Bishop Hill Lewandowsky teeters on the brink
Sep 3, 2012 Climate: Sceptics In the comments to the earlier Lewandowsky thread, readers note the following comment by Skeptical Science writer, Tom Curtis:
Given the low number of "skeptical" respondents overall; these two scammed responses significantly affect the results regarding conspiracy theory ideation. Indeed, given the dubious interpretation of weakly agreed responses (see previous post), this paper has no data worth interpreting with regard to conspiracy theory ideation. It is my strong opinion that the paper should be have its publication delayed while undergoing a substantial rewrite. The rewrite should indicate explicitly why the responses regarding conspiracy theory ideation are in fact worthless, and concentrate solely on the result regarding free market beliefs (which has a strong enough a response to be salvageable). If this is not possible, it should simply be withdrawn.
It surely cannot be long before this happens.
Reader Comments (69)
Big oil, big coal, well organized, week funded, conspiracy theorists. Anyone notice the irony in that?
Lew, as quoted by Geoff:
•“Myth vs. fact” approach can backfire
–people remember the myth more after being told that it is a myth
–“it’s a myth that global warming stopped”
–people remember “global warming stopped”
Ha! That sounds eerily like what John Cook once said to his team:
If this is the case, then what on Earth the SkS is doing by promoting the Top Ten Global Warming Myths? To debunk them?
Cook's comment was made in a formerly secret SkS thread that was entitled "Bishop Hill impugns SkS reliability". No kidding. See, the second page of Opengate - Josh158 (linked above), Mar 27, 2012 at 4:18 PM for the wider context, in which Cook also discusses how he converted Darth Vader to the cause and made him richer as a result.
I have made the following comment (underneath Lewandowsky's response'
Everyone please be VERY polite, if you choose to comment there.
http://www.shapingtomorrowsworld.org/ccc1.html#comments
Barry Woods at 03:57 AM on 4 September, 2012
I notice that no link to the paper is made here, nor the rather contentious title is not spoken..
"NASA faked the moon landing|
Therefore (Climate) Science is a Hoax: An Anatomy of the Motivated Rejection of Science"
http://websites.psychology.uwa.edu.au/labs/cogscience/documents/LskyetalPsychScienceinPressClimateConspiracy.pdf
Given that this was the reason a number of people were concerned, perhaps just a tiny oversight, in attempts to clarify the concerns made by 'sceptics' to the readers here?
As Steve Mcintyre - Climate Audit and Condon (The Air Vent are both named in the paper, I do think it appropriate, that the authors confirm thatthese 2 blogs were NOT approached - They both state that they were not.
Secondly, Tom Curtis at the 'consensus blog' - Skeptical Science' one of the so called 'pro-science' blogs surveyed' had this to say about the paper and it's data. Perhaps a response from the authors is due?
Tom Curtis:
"Given the low number of "skeptical" respondents overall; these two scammed responses significantly affect the results regarding conspiracy theory ideation.
Indeed, given the dubious interpretation of weakly agreed responses (see previous post), this paper has no data worth interpreting with regard to conspiracy theory ideation. It is my strong opinion that the paper should be have its publication delayed while undergoing a substantial rewrite.
The rewrite should indicate explicitly why the responses regarding conspiracy theory ideation are in fact worthless, and concentrate solely on the result regarding free market beliefs (which has a strong enough a response to be salvageable). If this is not possible, it should simply be withdrawn."
http://www.skepticalscience.com/AGU-Fall-Meeting-sessions-social-media-misinformation-uncertainty.html#84398
Lew:
"I am therefore awaiting guidance on this issue."
Read, "I am in a pile of shinola. I need help to get myself out of it."
Lew:
I'd like to know whether the ethics committee indeed approved the online survey that provided Lewandowsky with the data he needed for the hack job, or whether rejecting such absurd researches as science fall within the purview of another committee altogether.
I read Lewandowsky's comments.
He is stalling for time and hoping that some deus ex machina will come and dig him out of the brown and very smelly stuff. And claiming that his attendance at 'a conference' means he cannot attend to this matter right now
This is unlikely to be a winning strategy since the pressure on him will only mount in the interim. He should recall that the Climategate team went AWOL immediately after the Day of Liberation. And doing so meant the personal and professional consequences were much, much worse. He emulates them at his peril.
Here's my comment - just in case history is rewritten once again
Lewnowsky says:
"In a somewhat ironic twist, given that the paper addressed conspiracist ideation, much attention has focused on the source of participants..."
Surely with a survey based paper it is pretty standard to direct ones attention to the source of participants? Which definition of irony am I missing here?
Lewandowsky's article is interesting in what it leaves out.
He picks up on the minor point about the survey only being posted on "pro-science" websites, but makes no reference to the consequence of such a move. At most, only 175 of the responses could be construed as rejecting the science. Nor does he mention that on the "NASA faked moon landing" survey, 93% of respondents gave the lowest score.
It really doesn’t matter now that the survey is history, and no-one is likely to repeat it any time soon, but I actually believe several of those conspiracy theories, and I’d probably believe others if I could be bothered to look into them. I’m like that. Don’t get me going on the identity of Jack the Ripper or the Chinese discovery of Australia.
My answers on the free market would have meant that manicbeancounter couldn’t dismiss me as a fraud or an outlier, and I might have tipped the balance in Stephan’s favour. Funny that.
Leopard, I think conspiracist ideation is by now being redefined to mean due diligence. Humpty Dumpty would be proud.
Geoff: the point about not bothering to look into them is key. I carefully said in the previous thread that I did not believe in six of them - but that should be read in the light of my stated conviction long ago (on a wiki called Why Clublet) that any of us must feel free to say "don't know/don't care" to a whole lot of the myriads of conspiracy or other theories that cross our path. This is essential, I argued, both to sanity and to fruitfulness - because it's impossible to master any but a few of such complex matters.
Plus some things seem to matter much more than others. If NASA faked the moon landings, big deal. If Wernher von Braun and many of the other 765 scientists brought to the US via Project Paperclip should have been prosecuted as war criminals for their gruesome parts in the Holocaust - or at the very least not feted as all-American heroes for many years - much bigger deal. Likewise, if CAGW policies lead to thousands or even millions of unnecessary deaths of the poorest, starting with biofuels subsidies, then, conspiracy-driven or not (and I rule nothing out), it's a much more important field for me than otherwise.
Thanks again for your contribution, as Foxgeoff, our loony left, ranting right slice of the BH community. I feel right at home with very British free thinkers such as these :)
It ain't slander. It's written therefore it's libel.
Sep 3, 2012 at 6:51 PM | omnologos
Just to clarify 'written' isn't the determinant of libel - it's publication/broadcast. If I pass a written note to someone in the pub defaming you that is slander [transitory]. If I defame you on the radio that's broadcast so libellous.
Richard Drake
There’s a lot of nonsense spoken about conspiracy theories. It’s often used as a synonym for “wild unsupported theory” simply because the conspiracy part carries the implication that the believer is suffering from persecution mania. For all I know, Martin Luther King may have been shot by a lone gunman working for the FBI. Is it a conspiracy if he didn’t tell anyone about it? The unproven accusation that the Nazis started the Reichstag fire is a conspiracy theory that is widely accepted. So is the WMD dodgy dossier story. It takes no more people to concoct and sell the dodgy dossier than it does to knock off a civil servant and disguise his death as suicide. Why is believing one the sign of an enquiring mind, and believing the other a paranoid fantasy? Isn’t the difference one of decency, rather than of the quality of the evidence?
The postwar history of Italy is a history of conspiracies. Either X was working for the Mafia, or there’s a conspiracy to accuse X of working for the Mafia. An enquiring sceptical mind of the quality of Chomsky’s refuses to countenance the possibility of a conspiracy to commit the 9-11 massacre, simply because it would have involved too many people. Yet he has spent his life protesting against the murder of millions of South East Asians by the US government, a conspiracy which likewise involved thousands of people, and remains unknown to the great majority of Americans to this day.
There’s a glaring fault in Lewandowsky’s conspiracy questions that no-one has mentioned. They’re far too specific to capture the nature of belief in conspiracy. “Princess Diana was murdered by the Royal Family” - “strongly disagree, it was MI5 wot done it”; “A powerful and secretive group known as the New World Order are planning to eventually rule the world..”, “Wrong! That’s just a cover story for the Elders of Zion” .. and so on.
In response to Prof. Lewandowsky's posting of today I have left the following comment.
@geoffchambers
Please keep on posting at SkS. You are really beginning to piss off the moderators there, but I think they recognise that it would be a spectacular own goal to ban you outright. Especially in full public view of this forum. Keep it up!
Geoff:
Interesting example, because by no means all historians are convinced the Nazis started it, even though everyone accepts that Hitler used it to blame the communists and drag Germany into a state of emergency that laid the foundation for the rest of totalitarian rule. As you say, a conspiracy theory and one that gives the lie to two things:
1. They're all "wild unsupported theories"
2. It will always be possible to come to a definitive conclusion via evidence. That looks pretty unlikely now.
The idea that Roberto Calvi or David Kelly were murdered are for me modern equivalents. It's not wild to think so but we certainly don't have all the evidence.
Chomsky's a difficult one. I was reminded of his 'contribution' on the Kymer Rouge genocide when Steve McIntyre mentioned his visit to ths country in the late 60s recently. On googling I discovered Bruce Sharp and pieces like [[Averaging Wrong Answers: Noam Chomsky and the Cambodia Controversy|http://www.mekong.net/cambodia/chomsky.htm]]. Sharp, like all historians, isn't without bias - his wife suffers from survivors guilt as a Cambodian of that generation for one thing. But I think it's worth a read.
Real history is astoundingly complex and all our theories about it necessarily simplify. Some simplifications take us nearer the truth and others don't. This is almost totally orthogonal to the issue of conspiracy for me. In some cases it's a fruitful part of the picture, in others not. But you've shown us the way not just in being evidence-based but full of courtesy. Thank you.
That link, transported out of wiki format, is Averaging Wrong Answers: Noam Chomsky and the Cambodia Controversy.
the really strange thing about all this is that if yo0u want to see a real-life conspiracy theorist, you only have to consider John Mashey - convinced warmer who concocts weird conspiracy theories every day of his misbegotten life.