All you can do is laugh.
Brandon Shollenberger writes at Lucia’s about the new Fuzzy Math consensus “proof” paper from the ever entertaining John Cook at Skeptical Science, rated with the help of 27 of the SkS kidz club. The method is simple:
“Each abstract was categorized by two independent, anonymized raters.”
With a simple premise like that, what could go wrong? Well for starters, they don’t seem to understand what the word “independent” means. Shollenberger continues:
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That makes sense. What doesn’t make sense is that people would make topics in the SKS forum like:
Does this mean what it seems to mean?
second opinion??
how to rate: Cool Dudes: The Denial Of Climate Change…
That’s right. The “independent” raters talked to each other about how to rate the papers. This must be some new form of independence I’ve never heard of. I’m not the only one thrown off by this. Sarah Green, one of the most active raters, observed the non-independence:
But, this is clearly not an independent poll, nor really a statistical exercise. We are just assisting in the effort to apply defined criteria to the abstracts with the goal of classifying them as objectively as possible.
Disagreements arise because neither the criteria nor the abstracts can be 100% precise. We have already gone down the path of trying to reach a consensus through the discussions of particular cases. From the start we would never be able to claim that ratings were done by independent, unbiased, or random people anyhow.
One must wonder at the fact an author of the paper calls the work independent despite having said just a year earlier, “we would never be able to claim” it is independent. Perhaps there is some new definition for “never” I’m unaware of.
And it gets even more hilarious. Read it all at Lucia’s.
For those who don’t know Inigo Montoya:
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Izen and BA
i asked if either of you were involved in the Cook paper. My reason for asking was i was hoping you were so you could provide some inside information about the processes of the study. But i guess not. Thank you for answering.
Eugene WR Gallun
At least this explains why the handful of posts I have seen from Brandon Shollenberger were a waste of time – he is an ITT Tech student! No wonder alarmists make fun of us.
I often find that the little things a person says and does are always very telling about that person’s personality.and predictive of his other behaviors.
11,991 papers were used in the study.
Cook-The-Books says over 12,000 papers were used in the study.
The correct statement would have been ALMOST 12,000 papers were used in the study.
A small thing? Yes, but very telling. At the very least Cook-The-Books likes to garnish his facts. i strongly suspect that all his claims about the “virtues” of his study are exaggerations.
Eugene WR Gallun
Eugene, I tried pointing this out to the ITT Tech student and he just wanted to argue with me about it.