Social psychologist Jose Duarte pulls no punches in describing Lewandowsky’s failures of science in the “Moon Hoax” paper and the later retracted “Fury” paper. And then goes on to describe failure in Cook’s 97% consensus paper. Excerpts follow.
in their abstract they say:
“Endorsement of free markets also predicted the rejection of other established scientific findings, such as the facts that HIV causes AIDS and that smoking causes lung cancer.”
This is all false, and the paper should be retracted. It should’ve been retracted by the authors already.
…
Surprisingly, climate skeptics got mad about this paper, perhaps because > 97.8% of those who think climate science is a hoax reject the moon hoax idea in Lewandowsky’s own data, placing them squarely in the mainstream of humanity. So, Lewandowsky, Cook, Oberauer, and Marriott (2013) wrote a follow-up hit piece that was all about their critics. They wrote a paper that was about the critics of the first paper, the one we’ve just debunked. It wasn’t enough to lie about people and smear them as believing things they definitely do not believe. He needed to take another swipe. The journal, Frontiers in Psychology, wisely ended up retracting that paper, which is exactly what should happen to this fraud here.
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This was an awful thing to do. It was damaging to innocent participants. It is unethical to do this to your participants. It is wildly unethical to invite people to participate in a study, and then do this to them. They are helping us. They are volunteering to participate in scientific research. They’ve take time out of their lives to help us out. And in return, we slander them? We tell the world that they believe things that they do not believe? What Lewandowsky and colleagues did here was despicable and fraudulent. Why would anyone participate in a social psychology study if this is what we do to them? Why would anyone participate in research if our goal is to marginalize them in public life, to lie about them, to say that they think the moon landing was a hoax, to say they don’t think HIV causes AIDS, to say they don’t believe smoking causes lung cancer – when none of those things are true. Do we hate our participants?
Read the whole thing here: http://www.joseduarte.com/blog/more-fraud (h/t Bishop Hill)
In another article, Duarte goes on to describe the failures of Cook and his “independent raters” in Cook’s 97% paper.
In social science, it’s common to use trained human raters to subjectively rate or score some variable — it can be children’s behavior on a playground, interviews of all kinds, and often written material, like participants’ accounts of a past emotional experience. And we have a number of analytical and statistical tools that go with such rating studies. But we would never use human raters who have an obvious bias with respect to the subject of their ratings, who desire a specific outcome for the study, and who would be able to deliver that outcome via their ratings. That’s completely nuts. It’s so egregious that I don’t think it even occurs to us as something to look out for. It never happens. At least I’ve never heard of it happening. There would be no point in running such a study, since it would be dismissed out of hand and lead to serious questions about your ethics.
But it’s happening in climate science. Sort of. These junk studies are being published in climate science journals, which are probably not well-equipped to evaluate what are ultimately social science studies (in method). And I assume the journals weren’t aware that these studies used political activists as raters.
Examples of the unbelievable bias and transparent motives of the raters’ in Cook, et al (2013) below. These are excerpts from an online forum where the raters collaborated with each other in their ratings: –
See more at: http://www.joseduarte.com/#sthash.gfz7am3K.dpuf
Thank you Jose Duarte.
It is heartening to see somebody outside of climate science finally call these spades a spade. Now if we can just instill some sense of moral responsibility to people in climate science who really should be speaking out about using science as a smear tactic, we’ll be gettin somewhere.
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Brilliant. At long last. Thank you José Duarte.
“What Lewandowsky and colleagues did here was despicable and fraudulent.”
Nicely said!
From another article on that site entitled “Climate Science is Biased, but Right:
Beware centralized authorities and lofty scientific organizations. Climate science is going through a pompous phase right now, where they think that if they issue a report under the banner of the AAAS or the Royal Society or the IPCC, laypeople should just kneel before them. That’s unscientific, un-American, and terrible epistemology. Authority and officialdom are not good heuristics for scientific truth, and clearly, organizations like the AAAS can no longer be trusted. I don’t think climate scientists fully appreciate the fact that lots of people simply do not trust them — and behavior like the AAAS’ scam report will only further erode the public trust, and deservedly so. They need to have much higher standards, make it trivially easy to obtain their data, and always, always, always tell the truth. AAAS grossly misled the public about the quality of the evidence for their 97% consensus figure, and I can’t tell you how much that crushed me — they’re a left-wing political advocacy organization at this point, not a scientific body. A scientific body would use robust scientific methods like meta-analysis, and carefully control for the political biases of its membership – cherry-picking junk studies is the well-worn tactic of mediocre political advocacy think-tanks.
I’m not sure what weight his opinions carry but he certainly believes in telling it how it is.
Reblogged this on My Daily Musing and commented:
Wow, Jose Duarte puts the shucking and jiving of Lewandowsky and Cook in its place.
If the trash and junk papers that cluster around the climate opbsession were to be withdrawn there would likely be a noticeable and significant decrease in climate papers.
Kudos to Jose Duarte for having the guts to call this particular bit of trash for what it is.
Where are those serious climate scientists who distance themselves from such unscientific studies which abuse of science in every way?
Jose Duarte is clearly beholden to the Koch brothers.
/sarc
Possibly too little too late.
Climatology is drowning in Lew Paper and the byproducts associated with it.
Social Science is about to get lumped in with “Climate Science”.
As dangerous pseudo sciencey rubbish that is dangerous to personal liberty and destructive to civil society.
Just another front, a cover for the statist do-gooder power hungry people haters.
With all due respect to Jose Duarte, I do not have respect for the “science” of psychology in the first place. While I do admire him for the integrity that he is trying to instill into the field, my own anecdotal experiences with the field shows that Lewandowsky is the rule, not the exception.
Berne, They fear the loss of their grants and life style! Here is a question to ask yourself, if you were Mexican and could only feed your children by working in America, would you cross the border? The same goes for for climate “scientists”, the MSM and the publishers and editors of magazines, I believe it is called self interest. The internet is changing the world!
“The person who posted this data, Brandon Shollenberger, is a complete unknown. It’s amazing that if it weren’t for him, we wouldn’t know how rigged the study truly was.”
Boom!
Looks like Duarte didn’t get the memo. Fellow of Science communication John Cook should straighten him up.
philjourdan says: “With all due respect to Jose Duarte, I do not have respect for the “science” of psychology in the first place. While I do admire him for the integrity that he is trying to instill into the field, my own anecdotal experiences with the field shows that Lewandowsky is the rule, not the exception.”
Bad science is bad science, and parading propaganda as science is parading propaganda as science.
It is ignorant to dismiss the science of psychology as not-a-science.
Psychology explores the natural world of human experience and behavior, strives to understand its rules or patterns, and take the findings and put them to some use.
Nearly all of us have been in college and learned of this scientifically verified concept called “bystander apathy.” If you are alone, and see something bad happening, or developing, then you are much more likely to act then if you believe others are also observing.
Bystander Apathy is a component of our psychology, something in the natural world.
Knowing this, we can be trained to recognize our likely disposition to observe but not act, and we can train ourselves to behave responsibly despite this phenomenon of nature.
Any “see something-say something” campaign is an intentional effort to overcome this. If you develop one, or more, see-something-say something” interventions, then test whether it has any notable effect on getting people to behave contrary to the bystander apathy effect, then not only are you dealing with a scientifically-described natural phenomenon, but you are engaged in a scientific assessment of scientifically-designed intervention.
Your life may one day be saved by someone trained to respond in a helpful way despite the natural inclination to do nothing.
Have the fake physics studies driven anyone to write off physics as a worthy realm of scientific exploration?
I could go on an on with plenty more obvious examples, but claiming “psychology” is not a science is just ignorant.
@TheLastDemocrat – Reread my post. I did not say I “dismissed” it as a science. Whether I do or do not is irrelevant to what I did say. And that is I have no RESPECT for the field or those who practice it.
As I also stated, in my experience, Lewadowsky is the rule, not the exception.
As any real scientist should be, Duarte is flabbergasted to witness the scurrilous stratagems deployed by the relentlessly dishonest Lewandowski, Cook et al.. Those of us who have for years been the targets of eco-alarmist slander cannot muster the same surprise, but our years of familiarity can help to answer the questions Mr. Duarte has about the etiology of this perversion.
My comment on a Daily Caller article about the behavior of Naomi Oreskes:
Duarte is a graduate student. The commentary, while pretty accurate and powerful, is in a blog post. Let’s see if he can get an article published in a reputable journal before ringing the bells.
@LeeHarvey, August 6, 2014 at 8:44. “Jose Duarte is clearly beholden to the Koch brothers.” /sarc
Wait for it, that accusation stands a very plausible chance of popping up, because it is exactly the problem besetting pro-AGW pop-sociologists like Lewandowsky and others: to bolster their assertion that we must analyze why skeptics and the public go against ‘consensus’ opinion, they rely on a single-source talking point about skeptics being ‘paid industry shills’. I covered that right here in a WUWT guest post, and in a post at my own blog:
“The OTHER problem with the Lewandowsky paper and similar ‘skeptic’ motivation analysis: Core premise off the rails about fossil fuel industry corruption accusation” http://ow.ly/nXXny
“Robert ‘dark money’ Brulle & Other ‘Skeptic-Trashing Environmental Sociologists’” http://gelbspanfiles.com/?p=1237
That last part about “moral responsibility to people in climate science” has been a great head scratch-er for me. I suppose they placed moral responsibility of climate goals so high that they overlooked the moral responsibility of the science process, standards, and responsible public policy input. The ends apparently justify the means for a wide swath of the research field. Such total avoidance of responsibility works for awhile and may have little perceived effect incrementally, but cumulative negative impact can be a disaster. I was recently reminded of this when reading the commemoration of WW 1 in the news recently. I did not previously recognize that the wholesale loss of a generation in Germany during the first great war played a part in the moral vacuum giving rise to the unchecked opportunities of radicals that followed in the 30s.
Lewandowsky and Cook are just two more in a long line of charlatans bleating out the party line, albeit with unusual attitude and arrogance.
TheLastDemocrat says:
August 6, 2014 at 9:11 am
The so called science of “psychology” is akin to blind men groping about in a dark room and asserting that they are divining the true nature of God. Right now they are no more effective than someone looking for the end of a rainbow. Calling a spade a spade is not ignorance. Someone defending something that is based almost entirely on opinions shouldn’t throw stones.
Bad science and having to retract papers can be hazardous to your health. Yoshiki Sasai, who was embroiled in a stem-cell scandal, committed suicide on August 5, 2014.
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2716540/Japanese-scientist-stem-cell-research-retracted-proved-false-commits-suicide.html
“we would never use human raters who have an obvious bias with respect to the subject of their ratings, who desire a specific outcome for the study, and who would be able to deliver that outcome via their ratings.”
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“But it’s happening in climate science.”
“Now if we can just instill some sense of moral responsibility to people in climate science”
You can’t instill something in someone when they never had a shred of it to begin with.
Alec Rawls-
Perfect way of stating a long held belief of my own! May I quote you sometimes with full attribution in the future?
[Response from Alec: Of course.]
bernie1815 says:
“Duarte is a graduate student. The commentary, while pretty accurate and powerful, is in a blog post. Let’s see if he can get an article published in a reputable journal before ringing the bells.”
What the hell does his graduate student status and the blog post location have to do with anything? Are his facts correct or are they not?
Would publishing in a ‘reputable journal’ somehow change the veracity of Duarte’s account? Or would publishing incorrect information in a reputable journal make it true?
What journal would be willing to do a (deserved) evisceration of Lewandowski’s garbage? Professional courtesy means that they stick together.
Just look at the failure of honest scientists (there must be some) to deal with Mann, Gleick, Cook, Lewandowski, Gore, etc., etc.
It was only a matter of time until someone within the social sciences community spoke against the farcical works of Lewandowsky. Now that Oreskes has inextricably linked her name to Lewandowsky, the scions of Harvard are surely plotting their next move…