of evidence of that. But as the PCRL news media shows, there are also plenty of others not directly connected to the AGW arguers that are acting in like fashion – also including members of the general public who subscribe to leftist-reactionary political beliefs.
There were obviously shenanigans involved, but in any case, a paper based on a web survey? Really?
pottereaton says:
April 3, 2013 at 7:54 am
An amusing comment at Bishop Hill that sums up these papers in a very original way:
“….there must be some real skilful academic turd polishing…”
You can’t polish a turd, but you can roll it in glitter.
Apr 3, 2013 at 2:12 PM | Unregistered CommenterRoger Longstaff
Hi Potter.
Actually You can polish a turd or should I say Cow dung. It is was a common practice in Southern Africa for the floors of rondavels. the floors are highly polished with a red wax based polish, beautiful and durable.
(A rondavel (from the Afrikaans word ‘rondawel’) is a westernized version of the African-style hut. The rondavel is usually round or oval in shape) .
But like Lewandosky et al crap. was built on a foundation of BS and crap!
All that glitters is not gold!
Please excuse my foul discretion.
Duster says …. Quite a lot really, but well worth reading.
I would add that as the survey was completed by mainly non skeptics pretending to be skeptics, So if the answers were not spoofed as Duster suggests then it would appear that they seem to agree with the moon landing conspiracy.
Manfred says:
April 3, 2013 at 1:27 pm
“Frontiers’ (an open access journal) article submission cost Euro770 – Euro1600. ”
Maybe they thought if we publish this our jounal has a negative value so we would be overcharging by giving it away for free.
Reg Nelson says:
April 3, 2013 at 11:50 am
Ric Werme says:
April 3, 2013 at 10:25 am
Can someone do me a favor and post a short summary about the current flap? Please address:
………………………..
The Marcott FAQ was put out as a PR damage control move, after Steve McIntyre showed that 20th century uptick could not be produced using the methodology they purported to use. Marcott coined the weasel word “not robust” which is climate-speak for “garbage”, admitting that paper did not support the outrageous claims being made in the media.
—————————————
Correct me if I’m wrong but, I think I recall the good Dr. Michael Mann came out early in support of Marcott. I think I recall the word robust but…………maybe not.
cn
Wamron says:
April 3, 2013 at 1:10 pm
Why are any of you wasting time on critiquing complete trash?
>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>
I do not care about Looney Lew. However I do care that his flagrant lie is being called a scientific paper and then cited in news stories, read by the general public, read by politicians.
Lew is making the diagnosis that ‘Deniers’ are mentally ill. People who have been concerned with some of the issues he connects to us such as believing the government lied about 9/11 have been hauled off to psychiatric wards and locked up against their will. And yes I am talking about the USA.
The easiest way to silence critics is to label them as being crazy. If that does not work you shut them up in a mental hospital.
I think they’re gonna throw Doc Lew under the bus.
They really don’t need him and he’s been caught twice.
He’s a loose cannon and an oddball to boot.
They wanted to dump Mann but he brings in grant money.
This guy will have tire tracks down his back shortly.
Lew’s-threw.
cn
I have been working tirelessly in an official capacity as a representative of the Alumni of the University of Adelaide to have the Lewandowsky – without a single response from the University, but I think there must be others also bombarding them with emails as well. They can’t ignore graduated Alumni from a fellow institution without appearing aloof and arrogant.
(paper removed) missing from after ‘Lewandowsky’ in above post
Not really sure why Tom Curtis is being given credit for his approach.
He came in late to the topic, was wrong with his first comments, tried the Racehorse Haynes/Nick Stokes approach and when that didn’t work he conceded a little. That and he wasted everyone’s time because he wasn’t aware of the events as they happened.
You can roll a turd in glitter but it’s still a turd. Under what scenario can they put this paper back up?
@ur momisugly Max Hugoson at 1103
I agree with the overall point in your post. One correction though. NASA actually lost 17 astronauts in the Apollo and shuttle accidents not 31. They were:
Apollo 1 fire (ground accident)
“Gus” Grissom
Ed White
Roger Chaffee
Challenger accident:
Frank Scobee
Michael Smith
Ronald McNair
Ellison Onizuka
Judith Resnik
Greg Jarvis
Christa McAuliffe
Columbia accident:
Rick Husband
William McCool
Michael Anderson
Kalpana Chawla
David Brown
Laurel Clark
Ilan Ramon (Israeli)
I think the details matter. I whole heartedly agree that it is critical to acknowledge accidents and learn from them. Accidents are inevitable when we push the boundaries of complex technology. Error is inevitable when we push the limits of science and try to understand complex phenomena and systems. The history of human progress is built on a succession of failures that we learned from and ultimately overcame.
Understanding how the earth’s climate actually works, and an ability to predict and adapt to changes is profoundly important to the welfare of billions of people. In addition to the economic damage and loss of liberty CAGW activists masquerading as scientists are inflicting, I think it is inexcusable that their dishonestly, manipulation of data, incompetence, and refusal to frankly acknowledge mistakes and fix them has significantly delayed progress in understanding the science.
Just like Lewpy’s first survey results paper, this latest paper is still available at Lewpy’s site and others. Taken down at the publisher doesn’t mean squat to the team when it involves their pals.
Classic Manniacal approach; refuse to admit problems, circle the wagons with co-respondents and pals, claim forever validity with a straight face (in public at least) and expect the faithful to spew bad science whenever real science surfaces…
Yup, include Lewpy and buds with the chaff and send them off world; to save the world of course. (borrowed from Hitch Hikers guide to the galaxy series)
“The easiest way to silence critics is to label them as being crazy. If that does not work you shut them up in a mental hospital.”
They also used to label non conform people for witchcraft and burn them?
Who is really really crazy here?
Gail:
“People who have been concerned with some of the issues he connects to us such as believing the government lied about 9/11 have been hauled off to psychiatric wards and locked up against their will. And yes I am talking about the USA.”
Well the USA aint doing a very thorough job of it. There are scores of millions of idiots who rumble on about how Bush and Cheney “did it”. They are impervious to reason and as bad as CAGW fascists.
The comparison you need to make is with the USSR. There “psychiatry” really was used to intern dissidents.
As for 9/11 excusers, I think its a pretty sure bet that their group overlaps very greatly with CAGW fascists.
Herein resides potential.
Re USSR space accidents……………we should remember the huge number of ground-crew killed in Soviet failed launches.Particularly the third attempt to launch the N1.
To Wamron:
You wrote: “…we should remember the huge number of ground-crew killed in
Soviet failed launches.”
Yes? Well, if that’s the case, we should also count all the American ground
fatalities, and astronauts killed in training flights in aircraft (like C.C. Williams,
Charlie Bassett, Elliott See, Bob Lawrence, Ted Freeman, and I think a couple
more). The U.S. and the Soviets both had 2 spacecraft failures in flight. Both
involved all on board being killed. The U.S. in-flight fatality count is larger
because the 2 STS craft had larger crews. Exploration involving cutting-edge
science and engineering is always risky. Leave it at that.
Why are people so bent out of shape over at Climateaudit and Bishop Hill’s blog whether the Lewandowsky survey was posted at SkS (or tweeted)?
Ric,
Because if you are going to conduct a study of the beliefs and attitudes held by CAGW skeptics, you need to include a reasonable number of such skeptics in your sample.
Lewandowsky, Oberauer, and Gignac failed in their effort to get 5 blogs run by skeptics to post a link to their survey. They never even bothered to contact Watts Up with That, which has the biggest readership among skeptical blogs.
The only skeptical blog that did post a link (unsolicited) was Junk Science; to this day, Lewandowsky et al. have never acknowledged that this occurred. They don’t mention Junk Science in the supplemental materials to their publication.
Meanwhile, they claim to have gotten 8 blogs run by CAGW proponents to post links to their survey. Skeptical Science never posted such a link; all Lewandowsky actually got John Cook to do was mention the survey in a tweet, reaching a much smaller audience. Yet they have claimed repeatedly that Skeptical Science posted a link; Skeptical Science is included, as we speak, in their published supplemental materials, as a blog that was “invited and posted a link.”
Further, they try to excuse the low percentage of responses that appeared to come from skeptics (around 15% of their survey responses) by claiming that 20% of Skeptical Science visitors in September 2010 were skeptics, as defined by John Cook.
Independent analyses of blog comments at SkS in September 2010 confirm that around 20% of the commenters were skeptics, if you define that category broadly enough to include anyone who took issue with any part of the house dogma at SkS. But this is completely irrelevant, since Cook never posted a link to the survey at SkS. Lewandowsky left one comment on SkS that entire month—about an unrelated topic.
Psychological Science had multiple grounds for rejecting Lewandowsky et al.’s manuscript. Their survey was badly constructed; they didn’t bother to provide basic descriptive statistics, such as the percentage of responses endorsing the view that NASA faked the moon landing; the analyses they did report did not support their conclusion that “conspiracist ideation” is the main driver of CAGW skepticism (if you accept their data and their analyses at face value, endorsement of an unfettered free market played a much bigger role); the title they put on their article was misleading even if you accept their data presentation; and so on.
But forget the rest of this stuff—Lewandowsky et al. didn’t have a study.
They purported to be studying skeptics, but they didn’t successfully recruit anyone at any of the major sites where skeptics hang out.
They couldn’t even accurately describe how they did recruit participants.
Two and a half years after collecting the data, 8 months after their manuscript was accepted, they still haven’t accurately described how they recruited participants.
To this day, Lewandowsky has refused to provide data on when responses were gathered, or on the blog of origin for each response, to other investigators who have requested them.
(It’s possible that Lewandowsky can’t provide this information—because he never got it or didn’t bother to retain it. But his response has not been to say that he doesn’t have the information. It’s been to refuse to acknowledge requests for it, or to turn over other information and pretend he has provided everything that was requested.)
On top of which, Lewandowsky and coauthors (including John Cook of Skeptical Science, and Michael Hubble-Marriott of a truly nasty little site called Watching the Deniers) rushed out the Frontiers in Psychology article—misquoting some of the blog entries that formed their data set, and trashing pretty much anyone who has asked questions about their methodology or asked for additional information.
So first they conduct a bad study.
Then it gets past the reviewers and the editor and gets published.
Then they run it out to the mass media 8 months before it is officially published (while withholding their not very responsive supplemental information for those 8 months).
They violate assorted norms of professional behavior.
Then they diagnose anyone who criticizes their study or asks questions about the manner in which it was conducted or requests additional data as a walking case of conspiracist ideation.
The mystery isn’t why the folks at Bishop Hill or Climate Audit are hopping mad at these guys.
They should be.
So should anyone who believes that psychological research can be conducted with a modicum of professional competence and integrity.