Brandon Schollenberger writes:
As you’re aware, Stephan Lewandowsky has written several papers claiming to have found certain traits amongst global warming skeptics. I believe his methodology is fundamentally flawed. I believe a flaw present in his methodology is also present in the work of many others.
To test my belief, I’m seeking participants for a short survey (13 questions). The questions are designed specifically to test a key aspect of Lewandowsky’s methodology. The results won’t be published in any scientific journal, but I’ll do a writeup on them once the survey is closed and share it online.
The Poll follows.
Please feel free to participate and/or share the survey with anyone you’d like:
http://kwiksurveys.com/s.asp?sid=jblyccj8lluam18284546
Note: the poll is just one page, and after submitting you’ll get a “make your own survey” ad page.
Hey guys. I just wanted to let you know I’ve closed the survey.
The response rate far exceeded anything I imagined, with the survey receiving approximately 5,800 responses in 24 hours. That’s more data than I could possibly need, and I’m closing the survey so I can begin writing about the results. I hope to have material to post come Monday, but don’t hold me to that. As entertaining as this project is, there are other fun things I might want to do on my weekend.
Thanks to everyone who participated. You guys rock!
Being half man and half bear and half pig, I have two mothers, I got so confused with the question because my Bear mother is not very nice, as she eats people given the chance. My Pig mother is very nice and warm and she made a great breakfast.
http://highflyersarena.wordpress.com/2014/01/10/challenges-of-future-leaders-f-mod/
For those who did not see this within the last 24 hours and find the survey closed, can the questions be posted so we can see what people are on about?
Brandon,
Great fun! I’m sure you’ll find we all very, very, very strongly agree that Bigfoot’s alien mother was barely a slightly wonderful old lady, although she often had difficulty hiding her racist viewpoint whenever she attended global warming protests ;o)
Looking forward to your post(s).
bshollenberger says:
January 11, 2014 at 1:57 am
Hey guys. I just wanted to let you know I’ve closed the survey.
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Not fair I hadn’t gotten my bot armay reprogramed 😉
But what will happen if this poll “proves” global warming with a 98% certainty. Will we all freeze?
bshollenberger says: @ur momisugly January 10, 2014 at 10:07 am
…Stephen Richards, I’m not sure anyone has ever decided whether or not I’m a skeptic, and that includes me!
>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>
I sure as heck hope you are a skeptic because the opposite is a faithful and blind follower. Modern society has no place for blind followers but unfortunately they are legion.
“bshollenberger says:
January 10, 2014 at 10:31 pm
John West, because the results are obviously nonsensical. There’s no way it’d pass peer-review.”
You mean it wouldn’t pass proper peer-review, but it will probably pass peer-review in a CAGW journal.
🙂
Did I pass?
when do you expect to post results?
thanks.
dmacleo says: @ur momisugly January 11, 2014 at 9:04 am
when do you expect to post results?
thanks.
>>>>>>>>>>>>>>
He said Monday at the earliest and Friday at the latest.
I have another update. Given the short window the survey ran for, a number of people may not have got a chance to participate. As such, I’ve opened a second survey identical to the first. Anyone is welcome to take it.
http://kwiksurveys.com/s.asp?sid=h1wq2yej0dhjgs4284520
I’m going to write about the results from the first survey for now, but I may include results from the copy in the future. Even if I don’t, at least you’ll be able to try the survey for yourself!
bshollenberger says @ur momisugly January 11, 2014 at 10:31 am ;
Ah – good move (lest the Internet destabilize 😉 … and a separate, time-displaced dataset.
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Pardon me, but are you already a peer-reviewed published author? It’s clear that you are very active on the Web, but I could not find any “papers”. [I am myself, not. I’m an amateur.]
I think it would be a great thing, and a “useful” venture, to aim for formal, ‘real’ publication.
But I would say to make that a separate project, and to pick the topic and design the investigation & paper, purposely to serve as a good foundation for ongoing future publication.
You already have a solid presence in several communities, and adding formal publishing to this ‘CV’ could be a big asset, especially if it’s approached with the intent to plant a load-bearing stepping-stone.
What are you talking about? Tens of thousands of Australians say they have seen Bigfoot! And its not just claims from those who report seeing Bigfoot while traveling to the US or to the handful of other countries where Bigfoot sightings are more traditional. In 2013, numerous sightings were reported right in Australia!
It started in March near Brisbane. More recent encounters were reported in Whyalla (Oct 19), Moonyoonooka (Oct 26), Kwinana Beach (Nov 9), Davenport (Nov 16), Albany (Nov 23), and Mullingar (Nov 29). Australian media followed these sightings from town to town. From speaking to local Bigfoot fanatics who claim to have developed an understanding of the monster’s movement patterns, they report that the creature has likely left Australia, and is headed for New Zealand. They don’t really explain how it is supposed to make it over the ocean to NZ, or for that matter how it made it to Oz all the way from the US in the first place. Bigfoot isn’t really known for its swimming ability, so that is kind of a glaring ommission. Maybe it stowed away on a cargo ship.
Now, some of those folks might be delusional or trying to make a hoax, but that is no reason to discount all of them. Several photos (and a couple of shaky cell phone videos) of what is allegedly Bigfoot have recently been featured in Australian media. It is true that certain identification of the monster from those photos is difficult. As is typical of Bigfoot photos taken in the US, the Aussie pics are typically blurry and show the beast running and covered in mud, or barely visible through clouds of dust. That doesn’t mean you should dismiss them out of hand. The scientific case for Australian Bigfoot sightings involves much stronger corroborating evidence, as presented on this website:
Yank Bigfoot has Come to Oz, says Aussie Monster Expert Clive Featherby
Full disclosure: Featherby and his colleague (American researcher Bob Chandler) do admit to receiving some modest funding from Lucas Oil company, and there are other good reasons to believe that their sympathies pretty obviously lie with Big Oil. But that doesn’t mean they’re lying. Try to keep an open mind about such things.
Brandon,
I took the second survey. I assume you’re aware the first question is not a complete sentence and does not parse to a logically answerable question as the missing word(s) could completely change ones answer.
I look forward to seeing your results.
Now, let me ask you this… let’s say some guy had been captured by a bunch of Bigfoots and held prisoner in a dirt pit to have sex with Bigfoot women until finally climbing up a limb broken off during a thunderstorm and crawling away on hands and knees because the Bigfoot women licked all the skin off the bottoms of his feet (and rubbed all the hair off the side of his head, but that’s another story) to keep him from getting away… does he say he was captured by “The Bigfoot”, like he had been captured by “The Sioux”, or was he Captured by “Bigfeet”, or “Bigfoots” or… ?
Bigfoot is JFKs lovechild.
JJ & Anor, the bigfoot spotted in Australia is Clive Palmer (LOL) the recently elected MP who is always putting his foot in it, by accusing people of incredible crimes. Like Rupert Murdoch’s Asian second wife was a Chinese Spy? And he has just opened an incredibly expensive dinosaur park. As I said, there are no primates in North America or Australia. In fact there were no humans until about 10,000 years ago North of the great lakes. I just think and know that is why our Indigenous Aborigines came from elsewhere. But there is knowledge archaic hominids and hominins were present in SE Asia.
Recall until European occupation and the arrival of the dingo, there were no mammals in Australia only marsupials and monotremes. Ah well, as far as the bunyip is concerned it could have been a crocodile or large lizard, they lived in Australia, still do. But Aboriginal myths or dreamtime, is often based on their interpretation of evolution and the natural environment they lived in.
Andrew the drop bear? The Sundra straits have been cut off from Australia and NG for Millenium.
That’s why no mammals evolved from marsupials and monotremes until the dingo and Europeans arrived. Aborigines came in around 50,000 years ago when sea levels dropped dramatically.
Anyway have to go and attend my bonsai. Enjoy your debate.
Skeptics do think differently, or more to the point, alarmists think differently.
Skeptics are simply people who are able to see problems at a higher resolution, as well as standing back to look at the problem in the round.
Alarmists are of a personality type that cannot juggle many ideas at once. Sceptics keep all possible aspects of a problem in play. This means assigning relative importance to different ideas, shunting some to the back-burner while other obviously important aspects stay on the stove. Sceptics are constantly juggling these ideas shunting them back and forth, never forgetting that the cumulative effect if the back-burner ideas could have quite an influence. Alarmists are incapable of doing this. They have one big pot on one burner in one kitchen, the IPCC.
As a result of this difference in mindset, sceptics exchange recipes, breathing new life into back-burner ideas that may prove to be more important than had first been realised. Alarmists expend their intellectual energies on serving up one standardised, unpalatable dish while guarding the kitchen door from anyone with new ideas.
This might sound tongue-in-cheek but it’s true: in general, alarmists can’t juggle ideas sufficiently well to fit them together because they can’t see problems in the requisite detail to see the links. Seeing the detail and the links requires hours of solitary contemplation followed by patient discussion with like-minded people who don’t dismiss your ideas at the outset because they know you haven’t yet burrowed down into the problem to the granular, detailed level. They know their potential objections will be resolved at a deeper level. Alarmists, as we know, are impatient, bombastic and self-promoting. These qualities are the diametrical opposite of quiet contemplation and thorough sharing of ideas through thoughtful, civilized discussion.
In short, alarmists are impatient linear thinkers; sceptics are patient, thoughtful, lateral thinkers.
Scute says @ur momisugly January 12, 2014 at 4:50 am;
Scute offers some good observations & interpretations. Some of what we notice about these two contrasting groups, though, can also be accounted for as reflections of their dramatically differing cultural & social (etc) status, within a larger common conflict & context.
Like with the Mujahedin in Afghanistan, patience is often the ‘apparent’ virtue of the underdog. The people of this region were paragons of patience, long before they picked up their current expertise in Russian & Cyrillic.
“Boy, you wanna see some finely-honed patience, check out those Afgans”. More-generally, if you want to see patience maximally developed & expressed, just grind & crush any given people beneath the heel for a few generations or centuries. Of course, investing in the prospects of your grandchildren then becomes fraught.
The patience of skeptics is easily explained by the simple reality that without it, they quickly ‘prove’ all the charges with which they are commonly tarred. Even skeptics will distance themselves from associates who fly off the handle too readily. “We can’t afford that kind of behavior”.
Likewise, lateral thinking tends to recommend itself, when the opponent holds overwhelming powers. Aka, asymmetrical warfare.
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Environmentalism arose in the later part of the 19 C, and the late 20th C development of a classical-bogeyman climate-threat is a maneuver within/by that larger movement.
Environmentalism itself links directly to/emerged from the social phenomenon/movement of Romanticism, which had been dramatically ignited by the hoax writings of the formerly small-time but subsequent literary hero-Scot James Macpherson, exploiting the ‘ethereal’, previously-oral legends of Ossian, and taking the publishing-market by storm in the late 1770s. (Romanticism in Scotland.)
President Jefferson issued several eyebrow-raising instructions to Lewis & Clark, pursuant to his deep involvement with Ossian Romanticism. Napolean Bonaparte was caught up in the frenzy, carrying Macpherson in his saddlebags during the pivotal campaigns of European history.
Romanticism was a towering social bonfire of the first magnitude; crudely, a ‘mania’ or outright ‘break from reality’. It is massaged today, to ‘romanticize’ the underpinnings of Literary, Intellectual, Academic and Liberal institutions … which in the actual historic facts & contexts are a good deal less ‘romantic’ than their stakeholders would have it.
To know the enemy, know Romanticism … staying aware that they wrote the history books, and Wikipedia. Be patient, and think laterally. 🙂
@ur momisugly Ted Clayton Jan 12th 2014 at 8:06
Good comment. You’ve proved my point: you used your accumulated historical knowledge to shed light on how Romanticism has infected the environmental movement. By doing so, you have proved that by keeping many seemingly disparate ideas in play before meshing them into a coherent whole, you can achieve greater insight.
I would say that humanist academics, who have their ideas rooted in Romanticism are linear thinkers, generally speaking. Unfortunately, they are good communicators of their often bad ideas, so you end up with BBC science reporters with no knowledge of science but qualifications in English and media studies, peddling claptrap. Or archeologists with not a shred of engineering knowledge pontificating on how they built the pyramids, batting away sound theories because they’ve already examined how the society was structured. All touchy-feely; no maths or physics required.
A stark example of linear thinking in climate change is Nuccitelli demanding a mechanism for the recently proposed theory that the instrumental record may demonstrate a superimposition of the AMO over the slow, linear recovery from the Little Ice Age. It’s a conjecture waiting for a proof. Nothing wrong with that, mathematicians exalt conjectures to the status of theorems all the time, even those yet to be proved. But Nuccitelli wants to throw the baby out with the bathwater. If you bin the conjecture how are you going to be alert to the first signs of evidence for the LIA recovery mechanism whether it be GCR’s, solar tides, albedo changes etc.?
The other glaring example of linear thinking in climate change was chapter 7 in the AR5 draft. The authors allowed a mention of the Bond et al paper on a long-term correlation between GCR’s and temperature and then repudiated it for want of an atmospheric mechanism to explain it. It was a correlation, in other words, for them, another worthless conjecture. They couldn’t keep it on the back-burner even though it is a potential game-changer. This is akin to saying to Newton “sorry, we know you’ve described how gravity works but not what it actually is so we can’t use your equations or do any astronomy/ ballistics/ clock-making until Einstein arrives, or rather, Higgs, or rather the Hadron Collider.” Quite insane logic.
I didn’t give any examples of linear thinking alarmists in my last comment because it was supposed to be pure observation. However the two examples above are the big two for me. Doubtless, there are others.
Scute
I’ve seen Bugs Bunny on tape, & I don’t believe he’s real.
Mark, the first question is a complete sentence. The word “a” in it is extraneous. I’ve discussed it a few times. Basically, it was either an intentional error to get people to pay more attention, or it was a typo. I refuse to say which.
Ted Clayton, I’m not a published author. I never even intended to become very active in global warming discussions. I just noticed problems nobody else was talking about and couldn’t ignore them.
As for a “formal” or “real” publication, I’m not sure what I could publish. The results of the survey are obviously nonsense. That was the point. The only thing I could imagine publishing is a paper showing why they’re nonsense. That might be worth trying to do.
Speaking of which, the weekend is over. I can stop pretending to have a life now and go back to writing.