Readers may recall this survey: A poll to test the Lewandowsky methodology The results are in, which is why we can’t say global warming proponents support pedophilia.
Guest essay by Brandon Schollenberger
They don’t. The fact there is a correlation (0.14) between believing global warming is a serious threat and saying pedophilia is good is meaningless. The fact this correlation is “statistically significant” (at the 99.99% level) is meaningless. Anyone who looks at the data can immediately see the results are bogus (a small jitter value was added to allow us to see the density of responses):
There are only 20 or so respondents (out of over 5,000) who claim to believe global warming is a threat and claim to support pedophilia. It’s likely those responses were false. Nobody can seriously claim that proves global warming proponents are pedophiles.
The issue of false responses received a lot of attention with Stephan Lewandowsky’s paper, “NASA faked the moon landing—Therefore (Climate) Science is a Hoax. In that paper, similarly false responses created spurious correlations. Unfortunately, the focus on false responses meant a more fundamental issue got missed. Namely, the entire idea behind this approach is nonsensical. The approach is like taking the data displayed above and drawing this line:
The line fits okay in the bottom left corner where most of the data lies. That means there is positive correlation between the two data sets. However, that corner clearly shows a correlation between thinking pedophilia is bad and being a skeptic. It tells us nothing about global warming proponents or pedophiles. Similarly, when I said global warming proponents support genocide, I was doing this:
If we put this in words, the argument is:
Skeptics believe genocide and pedophilia are bad. Global warming proponents are the opposite of skeptics so they must believe genocide and pedophilia are good.
Change a few words, and you have Lewandowsky’s argument for why we should believe skeptics are conspiracy theorists:
Global warming proponents believe the moon landing was real. Skeptics are the opposite of them so they must believe the moon landing was faked.
With this corresponding image:
All of these results are “statistically significant.” However, all of these results assume skeptics must hold the opposite view of global warming proponents on all things. Assuming that guarantees the results. We can do that to criticize any group we want. Just follow these simple steps:
1) Ask group X if they think the moon landing was real. They’ll say yes.
2) Assume group Y would answer the opposite way.
3) Conclude group Y believes the moon landing was faked.
You can replace “the moon landing was real” with anything you want. I showed this by doing it with genocide and pedophilia. Had Lewandowsky asked about those, he could have concluded skeptics are pedophiles. He could have probably got it published too. After all, he didn’t do this just once. He published a second paper using the same approach (with a slightly less skewed sample).
And he’s not the only one who uses it. Lewandowsky’s recent paper cites the paper, Dead and alive: Beliefs in contradictory conspiracy theories. That paper argues conspiracy theorists are so loony they’ll accept multiple, contradictory conspiracies. It’s namesake comes from the “statistically significant” correlation between believing Princess Diana and/or Osama Bin Laden was killed in a conspiracy and believing he/she is still alive. The image for this claim would be:
The scale in that image is correct. Let it sink in.
There is no justification for this methodology. Even so, three scientific journals have approved of it. Dozens of scientific articles approvingly cite its results. Half a dozen people have been paid papers using it. It has been promoted hundreds of times in the media. It is widely accepted in the global warming debate. It is complete and utter nonsense, but people like the results so they don’t mind.
And if my suspicions are correct, it’s probably been used in many other papers.
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Thanks, Brandon.
Point understood, but pedophilia?
Really?
The BBC supports CACA & harbors pedophiles, so not such a statistical stretch.
Ditto PSU.
Is Lewandowsky so stupid that he actually believes that his papers are meaningful, or is he so smart in believing that there are many who are stupid enough to accept his work? I think it is a fundamental tenant of the anointed academics that their personal brilliance is so great, that it is morally acceptable to lie to the ‘ignorant masses’ at will, as long as it is for a ‘good cause’.
Ironically, the ignorant masses see through this in a heart beat. It is his fellow academics who appear to be persuaded by this garbage.
Wow, it’s amazing that someone has the audacity to a publish such obvious dreck. Even if the methodology was correct (which it is not), a correlation of 0.14 is as close to meaningless as anything I’ve ever seen. Personally, I never believe correlations less than about 0.90. These folks seem deranged.
Bob Tisdale, it was my pleasure! Except for the rewriting part. This is actually the fourth version of the post. I kept trying to find ways to make the mathematical underpinnings of the post interesting for lay readers. That was painful. I’m glad I decided to take a simpler approach.
Dave, yup. I included genocide in the survey so I’d have something bad to “pin on” warmists, but I always knew I’d use pedophilia as the transition into showing why this approach is despicable. I wanted to show this approach lets you “scientifically prove” the people you dislike are the most vile things you can imagine.
That is, if we accept this methodology, anyone can be labeled a pedophile via “science.”
Is it possible Lewandowski is so stupid he actually believes in the validity of his technique?
Dave says:
January 23, 2014 at 2:14 pm
Point understood, but pedophilia?
Really?
Did not get the point? I’ll spell it out: It’s easy to demonise a sector of society with an abuse of statistics.
(That sector of society is sceptics, not paedophiles – thought I’d better spell that out for you.)
It’s quite easy to get some subjects from the dense block at the lower left to the block at the upper right. You have always some people who don’t understand the instruction and mark ‘agree very much’ when they mean ‘disagree very much’. Sometimes they are called outliers. BTW, are the significances based on the assumption of normally distributed variables?
Hitler believed in the theory of gravity! That proves that gravity isn’t real.
I mean, seriously, it seems that warmists will try anything to avoid any discussion of what the actual facts are and what conclusions, if any, can be drawn from those facts. The personality of a believer is not a test for truth. Even if it were true that every single person who denies AGW believed that the moon landing was faked it would have no relevance to whether or not the AWG theory is true.
Mindert Eiting, yup. The fact the data isn’t remotely close to having a normal distribution is actually why one can get “statistically significant” results that are obviously nonsensical. One could use transformations to make the data have a normal distribution then repeat the calculations. The results be wildly different.
Earlier versions of this post discussed that, but they dragged on too much. I couldn’t find a way to keep people from falling asleep while I explained, mathematically, what the problem was, how one could address it and how doing so would change the results.
Socrates is a fish.
All men are mortal.
Therefore Socrates is mortal.
Because Obama.
It also speaks to the “peer review” process. Clearly the reviewers of such papers either do not possess or choose not to exercise the same level of critical thinking as evident in this straightforward but insightful illustration.
“However, all of these results assume skeptics must hold the opposite view of global warming proponents on all things.”
Really? It’s worse than I thought, then.
What is the meaning of “paid papers ” ?
F.A.H., that reminds me of an important point. I discussed the point I made in this post with Michael Wood, author of the last paper I cited in this post. I posted about our exchange here. I challenge anyone to read his responses to me and not be amazed. The part I find most mind-boggling part is when he said:
He openly acknowledged his results came from one end of the scale but argued that’s okay because we don’t know there’s a discontinuity that changes the relationship between the variables. That’s like someone using the tactic I described in this post then saying, “Well, we don’t know skeptics aren’t pedophiles so it’s okay to use this methodology.”
He basically admitted the problem then said it isn’t a problem because I can’t prove his baseless assumption false.
garymount, a mistake when editing. I must have accidentally erased “to write” from that sentence.
jorgekafkazar says:
January 23, 2014 at 3:15 pm
“However, all of these results assume skeptics must hold the opposite view of global warming proponents on all things.”
Really? It’s worse than I thought, then.
———————————————————————————————————–
Which proves that you’re a warmist, cos that’s what they keep saying.
Brandon gave a more theoretical explanation of the dot analysis here.
Although the survey was a bit of fun, to demonstrate that Lewandowsky’s correlations were meaningless, the first three questions on opinions on global warming were:-
The “Moon Landings” paper had referred to the Doran and Zimmerman 2009 opinion survey to show that skeptics were at odds with the consensus of climate scientists. This was the first paper that claimed the magical 97% figure. The two questions asked were:-
Compared with Doran and Zimmerman, Schollenberger
– Asked about belief in the predicted future climate catastrophe.
– Allowed for a much larger range of positions, not just agree or disagree.
In particular from the results of the Schollenberger survey, it is possible to separate the catastrophists from those who believe humans are warming the planet, but see this as a trivial issue.
On a related note
https://www.whatdotheyknow.com/request/jimmy_savile_climate_seminar
😉
Brandon Shollenberger:
Thankyou, that is a clear, insightful and cogent explanation of the flaws in the analytical method used by Lewandowsky.
Please submit a paper explaining those flaws to the journal ‘Psychological Science’ which published the Lew. paper.
Richard
Jim Clarke says: January 23, 2014 at 2:34 pm
I think you should read Steve McIntyre’s post More False Claims from Lewandowsky to answer the question for yourself.
So some warmists aren’t genocidal pedophiles?
richardscourtney, I’ve considered that, but I believe I’d have to pay a fee if Psychological Science was publishing it. I don’t like the idea of spending my money that way. Part of it is simple finances. I’m not getting paid to do this. Paying to publish would mean I’m losing not just time, but money.
But the biggest part is they screwed up, badly. They shouldn’t get to make money off forcing people to do work to correct their screwups. The only way I could see wanting to publish with them is if they gave a waiver of any and all fees. Otherwise, I’d want to publish somewhere else.
Henry Bowman says: @ur momisugly January 23, 2014 at 2:36 pm
Wow, it’s amazing that someone has the audacity to a publish such obvious dreck….
>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>
It is even more amazing that Stephan Lewandowsky not only got his papers using this method peer-reviewed but the mass media then used the papers to paint skeptics as lunatic conspiracy nuts.
Brandon Schollenberger does a beautiful job of satirizing Lewandowsky’s method and results by turning the tables on him and the Warmists.