From Paul Matthew’s Climate Scepticism blog:
In the blogosphere, the hoax paper by Lewandowsky, Oberauer and Gignac, NASA faked the moon landing—therefore, (climate) science is a hoax was exposed soon after it came out – see blog posts by Jo Nova, Steve McIntyre, Brandon Shollenberger, José Duarte and many others. Duarte’s comments are significant as he is a published researcher in the field, referring to the paper as a fraud and calling for its retraction.
The most concise explanation of the error/fraud is given at Kevin Marshall’s ManicBeancounter blog. The paper claims that belief in conspiracy theories predicts climate scepticism, yet of over 1000 in the sample, only 10 believed the moon landing was faked (rendering any statistical results completely meaningless) and of these 10 only 3 were sceptical about climate change. Despite the fact that the main claim of the paper and its title can be demolished in one sentence after simply looking at a table of the data, the journal concerned, Psychological Science, has taken no action.
Yesterday this story appeared in the Sydney Morning Herald. As far as I am aware this is the first time it has appeared in the mainstream media. Kudos to their reporter Paul Sheehan, and also to the Quillette magazine for writing about it in December, and Lee Jussim for giving a talk about it at an academic meeting on social psychology. Here is an excerpt:
Distorted universities need a reality check
Cultural sensitivity is turning into a victory for ideology over objectivity
… universities have become havens for intolerance, orthodoxy and unscholarly distortion.
My favourite example, which encapsulates all of the above, was provided by Dr Lee Jussim, a professor of social psychology at Rutgers University in the US. He dissected a paper published by a respected journal,Psychological Science, in 2013, and found that it was rubbish, and probably published because the journal’s editors shared the ideological bias of the article’s conclusion.
The paper was entitled “NASA faked the moon landing – therefore (climate) science is a hoax“. The abstract of the study states: “Endorsement of a cluster of conspiracy theories (e.g., that the CIA killed Martin Luther King or that NASA faked the moon landing) predicts rejection of climate science … This provides confirmation of previous suggestions that conspiracist ideation contributes to the rejection of science.”
Note the term “conspiracist ideation”. The English language is being brutalised in the social sciences to create a false sense of rigour.
When Jussim checked the data, he found that of the 1145 participants in the study, only 10 thought the moon landing was a hoax. Of those who thought climate science was a hoax, almost all of them, 97.8 per cent, did NOT think the moon landing was a hoax.
The social psychologists who conducted the study had disguised the data and smothered it under a layer of obfuscation. No peer reviewer or journal editor took the time to check the raw data. Instead, the paper was published because it buttressed a pervasive ideological bias in the field…
This may provide some further embarrassment for the journal and its editors, particularly the remark made twice that the paper was published without questioning the data because its results fitted so well with their existing prejudices.
The editor of the journal at the time, Eric Eich, behaved fairly disreputably, as revealed by FOI correspondence, by responding to a question from Stephen McIntyre by getting Lewandowsky to respond and then including that response in his reply to McIntyre and declaring the matter closed (on a separate aspect related to ethics clearance).
The new editor, Stephen Lindsay, has recently written an editorial for the journal, Replication in Psychological Science, a subject that has been in the news recently. He shows some understanding of the source of the statistical error discussed above, since there is a section on interpreting correlations in which he says it’s a good idea to draw scatter plots, but he doesn’t seem to understand the mechanism of the Lewandowsky hoax (find lots of people who think A and B are true, calculate a correlation, then falsely conclude that people who don’t think A also don’t think B, nicely illustrated by this plot of Lewandowsky’s data by Brandon). Lindsay’s editorial article seems to lack real conviction – he just says he “encourages” authors to provide scatter plots. Worse still, there is no requirement to produce the raw data, he merely praises his predecessor Eich for instituting a system where authors who do provide raw data are rewarded with “badges”. If these people were serious about tightening up their field, it would be a condition of acceptance that all raw data was produced before publication and not just made available but attached to the paper in some way.
At the end of his editorial Lindsay writes “If you have other ideas as to how to enhance Psychological Science, please e-mail me about them”. I’ve done that and drawn his attention to the Sydney Morning Herald piece and this post.
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My prediction: He will search for an even more outlandish headline claim next time and this or another sheepish administrator (editor) will shy away from the fight. That is because the editors are also in it for short term gain on their vita. And the same will be true of the next editor. When this kind of relationship is applied to personal misconduct, the administrative response is to hide it rather than confront.
http://www.lawyersweekly.com.au/wig-chamber/news/17800-study-reveals-the-problem-with-overwhelming-evidence
“…he merely praises his predecessor Eich for instituting a system where authors who do provide raw data are rewarded with ‘badges’.”
*
Why do they only get badges? Why not a wizard’s hat?
(Do I need a “/sarc” for that one?)
Don’t be silly A.D. Everard, the hats are only for PROFESSORS…not just anyone. But if you turn in your hypothesis before you do your experiment AND you show your work, you get one of these shiney, glittery stickers to show your parents!
Oooh. Is that like a gold star? I’m excited now, I like those. When I grown up I’m going to be a wizard.
I’ve seen another paper, where a higher % of predominantly female psychology 2nd year graduates think the moon landings were faked, than in Lew’s sceptics / Moon Hoax paper..
this is the same paper, that famously thought conspiracy theorists simultaneously thought Diana faked her death and was also dead,, yet the data had zero people agreeing with that..
strange what does NOT get reported in that paper!!
Dead or Alive – Wood et al (absolutely no realtion)
Pity the students and the parents strolling into this professional swampland.
For those who may not be aware of how Alan Sokal deliberately published a phony paper in a prestigious peer review journal to prove ideological bias, read the Wikipedia entry for the “Sokal Affair”.
Erm, Social Text was prestigious only in the opinion of fellow sufferers from academic proctocraniosis. It was a hodge-podge of post-Normal, Chomskyesque, deconstructionist drivel. Sokal created a parody paper so chock full of parallel gibberish that it matched the editors’ preconceptions to a micron. They couldn’t NOT publish it, even though the very first paragraph gave away the joke, had they examined its content with the least smidgen of critically.
During the wait between acceptance and publication, Sokal was petrified that someone associated with Social Text would pick up the proofs, read them, and instantly blow the whistle, thus undoing all his “work,” a master stroke for rationality.
If the story will embarrass the MSM one way or another, they will not run it.
And in related news…
http://joannenova.com.au/2016/01/who-says-scientists-dont-do-it-to-get-rich-queensland-climate-expert-in-court-over-500k-in-false-expenses/
I understand that Lewandowsky is currently Chair in Cognitive Psychology at Bristol University UK.
http://www.bris.ac.uk/expsych/people/stephan-lewandowsky/
I shall be emailing this intelligence (sometime in the academic year) to him and a comprehensive circulation at Bristol uni and maybe a few other places such as WA uni.
Chair in Cognitive Psychology…snort. He’s also a Brick in Human Psychology, a Shoe in Reality Theory, and a Partridge in A Pear Tree. 🙂
Lew and his cohorts just founded a new society. It’s called the Society for the Creative Use of Morality (SCUM).
Social psychology is virtually all junk science.
Was it Feynman who said, “Any science preceded by an adjective isn’t Science?”
Just to clarify, the SMH is a very old, left of centre paper and is a stable mate of the Melbourne AGE newspaper. Paul Sheehan is a libertarian/ conservative writer and is a friend of Alan Jones and Andrew Bolt. He is known for his research before he writes and heaven help you if he goes after you.
Can’t help but feel this has some relevance to the climate ‘debate’.
The people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. That is easy. All you have to do is tell them they are being attacked and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger. It works the same way in any country. -Hermann Göring, Nazi military leader (12 Jan 1893-1946)
The full title of the Moon Hoax paper is
A simple pivot table of the responses to the NASA Faked the Moon Landings (CYMoon) and Climate Science is a Hoax (CYClimChange) statements, where a score of 4 is for strong agreement.
http://manicbeancounter.files.wordpress.com/2013/11/111413_0016_lewandowsky1.png?w=600
There are just two respondents out of 1145 who agree with both.
These were responses 860 and 889. Both respondents strongly rejected all four climate science statements. Further 860 strongly supported 5 of the 6 Free Market statements and all 16 conspiracy theories, whilst 889 strongly all 6 Free Market statements and 15 of the 16 conspiracy theories. When someone places uncontrolled opinion surveys on strident blogs on ethically controversial issues you are going to get scam responses. Any proper academic would delete such scam responses. But that would mean no result and no paper.
Like with much of so-called climate science, the more you dig the worse it gets.
What is hilarious is that after he got rebutted, painfully, he responded with a craptastic paper on Agnotology, which ironically is “the study of culturally induced ignorance or doubt, particularly the publication of inaccurate or misleading scientific data”. He and Cook and Nuttybelly and the gang are the POSTER CHILDREN for “culturally induced ignorance” as evidenced in their continued “publication of inaccurate or misleading scientific data”!!!
We couldn’t make up stuff this good if we TRIED to. It’s like watching the Stooges Go To The Olympics.
What seems to have gone unremarked is that Lew floated a meme of singularly magnificent trollery.
His troll job immediately commandeered the narrative and quite neutralized the ‘opposition’ who found it irresistible to devote immeasurable time and thought in an effort to refute it.
ROI, for a troll, is measured by the ratio of his effort vs the magnitude of outrage in response.
By this measure, Lew pwn3d like a big dog.
Lew’s troll was true genius – look how it’s still doing ‘mindworm’.
Lew has every claim to triumph. You just have to know Troll Rulez.
It was a gambit. It succeeded fabulously. If there were a Nobel for Trolling, Lew would win, hands down.
It had no other purpose or meaning.
I guess it’s not a complete job if I don’t also tell you what is the only winning argument, so I will.
When you understand that this whole game is to tax your breath and redistribute your wealth, you may see the true objective and defend it.
The magic word is a 4 letter word. It is a final argument that can not be refuted.
You have to know what it means and you have to mean it.
Look your marxist enemy in the eye and say it: “MINE!”
There can be no ‘right’ to violate your rights. Nobody has any right to what’s yours, period.
You’ve been debating the degree of submission. You do have the final word if you mean it.
gnomish-
You seem to have assumed that I didn’t know any of the things you said. I’m aware. But there isnt enough evidence to logically conclude that Lew actually is TRYING to be a troll, or wants to be. He’s behaving like one. But it’s also entirely possible that he is completely oblivious to his own irrational and illogical behavior. It’s also entirely possible that he knows he’s being irrational and he doesn’t CARE because he thinks his ends justify his means. Saving the world is a NOBLE and lofty goal for anyone isn’t it?
What I’m saying is that Lew might just be a small and ignorant COG in the machine of global socialism without even knowing he’s a cog. Cog’s can be either ignorant or complicit. You can make all the assumptions and presumptions about him that you want to, but it makes your arguments no more effective than his are because your conclusions are just as hard to back up as his are.
Dear Aphan,
You sound like a lawyer trying to talk a jury down from a ‘first degree’ conviction.
Why do you present this great cornucopia of unsubstantiated ‘possibilities’?
Squirrels?
“You sound like a lawyer trying to talk a jury down from a ‘first degree’ conviction. Why do you present this great cornucopia of unsubstantiated ‘possibilities’? Squirrels?”
Why? Maybe because the “law” is innocent until proven guilty? You’re hyperventilating accusations are equally unsubstantiated at this point. Just like “Lew’s” are. Rodent.
So you are defending Lew from my acknowledgement of his epic trollery?
Why?
I’m interested in this side-effect because it’s new to me. Thanks for any reply.
“So you are defending Lew from my acknowledgement of his epic trollery? Why? I’m interested in this side-effect because it’s new to me. Thanks for any reply.”
NO-I’m the LAST person that would ever want to defend Lew from anything he rightly deserves. I happen to LOATHE the man. But my feelings about him are irrelevant and cannot be used as “evidence” against him. I am defending LOGIC and REASON and demanding that you use them here or be labeled just as much of a fool as you declare him to be. I am NOT saying your conclusions are wrong, I am saying your premises are weak and sad. You can’t prove he intended to create a mindworm. Or even knows the Troll Rulez.
I’m sorry if the rules of logic are new to you, but you have offered nothing but your opinions and declarations and those do not earn my respect any more than Lew’s opinions and declarations did or do. Calling names and building strawmen just to defeat them are two well know troll behaviors. You might want to think about YOUR behavior before you go trying to paint someone else the same color.
” Calling names and building strawmen just to defeat them are two well know troll behaviors.”
Dear Aphan,
I’m sure you’re right about that because you are doing it yourself with that very remark.
“I’m sorry if the rules of logic are new to you”
They are not. Nor are cheap insults such as this one.
If you don’t believe our Lew wrote his paper deliberately and with malice aforethought, do you then maintain that he produced it innocently and accidentally? That is self evidently absurd. I declare that he is no fool.
Why do you mention your lack of respect for me? Is it in any way pertinent or do you resort to ‘argument from intimidation’, the usual liberal default fallacy, because your disapproval should influence my thinking? What would Mr. Spock say?
Thanks for the reply. I won’t ask for more.
.
Aphan- “Calling names and building strawmen just to defeat them are two well know troll behaviors.”
gnomish- “I’m sure you’re right about that because you are doing it yourself with that very remark.”
Pointing out facts isn’t building a strawmen, nor did I call you any names. Facts are facts. You shouldn’t take them personally unless the personally apply.
Aphan-“I’m sorry if the rules of logic are new to you”
gnomish- “They are not.” So you DO know the rules of logic. Do you know them well? Are you intentionally not using them for some reason ?
gnomish- “Nor are cheap insults such as this one.” Please indicate, by quoting me exactly, what I said that you think fits the definition of a cheap insult.
gnomish “If you don’t believe our Lew wrote his paper deliberately and with malice aforethought, do you then maintain that he produced it innocently and accidentally? That is self evidently absurd. I declare that he is no fool.”
You seem to have ignored or missed the other possibilities I introduced earlier to refute your insistence on using the black-white, false dichotomy that there are only two things that could motivate him. You did it again when you ask the question as if it COULD ONLY BE “malice aforethought” OR “innocently and accidentally.” It’s a flawed argument. What is absurd is pretending that what you THINK his motives were constitutes some kind of proof of those motives. Which is also flawed logically.
Gnomish-“Why do you mention your lack of respect for me? Is it in any way pertinent or do you resort to ‘argument from intimidation’, the usual liberal default fallacy, because your disapproval should influence my thinking? What would Mr. Spock say?”
Me- I said, “your opinions and declarations and those do not earn my respect”. I said nothing about respecting you or your thinking at all. Whether your opinions and declarations are respectable is the only thing pertinent here, and the way you present them currently is not respectable because they are not rational. Like bringing up Mr Spock is nothing more than reductio ad absurdum.”
gnomish-“Thanks for the reply. I won’t ask for more.”
Me-You’re welcome. But you don’t have to ask for more. It’s a comment section on a blog. You’ll get replies from other commenters whether you want them or not.
.
.
“An Anatomy of the Motivated Rejection of Science”
Skeptics are not rejecting “science” when it comes to the theory of human-caused global warming/climate change, they are rejecting the climate change theory because it’s predictions are proving to be wrong.
TA
I took three semesters of graduate statistics as part of my psychology training, something I have since learned is highly unusual. In one class we were asked to critique a paper from any mainstream psych journal, of which the library had many, and look for obvious errors. It was like shooting fish in a barrel. Sorry, that’s not accurate, it was like closing your eyes, reaching into the barrel and attempting to close your hand without grabbing a paper that would have earned an F- in any serious statistics class.
The field of psychology has always had “physics envy” due to psych theories being notoriously hard to verify or confirm. There is a very heavy reliance on statistics, and while there actually is some very good research out there, the field has way more than its fair share of utter garbage as well, attempting and usually failing to masquerade as hard science.
If this guy wants to improve his journal, tell him to hire a Steve McIntyre protege to screen all his papers. He’d rocket to the top of the pack in a year or less.
He’d more likely go out of business since there wouldn’t be any papers left to publish.
Notanist-
“It was like shooting fish in a barrel. Sorry, that’s not accurate, it was like closing your eyes, reaching into the barrel and attempting to close your hand without grabbing a paper that would have earned an F- in any serious statistics class. ”
I nominate that for the 2016 WUWT hilarious quote of the year so far!!!! I’m still wiping laugh tears off my cheeks!!!
“Physics envy” did it for me.
If they pulled the paper, why is it still available online?
http://pss.sagepub.com/content/early/2013/03/25/0956797612457686.abstract
(Notable that it contains a lot more analysis than the “catchy” title implies…)
More to the story, too…
http://arstechnica.com/science/2014/03/journal-pulls-paper-due-to-legal-context-created-by-climate-contrarians/
Nice try, Barry… mounting a defense of the indefensible.
Neither the moon landings nor the global warming myth are hoaxes. A hoax has to be a deliberately fabricated lie, and the global warming myth is definitely not that. Instead it is a belief system akin to a religion. It’s proponents truly believe that they have discovered the secret of life, and no amount of contrary evidence will sway them from that belief. It has all the hallmarks of a religion. The climate has inexplicably changed and therefore we must be to blame for commiting the sin of profligate consumerism, the equivalent to avarice in the ten commandments. The remedy is for us to repent by sacrificing our luxuries and returning to a life of sack cloth and ashes. In this way we can appease the great God Gaia, and she will return our world to the normal that existed for a few short years in grandad’s day.
Doubtless true for the flock, but the shepherds know full well it is just a tool to excuse otherwise unconscionable (let’s be kind and say) tinkering with our lives.
“Of those who thought climate science was a hoax, almost all of them, 97.8 per cent, did NOT think the moon landing was a hoax.”
They tell us that if 97% of climate scientists agree on something, we should take it as fact, and the 3% who disagree are irrelevant. But if 97.8% of skeptics agree that the moon landing was not a hoax, Lewandowsky’s paper insists that they are irrelevant, and the 2.2% who think it was a hoax are representative of all skeptics. Why is 97% so definitive for one group but not for the other?
For leftists, the validity of an argument is determined by whether it supports your position, not by whether it is factually accurate.
This is exactly why they are censoring Twitter and Facebook. The Party of Diversity is suffering a lack of diversity of thought and opinion.
http://www.therebel.media/verifymilo
http://www.therebel.media/muslim_rapes_police_cover_up_germany_facebook_google_and_twitter_to_censor
Badges? We don’t need no stink’n badges.
We don’t need no badges…
Well in kindergarten I used to get stars, the gold stars of course were the most sought after. At the time I thought it was a good idea being only about 5 years old. Apparently social science publications feel itis appropriate to their publishing scientists like 5 year olds.
Which makes understandable how Lewandowsky remains employed in an academic setting.
This development is very welcome and unexpected. It’s only when conducted in the darkness that this stuff poses a threat to society. Although I’m not overly hopeful, perhaps the ‘nouveau ordre du monde’ went too far with the clime syndicate (h/t to Mark Steyn for the term) that they’ve outed themselves. Encouragement, reward, adulation, free rein (even free reign until late-coming criticism from a minority) created the hubris that embolden them out into the light. I’ve had a few rants over the years on the subject of corrupted social science. Social psychology was mission oriented corruption whereas sociology, anthropology and the like (there seems to be more sciences these days that I haven’t kept up on) got that way by the unremitting efforts in ideological incursion and hi jacking of leadership in academe, ‘learned’ journals, the UN departments, and the rest of the infrastructure for dissemination of their political message promoting left wing fundamentals as science.
These corrupted ‘sciences’ are not simply the useful idiots that largely practice it, but were essentially centrally planned rallying nodes in the way Jussim describes. As a student in science and engineering in the 50s it was obvious to an outsider like me from observing who ran all the campus ‘student government’, activism, newspaper, etc. Engineers and real scientists didn’t have time or the inclination for all this kumbayah-look-what-the-right-wing-exploiters-have-done-to-the-unprivileged. Indeed, the self-satisfied consumers of this thin intellectual gruel seemed to have little other to do than this and my perception was that they were themselves drawn from the ‘privileged’ category.
In those days, mercifully, fewer than 5% of the (much smaller) population went to college, so that once the ‘arts’ crowd had graduated I never heard from or about them again. Today, apparently over 70% of high school graduates in the US go to college! This means that we ‘hear’ from them again and again and they are now a force to be reckoned with. This also fits with the patience of the left in crafting their long term plans.
I think the very worst part of the Lewpaper is that among those tiny few that were convinced that the moon landing was a hoax, it’s possible, if not likely that most or ALL of them could have been biased alarmists answering the poll in order to make “deniers” look bad. There is NO discussion of this in the analysis, and only a glancing and superficial discussion of faked answers. Only a few faked answers were deleted, and all those based on monolithic responses presumed to be sardonic, or a few based on IP technicalities. Given the politicization of the issue of CAGW, fake answers MUST be considered as highly likely and highly important. Furthermore, Lew and his pals never sampled any real climate realism sites. Almost all their answers came from activist, alarmist blogs, with many being John Cook SRS insiders, whom many could have been aware of how the poll data were to be used. Lew should never do his own polling, again. And this paper should be retracted.
1) The Moon landing is a hoax. Some guy proved so on YouTube. There are many light sources on the fake Moon photos.
2) Men have more sexual partners than women (about twice as much). I heard that on TV.
Which one is worse?
(Of course, a normal 10 years old should be able to destroy any of these.)
While Jussim’s (et al) work (cited by SMH’s Sheehan) focused on “morally motivated bias” the Haidt book (cited by SMH’s Sheehan) focused on political (and religious) bias. I think Jussim (et al) focus on the basis of moral bias is the correct fundamental framework to understand the problematic AGW alarm bias in climate focused science.
The concern is how the science focused on climate became dominated by a subjective school of the philosophy of science, displacing the objective school of the philosophy of science. Politics is not the means by which the subjective school of the philosophy of science dominates the science focused on climate. The subjective school found domination because its flawed metaphysics and epistemology based on post-modern philosophy dominates academia beginning in the second half of the 20th century.
John
Who will win the Ward Churchill Doofus Award in the Social Science category?
“Who will win the Ward Churchill Doofus Award in the Social Science category?”
Can’t they all just share one like the IPCC and Al Gore shared their award? 😛