Bishop Hill Lewcrative
Nov 8, 2013 Climate: Sceptics There have been some interesting developments on the Lewandowsky front. Firstly, Steve McIntyre has written a hilarious post about one of the sources Lew relied on in his Moon Hoax paper.
...nowhere in Wood et al 2012 is there any explicit statement that only two respondents purported to believe in the Faked Death theory that was highlighted in the abstract. Had readers been aware that only two people purported to subscribe to this theory, then they would obviously not expect “many people to give high endorsement to both theories”. Unfortunately when zero people subscribed to both theories, one cannot justifiably assert that “In Study 1(n= 137), the more participants believed that Princess Diana faked her own death, the more they believed that she was murdered".
Secondly, the ethical approval for the second "recursive fury" paper has been obtained by Australian Climate Madness. This has been nicely summarised by Shub Niggurath
The approval was granted as a “follow-up” study to the ‘Moon’ paper. The ‘Moon Hoax’ paper was itself was approved under an application for “Understanding Statistical Trends”. As recounted here, “Understanding Statistical Trends” was a study where Lewandowsky’s associates showed a graph to shopping mall visitors and asked questions (link pdf). This application was modified to add the ‘Moon hoax’ questions on the day the original paper was accepted for publication. The same application was modified for the ‘Recursive Fury’ paper. Each modification introduced ethical considerations not present in the previous step. Nevertheless, three unrelated research projects were allowed to be stacked on to a single ethics approval by the university board. In this way, Lewandowsky was able to carry out covert observational activities on members of the general public, as they reacted to his own work, with no human research ethical oversight.
The University of Western Australia seems entirely untroubled by all this. To the best of my knowledge their only response has been a shrug of the corporate shoulders. But as one surveys the stories of the various scandals at universities that have been covered at BH it becomes increasingly clear that there is almost nothing a university researcher or official can do that will lead to disciplinary action being taken against them. The only thing that seems to happen to miscreants is to be showered with awards - named chairs, awards from the Royal Society, that sort of thing.
It's lucrative, this academic misconduct business.
Reader Comments (30)
Christopher Gillberg is a child psychiatrist at Gothenburg University. His research has been alleged to have caused the brain damaging of many thousands of children in Scandinavia. After evidence for that came to light, Gillberg was awarded the King’s Medal of Sweden and also given a visiting professorship at Europe’s leading center for pediatrics, the Institute of Child Health (in London).
The first objective of any system is to protect itself. The system, it seems, is working very well.
Sociology is a dangerous method. It's founder, Machiavelli, showed how it could be used to expose the tyranny of dogma (in Discourses) and also how it could be used to put it over people (the Prince). The problem with the culture of social science practice in the universities today as exemplified by this little man who has chosen to make his little fame by attacking us is not only the obscene abuse of statistical methodology but also the permission to flip over into methodological activism -- thus permitting the researcher to play the prince. This permissiveness we can trace back to the neo-Marxist of the 1970s and 1980s and their mantra, Marx's epitaph, Thesis 11, where the purpose of social science research is no longer to interpret the world but to change it.
As Richard Lindzen said about the IPCC's AR5, Lew and Wood have sunk to a level of hilarious incoherence.
Steve's final words in his post:
"That Lewandowsky should make untrue statements will hardly occasion surprise among CA readers. However, drawing conclusions from a subpopulation of zero does take small population statistics to a new and shall-we-say unprecedented level. "
it becomes increasingly clear that there is almost nothing a university researcher or official can do that will lead to disciplinary action being taken against them
Unless they are a climate sceptic:
Did Macquarie University sabotage, exile, blackban, strand and abandon Murry Salby?
JCU caves in to badgering and groupthink — blackballs “politically incorrect” Bob Carter
And in these cases the 'disciplinary action' is for trivial or non-existent sins. I know of several other sceptics who have had similar treatment.
Can everyone stop worrying about this and read this blog blog here and watch the video and results. http://scn.sap.com/community/hana-in-memory/blog/2013/11/06/big-data-geek--is-it-getting-warmer-in-virginia--noaa-hourly-climate-data--part-2
And look at the scale of the data used. Neess distribution to most climate blog. Its not me by the way.
Lewdicrous?
JustAnotherPoster,
It's unfair to show SAP. It's a corporate enterprise system of great repute, used by many of the world's largest corporations. Although it has many obvious strengths for presentation, security and auditing / data integrity I believe it does not allow the fine tuning capabilities, required by somey academic end-users in climate research departments (;>)
For conspiracy theorists, it's hard to beat the supporters of the various lame ducks and turkeys subsidised under the banner of "renewables". They constantly assert that their favoured technology is only being held back by Big Oil or some such bogey man without ever explaining *why* business would block rather than invest in something so wonderful.
I was forced to read that twice. I'm none the wiser.
Which just proves the UWA just sucks, big, big time.
Great institution once, but not now.
Plagiarism. Just ask UC Boulder.
Mark
@Son if murder. This is not the sap you know. Watch the video. Its a presentation of climate data take from the raw source files and presented in real time.
Totally off topic, but grab a copy of this...
The Age of Global Warming, by Rupert Darwall - ISBN 9780704372993, Quartet Books
It's a fantastic walk through how we got to where we are.
Lewandowsky has a new sneer up at the Conversation, (a kind of Thinking Man’s Graun for chaps who’ve been to University). This rabidly warmist blog is financed by the Wellcome Foundation, the Nuffield Trust, and you the British (and Australian) taxpayer.
Demolition of his nonsense is spread around the net in a haphazard fashion; while McIntyre dismantles the nuts and bolts of the stats, Shub goes for the ethics, Simon Turnill spends good money on his FOI requests, and I rant as rudely as I dare, he continues to get away with his nonsense, supported by the entire scientific establishment.
We’ve just learned in a comment by A Scott at Climate Audit that the reviewer’s objections to “Recursive Fury” were ignored and the article published, (in three different versions, with four different lists of peer reviewers). Objections by Jeff Condon and Foxgoose were accompanied by legal threats and led to corrections. Other objections have been politely ignored for the past seven months. I was told by Psychological Science Editor in Chief Professor Eric Eich back in April that processing my complaint would take time because “my understanding is that Dr. Lewandowsky is in transit from Australia to England, and he will need time to settle into his new surroundings.”
Well, he’s found time to befriend Mann at the AGU meeting in Colorado and be interviewed by Chris Mooney in Washington en route from Perth to Bristol, with a stopover in London to pick up a medal and a fat check from the Royal Society, while continuing to insult his critics in numerous articles.
It’s not about Lew, is it? He’s just a symptom. But of what?
Completely off topic
http://www.standard.co.uk/news/i-made-a-porn-film-for-my-30th-6302157.html
Just watched Have i Got News For You with Victoria Coren and Godfrey Bloom formally with UKIP.
Godfrey was completely un phased by Victoria Coren indignation towards him when they produced a picture of him frolicking with a stripper gram from 30 years ago.
However it does seem that Feminist Victoria did some frolicking herself for her 30th Birthday
Nigel Farrage could possibly bring Godfrey Bloom back to UKIP.
Politics does need its characters just don't let in charge.
That's outrageous!
Irresponsible processing of raw temperature data by non- #climate pscientists could put our entire g̶r̶a̶v̶y̶ ̶t̶r̶a̶i̶n̶ children's future at risk!
Steve McIntyre says
This can also be said of Lewandowsky's Moon Hoax paper, the full title of which was "NASA faked the moon landing:Therefore (Climate) Science is a Hoax: An Anatomy of the Motivated Rejection of Science". Using the logic of Brandon Shollenberger in the comments the results of Moon Hoax to Climate Hoax are
Endorse – Endorse 3
Endorse – Reject 7
Reject – Endorse 131
Reject – Reject 1004
I identified that of the 3 in the Endorse – Endorse category, two were likely scam responses. That leaves just 1/1145 respondents who may have thought that the "moon landing was faked, therefore climate science is a hoax". But given this unlikely chain of reasoning was not explored in the survey, it is misleading to make such a statement. Given that Lewandowsky's specialist area of research is into the adverse impacts of misinformation on democratic societies, it is far from a minor issue.
- But Science rules don't apply to "Climate Science ™"
The religion "Climate Science ™" isn't actually a science as a result of the "ends justify the means" practice by the people who deal with it. They have exempted it from a the normal rules that apply to science. One could make a list of 50 : fact being by consensus instead of proper validation, the focus being on proving hypothesis instead of disproving, results being twisted to confirm the hypothesis in every event (Popper's definition of pseudoscience), skepticism being banned instead of accepted, pal review being the norm, maliciously adjusting data, keeping methods & data secret, policy being implemented on theories which don't actually predict real world outcomes, being publicised straight to pop-sci press before peer review completed etc.etc.
- Now there are proper sciences/engineering that deal with aspects of climate science from physics/ stats/ even economics & psychology, but once they hand over their research to "climate science" dramagreens, it stops being science.
- Hence Lew et al are exempt from the ethics code cos what they are doing is "Climate Science ™" not real science
- The big problem is the damage this all has done to the CREDIBILITY of real science
.. and on this occasion the reputation of University of Western Australia (& It's board : Professor Paul Johnson etc.) who probably mistakenly think that in 70 years time there will be a blue plaque there & in Bristol.. commemorating the saving of the world
... but now would you jump to employ alumni or recommend an overseas student study there ?
@jamspid so presenter who made a porn film produces saucily incriminating photo of Farage
..It's TV ... falseness is not confined to Climate_Science™ it's permeates much of modern society & most of TVland
Stewgreen
Except it’s not, it’s cognitive psychology, and they’re doing it, not on the outer green fringes of political activism, but in the heart of the establishment, in reputable journals run by fellow professors, in top universities, and reporting their results in journals like the New Yorker and Scientific American, plus on blogs financed by government-funded educational organisations.Kevin Marshall in the post above yours links to his manicbeancounter post which is the only place in the world, to my knowledge, where you can see the results of the Moon Hoax survey laid out in all their glory. It came as a shock to me to learn that Lewandowsky’s methodology and presentation of results is absolutely standard practice in psychology. You can have genuine survey results based on one or two or zero respondents, all tarted up with Pearman’s rho or Kendall’s tau-b, and no-one will ask any questions.
Want to use a rude word about climate sceptics? You just:
1) trawl Google scholar for the word in question - say, “conspiracy”.
2) assemble the papers involving the word (on anti-semitism in Malaysia, homophobia among gays in South Africa, an analysis of the speeches of Ayatollah Khomeini - who cares?)
3) Make some meaningless generalisations in flatulent language (“conspiracist ideation”) to link them all together
4) Do a survey to prove your point.
Give me a Likert scale and a free on-line survey company. With just two questions: “Psychology is important” and “we should try to understand the motivations of paedophiles” I can prove to you the link between cognitive psychology and paedophilia.
Geoff, yes Psychology is an especially weak science, witness that famous recent lifelong cheating prominent Dutch social psychologist Diederik Stapel
- However Lew et al even broke the ethics rules of this weak science (but as I say once you call something "Climate Science you are allowed to break all the rules it seems)
Lew's logic reminds me of a puzzle that used to go round in the 1980s before the 'net when people made photocopies of photocopies ...
God is love
Love is blind
Stevie Wonder is blind
=> Stevie Wonder is God
The first paragraph of this post is mistaken:
Wood et al 2012 (Dead or Alive) was not used as a reference in LOG12.
I'll see if I can get the sequence straight. Both of those papers were published without reference to the other. Recursive Fury was then published, citing both papers. Michael Wood initially served as a reviewer of the paper, but he asked to be removed after his complaints regarding the paper were overruled. He then published a new paper which cited all three of the other papers, and Stephan Lewandowsky served as a reviewer for it.
In addition to that, both of the original papers cited a Swami 2011 paper. That paper was one of a series by Viren Swami about conspiracists, members of which were referenced in all four papers. Swami is credited as editing and reviewing the Recursive Fury paper. It's all pretty incestuous.
On another note, Swami's series of papers on conspiracists used SEM in almost an identical way as Lewandowsky did in at least one paper. It's plausible Lewandowsky used Swami's work, at least in part, as inspiration for his "analysis." I haven't been able to find copies of the Swami papers referenced by Lewandowsky and Wood, but the fact a related paper used the methodology is suggestive. That's especially true since Lewandowsky offered no reference or discussion to justify his use of SEM. The Swami paper I linked to is similar in that it offers only a hand-wave to a textbook on SEM without any discussion or justification. A further similarity is neither Swami nor Lewandowsky did basic checks that are always precursors to the use of SEM, checks which would have shown there were problems that needed to be addressed (problems of the same class as Wood et al's).
I'd like to get copies of Lewandowsky's earlier papers to see what methodologies he's used before, as well as Swami's papers to see what each of them use for methodology, but there's already enough incestuousness here to be troubling.
incestuous ?
OK I am not the expert, but AFAIK each academic paper should be
1. new unpublished idea (unless the purpose is to test & replicate someone else results)
2. unique.
You can't even plagiarise yourself, let alone stuff whole pages of some else's research into your own paper
Michael Wood – the Frontiers reviewer of Fury that pulled out, has a paper citing Recursive Fury at Frontiers!!!
I have added this comment underneath the abstart:
http://www.frontiersin.org/Journal/10.3389/fpsyg.2013.00409/abstract
There is a problem here, one of the papers that is cited is not currently available from Frontiers.
Additionally the same paper (Lew 2013b) was unavailable over 3 months prior to the publication of this paper.. (and is still unavailable) if the hyperlink in this paper is clicked for LEW 2013b, it returns to the abstract of this paper (truly recursive?!)
The paper in question – Recursive Fury, Lewandowsky (2013b) et al.. has this statement on the Frontiers website:
“This article, first published by Frontiers on 18 March 2013, has been the subject of complaints. Given the nature of some of these complaints, Frontiers has provisionally removed the link to the article while these issues are investigated, which is being done as swiftly as possible and which Frontiers management considers the most responsible course of action. The article has not been retracted or withdrawn. Further information will be provided as soon as possible. Thank you for your patience. ” – Frontiers
As this paper was subject to multiple ethics complaints and factual errors (I made one of them) and has been unavailable for over 7 months, ‘pending investigation’ it seems perhaps unwise to cite it, until this issue has been resolved.
It also seems very odd, to cite a paper, when the authors presumably knew
(ie it is another Frontiers paper, and the lead author of the LEW 2013b, was a reviewer of THIS paper, and the lead author of THIS paper, pulled out of being reviewer for ‘Recursive Fury’ Lew et al 2013b)).
I have heard nothing from Frontiers about my complaint for months, yet authors are now citing this still unavailable paper. This seems very inappropriate.
I hope Frontiers will be contacting me soon to explain.
there are currently 2 Retraction Watch articles about Lew 2013b:
http://retractionwatch.wordpress.com/2013/03/28/why-publishers-should-explain-why-papers-disappear-the-complicated-lewandowsky-study-saga/
perhaps the authors of this paper should read the comments, and the comments under the abstract of Recursive Fury.
http://www.frontiersin.org/personality_science_and_individual_differences/10.3389/fpsyg.2013.00073/abstract
(especially as the lead author of this paper (Michael Wood), PULLED OUT from being a reviewer of Recursive Fury, Lewandowsky et al)
Barry
Well spotted!
Brandon
For a number of years Dr Swami has been turning out an average of one peer-reviewed paper per fortnight on subjects ranging from belief in extraterrestrials to the sexual attactiveness of dentists to the appreciation of female bottoms. The common feature of all these subjects is that they can get you written about in the popular press. (Dr Swami writes in a beauty magazine on “the science of the beautiful you”). I’ve covered this at
http://geoffchambers.wordpress.com/2013/04/17/lews-guru-and-the-science-of-a-beautiful-you/
From what I’ve seen, survey research by academic psychologists normally involves administering a questionnaire to first year students. Thus Dr Swami’s bottom research sample consisted of 180 teenagers, 80% of them female. This has ethical implications.
Academics are enhancing their reputations by provoking headlines saying “New scientific research by university psychologist says...” using survey techniques which would be banned in the lowliest teen magazine.
Barry Woods, somehow I didn't catch the fact the second Wood paper I mentioned was in the same journal as Recursive Fury. The journal took down Recursive Fury yet accepted and published a paper citing it that months later. That is ridiculous.
geoffchambers, the first time I looked at Swami's publication record, I assumed my search must have found papers from more than one person with the same name. It's weird to think they were all written by the same person.
I actually thought this Wood paper was rather good, and I’ve said so in a comment under Barry’s at Frontiers In.
They attempt something Lew, Cook and co would never dream of, which is to apply the same analysis criteria to both sides of a question. Among the results are the fact that “truthers” are less rude, and make more effort to explain their position. It would be interesting to conduct the same kind of analysis to climate threads.
A Scott in comments at Climate Audit has discovered a most interesting blog run by Mike Wood and three other English PhD students on the psychology of conspiracy theorising. There’s just one article there about Lew’s work
http://conspiracypsych.com/2013/02/23/climate-change-conspiracy-theories/
but quite a lot on Wood’s paper.