Believe it or not, my first email exchange ever with Joanne Nova occurred last week. I was curious about who hacked her. Soon after, she sent me this question:
Were you one of the “five” sites this man asked to host a “conspiracy survey” in 2010? (I just have to ask.)
Stephan Lewandowsky claims he asked five skeptical sites “who all refused to promote it”, but I hear he has so far refused to reveal which blogs turned him down. He didn’t ask me, nor Jeff ID, and he didn’t ask Anthony Watts. It’s as if Stephan did not want to know what real skeptics think.
Lewandowsky – Shows “skeptics” are nutters by asking alarmists to fill out survey
Professorial fellow Stephan Lewandowsky thinks that skeptics who are “greatly involved” in the climate debate believe any kind of conspiracy theory, including that the moon landings never happened, that AIDS is not due to HIV, and that smoking doesn’t cause cancer. But he didn’t find this out by asking skeptics who are “greatly involved” in the climate debate or by reading their popular sites. He “discovered” this by asking 1,000 visitors to climate blogs. Which blogs? He expertly hunted down skeptics, wait for it… here:Deltoid,
Tamino
Scot Mandia,
Bickmore,
A Few Things Ill Considered,
Hot-Topic (NZ)
Trunity (unconfirmed?)
John Cook (unconfirmed?)
My answer to her was: No. He didn’t ask me.
Well…. Thinking a bit more: I think it’s more accurate to say don’t recall being approached. Mind you: I’m not sure that I would have remembered a request. I also think online surveys about this sort of thing are next to useless. People don’t necessarily answer them honestly. Heck, people aren’t necessarily even sober when the answer them!
Today, Jo Anne sent me a link to this article.
I wonder if the list of 5 skeptic blogs approached will be included? I should think that information would be important to evaluating whether the researcher even tried to create an objective survey. I also wonder if the paper will describe how he made sure that people answering the survey honestly identified their degree of skepticism or alarmism?
Oh well. This will be yet another polarizing talking point out there on blogs.
For the record: I don’t know if Lewandowsky would count me as a skeptic, but I think the man really landed on the moon, Kennedy was almost certainly shot by Lee Harvey Oswald, and Princess Diana died in a car crash. (I admit to being fuzzy on the details of her death because I didn’t really follow that news story. I also didn’t watch her wedding on tv, nor that of her kids wedding. I will admit I Googled to see the naked Prince Harry pictures. )
I have decided some time ago that while the moon landing was probably real, the photos are probably fakes! 😉
BillC, I used to argue a point along those lines just to see how people would react. I said the moon landing was real, but something happened up there that got covered up. It’s sort of like what you see in this webcomic strip.
On topic, I’m afraid I’ve never read anything Joanne Nova has ever said prior to today. I had heard the name, but that’s it (it makes me wonder how I didn’t know someone had been hacked). After reading this article, I regret that. It was an interesting piece, and my mind couldn’t help but immediately make a certain connection:
Funny that Bill, i always thought the photos were real, but the landing was faked!
The moon landings were real. Stephan Lewandowsky is a fake.
Well, i don’t know if AGW skeptics are conspiracy theorists, but i know that very often conspiracy theorists are AGW skeptics.
Link:
http://websites.psychology.uwa.edu.au/labs/cogscience/documents/LskyetalPsychScienceinPressClimateConspiracy.pdf
I searched all of my email messages and found nothing (I have them all). Since the published article grossly misstated any positions I have about AGW using a pre-climategate link to a complaint I made about data availability as a reference, I am considering requesting a retraction.
The article was certainly inaccurate and in my opinion, libelous as well as blatantly political. If that is what passes for science at the journal of psychology, you have to wonder what else they have written.
True. Otherwise we’d have lots of green cheese.
Maybe they were covering up the fact that Neil Armstrong took home huge hunks of green cheese and later unjustly enriched himself selling it as a delicacy. (This will come out when his family publishes his personal diaries.)
About people lying when responding to online surveys:
The number of completed questionaires:(N = 1377)
Of these rougly 5% were duplicate IPs
I would suggest that people who send in duplicate reponses are likely motivated to biase a survey. I would also suggest they tend to lie. (Since he eliminated 71, I suspect that means he generally kept the first of the submissions from this IP. However, it’s quite likely even the first were lies.)
In addition, more than 10% were obviously fake:
This suggests that at least 10% taking the survey weren’t even trying to answer correctly. My theory: some were drunks having fund during happy hour, chortelling with glee as the filled in fake answers. (Oh… and if they move around, their IP can change.)
Let’s face it: Lots of people would think filling out a survey asking your beliefs about Rosewll NM could be hilarious fun.
Uhmm… more than 20% of the forms show signs that people are willfully toying around with the survey giving ages like “5” or “100” and providing answers outside the 0,100 bounds and/or were filling it out twice. Yah’ think the subset who might have cordinated responses couldn’t be large? In an online survey? On a political topic?
(I know I’m violating my rule on rhetorical questions. But what the F!?)
p-
It seems to me the biggest conspiracy in AGW is the notion that skepticism exists as a result of a well funded, well oiled fossil fuel funded machine. This nutty conspiracy idea seems to be swallowed pretty well whole and repeated far and wide. Skeptics know it’s not true. If it were true, we’d all be rolling in money!
lucia makes the most important point: AGW promoters utilize conospiracy theories revovlving around the “fossil fuel industry” and the “Koch brothers” as a matter of course.
Now a psychologist offers up a transparently deceptive survey that is significantly self-selected by AGW believers to offer evidence that skeptics are conspiracy kooks.
“Entertaining” is a polite way to describe the faux survey.
Jeremy Grantham, brilliant money manager, actually wrote this:
“Why are we arguing the issue? Challenging vested interests as powerful as the oil and coal lobbies was never going to be easy. Scientists are not naturally aggressive defenders of arguments. In short, they are conservatives by training: never, ever risk overstating your ideas. The skeptics are far, far more determined and expert propagandists to boot. They are also well-funded. That smoking caused cancer was obfuscated deliberately and effectively for 20 years at a cost of hundreds of thousands of extra deaths. We know that for certain now, yet those who caused this fatal delay have never been held accountable. The profits of the oil and coal industry make tobacco’s resources look like a rounding error. In one notable case, the obfuscators of global warming actually use one MIT professor who also defended tobacco! The obfuscators’ simple and direct motivation – making money in the near term, which anyone can relate to – combined with their resources and, as it turns out, propaganda talents, have meant that we are arguing the science long after it has been nailed down. I, for one, admire them for their P.R. skills, while wondering, as always: “Have they no grandchildren?†“
Probably one of the sceptic blogs was http://neven1.typepad.com/
or
http://www.skepticalscience.com/
Re: Don B (Comment #102294)
Scientists may be conservatives “by training,” but the statement on the “nature” of scientists is a little puzzling. Why would anyone who doesn’t like arguing go into science in the first place?
Of course, if Grantham believes otherwise, I’d like to have some of what he’s been smoking. 😉
Can someone pls send Grantham a link to the Climategate emails?
Grantham wrote the above in the summer of 2010, months after Climategate. The people at the Grantham Institutes must not have told him about scientists advancing their ideas through collusion and other means, deleting data to hide the decline, etc.
Anyone else see the irony of billionaire investor Jeremy Grantham, sponsor of the Grantham Institute for Climate Change at ICL and the Grantham Research Institute on Climate Change and the Environment at LSE, complaining about skeptics being “well-funded”? Come on. We all saw the leaked Heartland documents which evidenced the shoe-string budget on which the institute operates. As Lucia and hunter intimate, it makes one wonder who the real conspiracy theorists are.
haha… And how about those Prince Harry pics? Blue blood in the buff. I guess someone forgot to tell him that what happens in Vegas doesn’t always stay in Vegas. D’oh!!!
Sure Oswald shot Kennedy. But was he indirectly ordered to by Fidel Castro?
We know he was a Communist. We know Castro hated Kennedy, although he probably would have prefered to do it personally if he could have. It’s entirely possible that at some Communist rally, Oswald got the idea to kill Kennedy from a spy working for Castro.
Does thinking that could be true count as a “conspiracy theory” that would make me crazy?
Admittedly it’s entirely possible that he just heard Castro fans complaining about Kennedy at a rally. But a spy sent to plant the suggestion is possible, too.
Oliver:
Yep, that guy is just nuts.
You can ask my wife whether I like arguing. I work very hard to state my own work conservatively, but sometimes it’s just so d@mned good, that’s hard. 😀
“Scientists are not naturally aggressive defenders of arguments”
So all those bloviating Warmers I see on the bulletin boards probably aren’t scientists. I’ll be danged.
Andrew
When I was young(er than I am), I found out Christopher Columbus didn’t set sail to prove the world was round. It turns out pretty much everybody knew the world was round during his time, and the idea they didn’t was a myth started just a couple centuries ago. I couldn’t believe I had been taught a lie in school, much less that that lie was repeated in popular media all the time, just because people were too stupid to realize it was nonsensical. For quite a while, I actually thought there was a conspiracy to lie to me about it just like there was one for Santa.
Sometimes, when I’m feeling especially naive, I still do.
Quick question lucia. How outdated should cached pages for recent posts get? I’m asking because I’m getting a cached version of this page that seems at least 30 minutes out of date (and is missing a couple comments in the Recent Comments section). It seems a little weird, but I don’t know if it’s intentional.
Cache time out is set to 3600 seconds. That’s the default and represents the oldest a cached page will be stored by SuperCache. I think a new cache is always created when a comment is posted, if I do some sort of fiddle and possibly if a logged in user visits.
I can set the value higher or lower– but I’m pretty sure new versions are made when comments are posted. (However, editing doesn’t change things. So, if you are worried your old version of a comment is showing, just post a new comment!)
Oh– I should note, when a comment is posted on “blog post A” that restores the cache for “blog post A”. But it doesn’t do so for “blog post B”. So, recent comments may show different numbers of comments when viewed from the main post, etc.
There isn’t any way to set the cache time for the main page and the other blog posts separately.
Lucia, were the “Harry look at me” photos real or fake?
dlb–
You mean Prince Harry? Fake. My younger brother phoned me and told me he was the body double for those.
I hope your brother sends you some of the proceeds he’s getting from the tabloids 🙂
So this Stephan Lewandowsky thinks that “AGW skeptics” are prone to conspiracy theories. Presumably this is meant in a derisive way.
Presumably Prof. Lewandowsky recognizes that some conspiracies actually happened. Examples abound — the assassination of Julius Caesar, the Reichstag fire, the suppression of the smoking/cancer link… Is acceptance of these historical facts indicative of tinfoil-hat paranoia? Really?
Pres. Kennedy was shot by an ardent Communist — Oswald was an ex-Marine who had defected to the Soviet Union. He was in turn killed by a nightclub operator with extensive Mob connections. The story is tangled, but there was motive, means, and opportunity for numerous parties to knock off Kennedy. I don’t know if certain people conspired to kill Kennedy, much less what their motives might have been. But this general notion is as plausible as the “lone gunman” theory. Barring some unlikely and authoritative revelation, it seems unlikely that the truth of the matter will ever be known.
Perhaps Prof. Lewandowsky is beating the wrong bushes as he searches for psychopathological explanations for opinions on climate. In any case, however lame-brained such an exercise may be, he’s shown that it can be published in the peer-reviewed literature. For some, that’s the big prize.
I remember Princess Diana from that movie with John Travolta and the guy from Taxi. My first date actually.
I bet the Professor is open minded …. or not.
“Most climate experts agree that human carbon dioxide emissions cause anthropogenic global warming (AGW), reflected in increased global temperatures during every decade since 1970. Nonetheless, some public figures have claimed that AGW stopped in 1998. In a large experiment (N = 200), participants extrapolated global climate data, presented graphically either as share prices or as temperatures. Irrespective of their attitudes toward AGW, and irrespective of presentation format, people judged the trend to be increasing.
These results suggest that presentation of climate data can counter claims that AGW has stopped.”
http://pss.sagepub.com/content/22/4/460.short
Brandon,
If you think the myth a Columbus is bad, perform a serious study of the current favorite of many scientists – Galileo. Not the same story as the bumper sticker slogan.
Having walked among some of both right and left wing nut cases, the aforementioned conspiracies found the most ardent defenders on the left side.
.
The conspiracies most favored by the right side are almost never widely known, ones you never read about, because the media won’t write about them. This, of course, is a central tenant of the conspiracy….
My introduction to climate change “skepticism” was a video shown by my environmental science professor in the mid ’90s.
“The Greenhouse Conspiracy” (1990)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4Btd6L31ZYg
Click that link and then read the video description for a who’s who of internet conspiracy mongering. Watch the movie, if you’d like, although I think you’ll discover the “skeptic” claims haven’t changed all that much.
lucia:
That explains it. I didn’t think the cache was set for an hour.
Kan:
Oh, believe me, I know. I went to a private school for a while, and I was dumbfounded at how apologetic a couple instructors were when Galileo came up. I think my favorite moment was when a teacher said we should all feel bad that “the early Christian church burned Galileo at the stake.” I kid you not. I got detention for the outburst I had in response.
So yeah, I’ve ranted about Galileo plenty of times.
Grantham gets his info from his client, Dick Cheney . In other news, model-based extreme weather predictions are just liberal scare-mongering tools .
I thought all you colonials were obsessed with the royal family, so was quite surprised to read the above, as I could have written precisely the same thing, despite being a life-long Brit.
Regarding surveys and statistics, I heard from a reliable source (Ricky Gervais) that 83% of statistics are made up on the spot.
Lucia, I wrote to Lewandowsky to ask which were the 5 skeptic blogs he claims to have approached.
He would not answer the question.
Lucia; I agree about the validity of online polls, but, it might be interesting if some of the luke warm sites, and the skeptical sites, would band togther and offer Lewandowsky to put the poll on their sites.
Just sayin’…
@Jeff Id (Comment #102288)
August 29th, 2012 at 12:03 pm
Perhaps it’s your turn to do the retraction first, if you withdraw the implications of conspiracy.
“So since Phil Jones is so massively funded, does it make any sense that the ‘raw’ data used to create this temperature series would be discarded each time they have a ‘better’ version. Is this dataset the one scientists should trust so blindly when publishing or should they use the GISS dataset because with all of its known flaws, they were at least forced to put them in the open.”
I’m not sure about all climate skeptics, but Jo Nova certainly is a conspiracy nutter.
@Bugs
Huhh, “Perhaps it’s your turn to do the retraction first, withdraw the implications of conspiracy.” How do you withdraw “implications” IF they were even there in the first place?
Bugs,
It seems a stretch to call that an implication of conspiracy but that is a far cry from “denial of science”.
Remember, this was the point in history that Phil was stating that he didn’t want to release the data or the station list because all people would do is find something wrong with it. I’m sure you are familiar with the quote. There were real questions about how the stations were chosen at that time and the questions were created by Phil Jone’s own actions.
The problem I have is that the article completely misrepresented my position (and I’m sure others as well) in a “scientific” publication in a solidly disparaging manner. It appears to have been done for the single purpose of discrediting those of us with a less shrill approach to climate change and squelch the real discussion which needs to take place in climate science.
The article is full of unsupported innuendo and makes the cut in the journal with the obvious conclusion we all agree with. Those who tend to believe in conspiracies, tend to believe in conspiracies more easily. That Psychological Science let this article through review with so much vitriol, is more revealing about their close-mindedness and ignorance of the climate discussion, than the article is about its faux subject matter.
That is so bizarre. What’s even more bizarre is the peer reviewers should have insisted on a list of of sites contacted but did not. Mentioning who he asked to run the survey should fall under describing his methods.
Even more interesting would be someone showing him how easy it is for anyone with script-kiddie skills and a few hours to create a script to create any answer they liked to the poll.
Does anyone know which polling service he used?
Bug–
Could you elaborate. How do you find an implication of conspiracy in the paragraph you quoted. I’ll requote for convenience:
A conspiracy needs multiple actors and needs to be trying to do something somewhat underhanded and surrepticiously.
Could you name who is supposedly involved in “the implied conspiracy”? (For there to be an accusation that Jeff is implying a conspiracy above, I think you need suggest specific individuals he is accusing of being involved in the “implied conspiracy”. )
And what is this group of people supposedly conspiring to do?
After you answer the 2nd question, we can address whether or not the named people might actually be doing whatever it is Jeff is evidently “implying” they did.
Chris:
Examples?
Jeff Id (Comment #102329)
August 30th, 2012 at 6:01 am
It might seem hard for you to see it from his point of view, but he sees ‘skeptic’ blogs doing just that. They don’t look for a balanced evaluation of the evidence, they do just what he says, they only look for something wrong. All science is wrong, in a sense. And even the things that were supposed to be wrong have turned out to be right. You accuse him of receiving ‘massive funding’, when he’s on a salary. He doesn’t see most of it, he doesn’t get a bonus for it.
The fact is, it’s getting warmer, just like they said it would, for the reasons they gave, their temperature record agrees with the other records substantially. Yet we still have the ever popular misconceptions turning up at WUWT. I don’t know how many times they have failed to understand the use of anomalies, but there they go again, another article that tells every one why the use of anomalies is wrong. How many skeptics find what’s wrong with that. I think Mosher was about the only one.
The irony is that not one skeptic pulled up the scientists on their Arctic ice predictions. It turns out they were way to conservative.
“Sen. Jim Inhofe (R-Okla.) attacked former Vice President Al Gore on the Senate floor Monday, calling climate change “the greatest hoax ever perpetrated on the American people” and claiming that Gore is now “running for cover.””
“Inhofe also floated a political conspiracy theory focused on Gore.
He cited a secret “high-level meeting with all [Gore’s] global alarmists,†called a recent Gore op-ed in the New York Times a “sure-fire sign of desperation” and compared Gore to an ostrich.”
http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0310/34443.html
Surface Temperature Records: Policy Driven Deception?
“Horrifying examples of deliberate tampering”
http://joannenova.com.au/2010/01/horrifying-examples-of-deliberate-tampering/
Wacky Watts at his best. Does not understand something, must be a conspiracy to lie about thermometers.
“Lord Monckton delights Heartland conference with birther antics”
http://grist.org/climate-skeptics/lord-monckton-delights-heartland-conference-with-birther-antics/
Front and center at denier central.
James Delingpole on how Global Warming is part of the UNs Globalist Agenda.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=faSQr-SVh8A
Your buddies are a pack of fruitcakes.
bugs (Comment #102334)
You didn’t respond to the issues Jeff Id raised in Comment #102329.
You didn’t respond to the issues Lucia raised in Comment #102332.
Certain people make a concerted effort to stay focused on a scientific topic — engaging in informed discussion, educating readers, sometimes changing their own point of view in the process.
Many of the folks contributing to climate-themed blogs aren’t like that, whether they are passionate “CAGW’ers” or passionate “skeptics.” I prefer to think that most of the confirmation bias is unwitting, though I’d say that certain bloggers knowingly put scientific lipstick on their pet political pigs.
The Climategate emails include some evidence of surreptitious co-ordinated activity that could qualify as “conspiracy.” Embarrassing emails on the die-hard skeptic side wouldn’t shock me, either. But it seems to me that, for the greater part, “groupthink” is a more accurate and useful description.
bugs
Are you suggesting Phil sees skeptic blogs as being involved in a conspiracy? If yes, Phil Jones is a conspiracy theoriest nutter.
This is just silly. One can be on salary and have massive funding. It’s even the rule at labs and universities.
No? Do you think promotion, tenure and salary are in no way connected to the amount of funding? Or the number of publications one can produced based on the productivity of funded research? If you think this, you are woefully naive.
“It might seem hard for you to see it from his point of view, but he sees ‘skeptic’ blogs doing just that.”
Bugs, you cannot group everyone together to wash Lewandowsky’s responsibilities away. The problem is that I am an individual who Lewandowsky has misrepresented in publication. He didn’t even bother contacting me, or apparently any serious skeptics, for their opinions.
Now you state that Jones feels ‘skeptic’ blogs are doing just that. Jone’s is an idiot and a poor quality scientist in my opinion. He needs to stop ‘feeling’ (if he hasn’t yet) and start paying attention to open, proper data processing. From his emails and papers, some serious math and computer classes would help him improve. However this is off topic.
The problem is that I was individually misrepresented by Lewandowsky as a skeptic blogger/conspiratorialist who denies temperature trends and AGW in general along with a host of other implied rubbish. This rag of a paper that makes no useful scientific contribution, is now getting play in the mainstream British press.
The facts are that I have continually and regularly argued on behalf of AGW with those who don’t understand backradiation. Those who continue to argue this point are not ‘skeptics’. I doubt many of the left-wing advocacy blogs (RC,Tamino, SS etc..) have spent half the time I have arguing the basics. This was not what Lewandowsky stated in his article.
Also, I have published my own temperature series which was very close to the CRU results using methods which increase trends by better regression of individual stations. I have taken the time to coauthor a correction to the Antarctic trends which will be featured in the IPCC AR5 report being produced. Yet the authors of this article stated that I am conspiratorial and anti-science using a reference to an article that Lewandowsky didn’t bother to even read.
These are all pre-determined conclusions by the advocacy crowd about the thought processes of individuals who dare to recognize the problems in climate science.
Jeff ID, at this point, I think Lewandowsky needs to release the survey data that he supposedly collected for his survey including a list of the sites where the data were collected. I’m suspicious at this point as to whether a survey was even done. It’s possible the paper is entirely fraudulent.
How this got through peer review is beyond me.
I just saw the worst peer review in my entire life, btw.
Here’s a slightly redacted version of the review:
Reviewer #2 Evaluations:
Reviewer #2 (Good Scientific Quality): The XXXXXXX model described in this manuscript represents original work that warrants publicant.
Reviewer #2 (Appropriate Journal): This work should be of interest to XXXXXX readers.
Reviewer #2 (Satisfactory English/References): The manuscript is concise, clear, and well-written.
Reviewer #2 (Tables/Figures Adequate): Figures and captions are adequate.
Reviewer #2 (Concise): The length of the manuscript is appropriate.
Reviewer #2 (Appropriate Title and Abstract): Title and abstract are appropriate.
Reviewer #2 (Remarks):
Can you say “useless”?
dorlmin,
1) Al Gore has enriched himself to the tune of hundreds of millions of dollars on the back of his scaremongering.
2) Temperatures were supposed to continue to climb at the rate seen by (crappy) thermometers after 1998 and stopped climbing.
With reference to AMac (Comment #102337), I’d say that climate blogs are mostly less of the “changing opinions” and more of what one could call group polarization .
In a striking empirical regularity, deliberation tends to move groups, and the individuals who compose them, toward a more extreme point in the direction indicated by their own predeliberation judgments.
So now we know bugs has no significant understand of academia or funding for academia.
bugs also seems to deny (ahem) the reality of the important role conspiracy accusations and theories play in the climate committed culture. Koch, fossil fuel industry, Exxon, etc.
On top of that bugs seems to pull the same tactic as was used to help Gleick dodge his actions in your brush off of the deceitful misrepresentation of Jeff Id.
This does not leave one of the loudest voices for the climate consensus looking very good.
Carrick (Comment #102340) August 30th, 2012 at 9:07 am:
… How this got through peer review is beyond me.
My thought precisely. It’s so flawed it should have been irrevocably refused.
RB (Comment #102342)
From your link:
I think one of the reasons many climate blogs result in amplified extremism is that they moderate heavily and ban contrary opinions. One of the consequences is comments become polarizing echo chambers. Some reading those comments blocks develop the delusion they have heard counter arguments when they have not.
The reason I moderate lightly is to try to maintain as heterogeneous a blend of comments as possible. I can’t pretend I can force heterogeneity, but I can at least try to avoid suppressing arguments on one end or the other.
Lucia,
Mauboussin had an interesting article on the wisdom of crowds .
Even if you determine a collective is the best means to solve a problem, certain conditions must prevail for the crowd to be smart. These include diversity, aggregation, and incentives.
The stock market is an example of this aggregation mechanism. One could argue that in principle, academic literature for the most part, is likewise. Its not clear whether reputation is an adequate incentive for bloggers.
But you are doing a good job of attracting a fairly diverse set of people here, perhaps because they are trying to win some quatloos 🙂
RB–
Well… the stock market sometimes suffers bouts of madness and delusions. See Extraordinary Popular Delusions & the Madness of Crowds. I suspect similar bouts of madness and delusions are shared by academic literature. The bubbles in markets are remembered because markets also have very strong penalties for being wrong. The analogous ones in academic literature are generally forgotten because unless you both announce the way Pons and Fleishman did and are as wrong as they were, errors in academia are generally simply ignored.
RB,
I’m all about the quatloos.
Actually, when I used to blog, the crowd started out more diverse and tightened as more audience showed up. When I decided not to argue a point, others would step in and oftentimes slam the writer rather strongly.
Usually the person getting slammed was interesting for at least bringing a separate view but sometimes the purpose of the commenter was simply to gain the response. Drive-by comments with too much anger tended to pile up and chase away some good people from threads.
The net effect is to take a blog like noconsensus and force it into a self-sorted pseudoconsensus. I never resolved how to improve the situation much.
Carrick, the survey did take place – if you go to Jo Nova’s blog and click on the links you can see 6 of the original posts where the survey was posted in Aug 2010.
What is looking in serious doubt is Lewandowsky’s claim that “5 skeptic blogs were approached but none posted the link”. See the long list of updates at Jo’s blog – none of the obvious suspects were contacted.
Imagine that you are a skeptic blogger and you get an email saying please host this survey on your blog. What would you do? You’d look at the survey with its questions on climate science and bonkers conspiracy theories and instantly spot the agenda. You’d then write a post ridiculing the survey, wouldn’t you?
Lucia, his excuse for not answering the question was that this information does not affect the results, and that they should not be ‘outed’ for not posting the link after his private enquiry.
I agree that it’s amazing that a serious journal would agree to publish this.
Lucia,
It is true that the stock market is mostly irrational. The premise behind value investing is that it sometimes returns to value which is the basis of “reversion to the mean” strategies. Examples are the Shiller PE or market cap/gdp ratio. One could say that stock prices (or for the market as a whole) are over the long-term pegged to the earnings of companies with an added risk premium. In other words, there is circumstantial evidence to say that in the long run, the stock market is a good aggregator of information.
Yes. I think this tends to happen everywhere.
One of the “corrective” things Susstein mentions in passing is that people can exit groups. In his paper, he notes that when people exit groups because they are uncomfortable with the original groups position, the remaining groups is more polarized. This is true.
But what is not noted is that people who exist may form new groups. On the internet, this means new blogs. So, for example, people who might not be comfortable participating at Romm, Real Climate or WattsUpWithThat can create their own blog or find one where they are comfortable.
Oh. And yes, the quatloos. That exists for several reasons. One is just the fun of it. But the other is: In the end, each month there is an outcome. It may be weather. But if we view the bets, we can see that some people always make “loonie” bets (on both ends). (The ever-name-changing marie-deschamps-andrew-blah-blah tended to put in ridiculously low UAH bets no matter what. As if somehow betting low would “mean” something. Well… no.)
With short term betting and quatloos, most betters actually try to win rather than “make a statement”.
It is hard to win consistently and everyone comes up short pretty often. And I think people do often leave their notions about whether climate change is “true” or “false” at the door when predicting and having that left as a sort of record.
(I know people want me to fish everything out and find out whose best!)
But… well… let’s face it -1.5 millions sq. km? That’s not going to win. (Even though the Porcozio’s tiny positive bet is unlikely to be very close to the ultimate outcome, it could win as a betting strategy. After all, when you bet, you don’t know what the other bets are going to be. Porcozio wins if the next lowest bet is further away than his– and that’s not impossible. But for ice the lowest possible rational value to bet is 0. Because the person betting 0 will beat -1.5 no matter what. So… stupid. )
Paul Matthews
First: The amount of effort he took to find skeptics does affect how seriously anyone should take his survey.
Second: That’s excuse of not wanting to “out” someone is nonesense. No blogger is going to feel “outed”. Heck, if my memory is faulty and it turns out he asked me, I won’t feel “outed” in anyway that is “bad”.
Third: He could easily just contact the 5 skeptic blogs and ask them if he may release their names. Most will likely say, go ahead. But if they say no, then he might have some excuse.
If it turns out my memory is faulty, I’d blog about the survey– which I think is nonesense no matter what.
As far as I can see, skeptics, whatever the topic, are those who evaluate data for themselves.
Sure. And in the long run, at least in testable areas, failed academic theories are forgotten. So, the more correct ones rise to the top. But both with respect to irrationality and ultimate success in aggregation your analogy between academic literature and markets may be valid.
Lucia, you are right about the ‘quatloos’ focusing minds (though I don’t bet myself). Which is why spread-betters get election results right more often than pollsters.
As for Lewandowsky, how about submitting a survey to 10 psychology blogs asking (with redacted examples from his paper) whether this is the proper way of conducting a survey? 🙂
lucia (Comment #102354),
I think that the cAGW theory will fail, but I don’t think it will be forgotten for centuries.
Paul:
To be clear, I worry about the integrity of the “data” he used.
He could be making up conclusions whole-cloth (I’ve seen that happen and caught people at it) or because we don’t know how well controlled it was, some of the anti-skeptics could have “multiple-voted.”
Of course as published research, the onus is on him to demonstrate that he used rigorous methods in obtaining his survey results, prevented multiple voting, and that his reported summaries faithfully represent his sample population.
bugs might argue “why would he share that with us if we are just trying to find something wrong with it?” [Put another way, bugs thinks there’s a secret card that people carries that permits some people access to data that other’s are not allowed.]
Anyway, the whole paper has a “dead fish” smell about it. When I get stuff like this to review that the “smell-meter” pegs on, I usually go through it with a fine-toothed comb.
[I have a paper I’m getting to reject the revision of as we speak. Poorly written paper, bad science, non-existent calibration data, yada yada yada. It’s not *just* climate scientists that I hold up to some standard beyond fawning at them.]
“Imagine this study: An academic who is a strong Democrat wants to do a study to discover if Republicans suffer from a psychological tendency to bizarre conspiracy theories. OK, the reasonable mind would already be worried about this. The academic says his methodology will be an online survey of the first 1000 people who reply to him from the comment sections of certain blogs. This is obviously terrible — a 12-year-old today understands the problems with such online surveys. But the best part is that he advertises the survey only on left-wing sites like the Daily Kos, telling anyone from those heavily Democratic sites that if they self-identify as Republicans, they can take this survey and their survey responses will be published as typical of Republicans. Anyone predict what he would get?”
http://www.coyoteblog.com/coyote_blog/2012/08/a-truly-bad-study.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+CoyoteBlog+%28Coyote+Blog%29
Don B (Comment #102360)
Yes. The study methodology is clearly terrible. I’m very curious to know which skeptic blogs he contacted.
I emailed at August 30, 2012 12:09:45 PM my time. He’s probably asleep by maybe he’ll respond when he reads his email in the am.
To his credit, Lewandowsky has made his dataset available (see Geoff Chambers at Aug 30, 2012 at 4:58 PM http://www.bishop-hill.net/discussion/post/1904675#post1941263?currentPage=2)
As I said there, for a survey that supposedly aimed to question skeptics, it’s interesting that 86% of the responders agree or strongly agree that “Human CO2 emissions cause Climate Change” and 78% “believe that the burning of fossil fuels on the scale observed over the last 50 years has caused serious negative changes to the planet’s climate.”
As Geoff notes, only 4 respondents said that they strongly believe that the Moon landings were faked (out of 1100+) and 2 strongly believe the Royal Family arranged Diana’s death.
DR_UK
Do you know if the raw data are posted so we can all have a look?
I created a kiwisurvey and was able to fill it out using an anonymous proxy service. Having discovered that, I’d like to read the IP addresses 🙂
I do not like to waste time responding to political diatribe and advocacy even if it is in the form of a peer reviewed paper – but what the heck.
I do agree that a number of those who are more skeptical about the science of climate are motivated by their politics being less statist than those who advocate strongest for AGW mitigation by the state. The other side of the authors argument is that if one were of the political persuasion that government should be deeply involved in these issues anyway one might well be less critical of a science that states a consensus that favors their political position.
The politics works both ways and I say being skeptical with reason and logic is more in the vein of science thinking than accepting the science of ones choice with little hesitation.
It would not be difficult to find less than scientific thinkers on all sides of the AGW issue and in the end that discovery means nothing in the matter of attempting to discover scientific truths.
Found a Pro Science blog that advertised for what appears to be the survey. Love the title of the Blog.
http://watchingthedeniers.wordpress.com/2012/06/07/take-this-test-please-uni-of-wa-survey-on-science-and-values/
Lucia, a bit of investigating. From Deltoid, where even the usual gang found the survey to be not so good –
http://www.kwiksurveys.com/online-survey.php?surveyID=HKMKNF_991e2415.
I found the lead sentence interesting – “Stephan Lewandowsky is conducting a survey on attitudes towards climate science and related issues and is interested in responses from readers of pro-science blogs”
Pro-science?
This is where it leads to (no longer available) – http://www.kwiksurveys.com/online-survey.php?surveyID=HKMKNF_991e2415
From Mandia’s lead in – “The survey has been approved by the author’s University’s ethics committee and carries no risks for participants.”
Ethics committee?
From the Bish, unthreaded – ”
Stephan Lewandoski is surveying attitudes to climate science at
http://www.kwiksurveys.com/online-survey.php?surveyID=HKMKNF_991e2415
As someone who in my time has worked with professional survey companies and Government statistics bureaux, the survey is moderately flawed – e.g. asking two-parter questions with a single answer, failing to define a few terms such as ‘climate scientist’, failing to account for perfectly plausible answers – e.g. does HIV cause AIDS? Correct answer is probably that HIV is a necessary but not sufficent condition (even that is wrong – some people have AIDS but no HIV, many people have HIV but not AIDS – with or without treatment).
Overall he is getting your ( American style ) political beliefs, then a bit of science – very badly worded and designed to turn honest answers into climate propaganda – and then a bit of lifestyle stuff.
With the science questions, the less you know the better, because Thinking Scientistsâ„¢ look at the deeper questions, so they are as likely to answer ‘wrongly’ as any non-scientist
Aug 30, 2010 at 4:09 AM | Jerry”
Please disregard previous comment poll was conducted in 2010, 2 years prior to this blogs post.
Re:
cui bono (Comment #102355)
August 30th, 2012 at 12:06 pm
“As for Lewandowsky, how about submitting a survey to 10 psychology blogs asking (with redacted examples from his paper) whether this is the proper way of conducting a survey?”
Well you did make me smile, but I then thought that you may be surprised by the response of the psychologists. Many years ago when I was studying stats, we had a prof who used to like to take published papers with clear examples of serious statistical errors, and make us report on the flaws and weaknesses. For some reason, the examples were all psychology papers. After the 6th or 7th paper in the series, he was asked by one student if he was driven by a dislike of psychologists or something. “Not at all.” he replied. “Some of them are nice people. It’s just that they have low IQ’s.”
It makes me nostalgic for the world before political correctness was invented.
The dataset is now available on Bishop Hill http://www.bishop-hill.net/blog/2012/8/31/lewandowskys-data.html (just data, no IP addresses!)
The columns titles can be understood by reference to Table 2 in the paper.
Paul_K, it’s funny you mention that. Someone asked me to take a couple such tests recently, including ones for “social dominance orientation” and “right-wing authoritarianism.” I wound up spending more time discussing what was wrong with questions in the tests than taking them.
My favorite part was one test’s instructions told me if a question had multiple parts, I should combine my score for each part into a single value for my answer to the question. As though that wasn’t strange enough, the author of the test has claimed to find strong correlation between certain things, things which often show up in the same questions…
Uh… duh? If you ask questions with three claims in them, you’ll find correlation between people’s opinions on those three claims.
I just found out the paper used a 4-point scale for most of its questions. That bothers me. I know the lack of a midpoint decreases the quality of one’s data by decreasing the participants’ interest, but I’m worried about something else. A common argument for not including a midpoint is it doesn’t change the proportions of answers (I don’t know if that’s actually true). In other words, if results would be 30/50/20 (Positive/Neutral/Negative), they’d be 60/40 if you removed the midpoint.
But even if the proportions are unaffected, does that necessarily mean any analysis of the results will be unaffected? Would the correlations found necessarily remain the same? It seems to me if a questionnaire forces people to answer either positively or negatively, it could introduce spurious correlations.
Hello,
This is the well known straw man tactic.
Everybody knows that the Universe was sneezed out by the Great Green Arkleseizure.
And yes we sceptics are sceptic about acid rain hystery, Ozonehole theory and BSE.
BIG BIG CONSPIRACY INDEED isnt’t it?
Morons!
Mich
And yes :
80% of climate activists are arrogant, vindictif, agressive, childish ….
I just made a survey. You don’t believe me? Ok, I lied.
But honestly,
yesterday I saw a german activist on TV. He really seemed to be concerned about climate change. You could really see the fear in his eyes. Some people are really concerned about the end of the world in 2012. Most of those people are also concerned about climate change.
But honestly I really thought this activist was pathetic.
Sorry
Dr_UK in comment (#102366) sort of makes the rest of the discussion pointless. The author clearly and deliberately set out to deceive readers. It is not possible to tell what one group thinks by having people opposed to that group tells us they think. from Dr_UK’s post:
“86% of the responders agree or strongly agree that “Human CO2 emissions cause Climate Change†and 78% “believe that the burning of fossil fuels on the scale observed over the last 50 years has caused serious negative changes to the planet’s climate.â€
This was a survey of climate consensus believers. Period. While it offers no demonstrable insights into skeptics, it does demonstrate clearly the lack of integrity in yet another climate change extremist, along the lines of Peter Gleick.
Monckton will save us.
http://rabett.blogspot.com.au/2012/08/monckton-will-help.html
lucia (Comment #102338)
Hardly, there is no mention of conspiracies. No, just a bunch of people who mostly agree he is part of a conspiracy to enrich himself at their expense with his massive funding, rather than just trying to state just what he honestly thinks the science is revealing. The CRU temperature record they worked that was ground breaking still stands the test of time today.
Chris (Comment #102326)
August 30th, 2012 at 5:04 am
This paper by her husband, David Evans, is a classic paper. Hosted by the SPPI.
http://scienceandpublicpolicy.org/images/stories/papers/originals/manufacturing_money_and_warming.pdf
To understand how money is manufactured, you really need to understand how modern banking evolved from gold-smithing. Although it appears a little arcane at first, this historical route is the easiest. It’s not difficult to understand, but pay attention because otherwise the tricks of manufacturing modern money will not make sense.
Commerce started with direct barter, but over thousands of years gold evolved as the universal medium of exchange in Europe, Asia, and Africa. A simple system that continued for a few millennia.
In the Middle Ages, goldsmiths took gold deposits from individuals for safekeeping. The receipts for these deposits circulated as money, because they were more convenient than the metal itself. But the goldsmiths learned they could issue many more “receipts†than they had gold. They would typically lend out receipts for ten times as much gold as they had, on the assumption that not everyone would try to redeem their receipts for metal at the same time. Money was thereby manufactured, or created out of thin air. Furthermore, the goldsmith would charge interest on the receipts they lent out, to compensate for the risk of not being repaid and to make a profit.
For example, if customers deposited 200 ounces of gold with a goldsmith, then the goldsmith would issue them with receipts for 200 ounces. But he would also issue receipts for another 1,800 ounces to people as loans, and charge interest on them — for a total of receipts for 2,000 gold ounces. Notice that 1,800 of the gold ounce receipts that the goldsmith manufactured were for gold that did not exist. For a typical interest rate of 5%, the goldsmith is earning 90 gold ounces per year by lending out these receipts to gold he does not have — pretty profitable eh? If any customer came to the goldsmith with one of the goldsmith’s receipts and asked for “their†gold, the goldsmith would hand over some gold and destroy the receipt. In normal business, they knew from experience that keeping back 10% of the gold was enough to keep this scheme working and, if it wasn’t, they could simply borrow gold from another goldsmith. The only downside for the goldsmith was an unpaid loan—he owed gold on all the receipts issued, so he would ultimately have to pay any unpaid loan out of his own pocket.
This practice is called fractional reserve banking, and exists in essentially the same form today in modern banking.
If you are wondering if this is a guarded dig at the “Jewish Bankers”, then this rebuke from a former member of the Australian “Galileo Society” of which Evans and Nova are members, seems to confirm it is.
Hard line Australian denier Andre Bolt has severed links with that society.
http://blogs.news.com.au/heraldsun/andrewbolt/index.php/heraldsun/comments/happy_to_help_those_who_ask_but_not_people_who_peddle_this/P20/
I see Malcolm Roberts has reportedly said climate science is controlled by “some of the major banking families in the world†who form “a tight-knit cabalâ€.
This sounds very much like one of those Jewish world conspiracy theories that I despise.
Can you tell me what Malcolm meant?
I see I am listed as an adviser to the Galileo Movement. In the circumstances, and until I receive an innocent explanation for Malcolm’s reported comments, I’d ask that you remove my name.
Andrew Bolt
Bugs, instead of posting random stuff you might consider defending your accusations against Jeff Id. You could start by answering Lucias comment #102332:
Bug–
Could you elaborate. How do you find an implication of conspiracy in the paragraph you quoted. I’ll requote for convenience:
A conspiracy needs multiple actors and needs to be trying to do something somewhat underhanded and surrepticiously.
Could you name who is supposedly involved in “the implied conspiracy”? (For there to be an accusation that Jeff is implying a conspiracy above, I think you need suggest specific individuals he is accusing of being involved in the “implied conspiracy”. )
And what is this group of people supposedly conspiring to do?
After you answer the 2nd question, we can address whether or not the named people might actually be doing whatever it is Jeff is evidently “implying” they did.
The “massively funded” is one of the common conspiracy theory memes, that scientists are conspiring to talk up AGW just so they can obtain massive funds, which is crazy since there is no evidence the CRU was massively funded, nor does he understand the state of computer science back in those days. Storage costs were very expensive and consumed a lot of space. It is very common to keep data only as long as necessary, and even if it is archived, when it is requested, the equipment needed to processes may not even exist. Ask NASA.
I also recall there was one remarkable post Jeff Id created at his blog, which was quickly deleted which involved conspiracy theories, can’t remember the details now, since it was deleted.
bugs (Comment #102394)
It’s true that true “raw” data has often been discarded due to storage limitations in storage. With regards to this specific case, roughly how much “raw” data and what storage technology are we talking about?
At this point, they are all in the same program — money and power for themselves. I flatly don’ t belive they give a crap about America at this point. They just forced the most disingenuous and immoral health care bill through despite the fact that nobody wanted it and now they are back on the alleged climate bill which is nothing more than another money and freedom grab by the political class.
http://noconsensus.wordpress.com/2010/06/
A global warming book was withdrawn from public schools for inaccuracy. It almost sounds like a small bit of sanity is creeping into the global warming discussion. After all, us skeptics all seem to have our nuanced opinions on the matter and not many of them are unreasonable. As a father of two kids ready to enter the US public indoctrination/brainwashing program, I’m very concerned as to how this issue will be presented.
http://noconsensus.wordpress.com/2010/06/
Ok, I exposed the false reporting of the media in my previous post HERE but it didn’t help me feel better. This immoral reporting and junk science deserves a full on rant.
The Arctic ice has GROWN from last year not shrunk. It is BIGGER not smaller, LESS polar bears are swimming not that it matters. We just didn’t have our polar bear RADAR activated yet.
We cannot be PAST the “tipping point†because the ice GREW. We know you AGW guys wanted it to shrink but it DIDN’T, not because of magic but because the earth is COLDER, yes COLDER than it was before. Sure this doesn’t disprove AGW but it does mean that the ice is BIGGER, MORE, INCREASED, LARGER, GREATER, MORE HEAVIER, LESS LIQUID than last year!
http://noconsensus.wordpress.com/2008/08/31/arctic-ice-grew-in-2008-agw-what-they-dont-want-you-to-know/
Is that enough?
The CRU was founded in 1972. A DEC tape from around that era could store 184K, for example.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DECtape#DECtape_II
I noticed something amusing when looking at the data file for this paper. Even after the filtering done by the authors, 63 of the respondents gave answers that make no sense. Thirty eight agreed more strongly with:
Than:
Twenty six (one of whom was in the previous 38) agreed more strongly with:
Than:
Six percent of respondents gave answers that make no sense.
I was interested to find out only ten of the respondents felt the moon landing was faked. That made me check how people felt about the other conspiracies. I’m not sure what to make of the fact the most commonly agreed with conspiracy theory was:
This question is poorly phrased as it overlooks the involvement from the Fortiers, but still… 289 respondents said they agree. A full quarter of the respondents agreed with a conspiracy theory!
In an amusing twist, only 11% of them are “skeptics.” That is 3% less than the 14% of respondents who self-labeled as “skeptics.”
If the authors can draw conclusions based on the responses of 10 (out of 1145!) people, I think that means we can say people who believe in global warming are more likely to believe in conspiracy theories.
Brandon
I think asking that is jumping the gun. The real question is did those respondents really think the moon landing was faked or were they people intentionally giving faked responses?
The bombing was in 1995. If you are 20 years old, this happened when you were 3. It’s entirely plausible that for American 20 year olds, the most accurate answer would be “I dimly recall something about this bombing. But I have no idea.” For people in other countries the answer that might best describe their opinion could be “Huh? What? ”
I would not be at all surprised if a fair number of people answering that were just guessing the way one might guess on a multiple guess quiz. They didn’t think this was a conspiracy theory so much as they aren’t familiar with the history at all. Imagine if people asked:
“Did Jeffery Dahmer hide bodies in the crawlspace of his basement”? Did Jodie Foster encourage John Wayne Gacy to kill Ronald Reagan? Was John Hinkley a convicted sex offender?
These were all important news stories at one time. Most people filling out a survey aren’t going to remember which of these were which and which. I bet you’d get lots of “yes” answer to these. (One hopes very few will think Jodie Foster encouraged anyone to kill anyone. But it was Hinkley who had a unrequited crush on Jodie Foster and who formed the odd idea that killing Reagan would impress her.)
lucia:
Whether or not it’s jumping the gun, if only ten people said they believed the moon landing was faked, then whatever their reason for saying so, it’s kind of absurd to title a paper:
Regardless of the quality of the paper/data, that it just disgusting. Titling your paper to imply people who are skeptical of your position based upon the silly answers of less than 1% of your respondents is… It’s even worse when you realize those silly answers are mostly given by people who claim to agree with the position.
I find it hard to believe that’s the case. Princess Diana’s death was about as far back, and it had a total of 25 people say they think there was a conspiracy.
As another way of looking at things, the most popular conspiracy theory after the Oklahoma City bombing one was the Kennedy assassination at 247. After that was Pearl Harbor, at 146. After that was MLK’s assassination, at 90. It’s hard for me to believe so many more people would “guess” on one conspiracy than every other.
Also, that conspiracy stands out in another way. Only 145 people strongly disagreed with it. The same pattern is found as above, with the next lowest being the Kennedy Assassination (314), followed by Pearl Harbor (423), followed by MLK (458).
I don’t trust the paper’s data as being accurate or meaningful, but the only conspiracy theory to involve neo-nazis is a major outlier within this data. I think that’s interesting.
I suspect outside the US more people know of Princess Diana’s death than the Oklahoma bombing. To find out, we should take a survey. 🙂
Even apart from that: I never followed the stories on her death. I think it involved a drunken driver, paparazzi and a wealthy boyfriend or Arab or middle-eastern descent whose family owned a big department store. But I could be mistaken.
I suspect people are likely to guess on conspiracies they’ve never heard of and have opinions on others. The JFK and Pearl Harbor stories are fundamentally and globally more important. Why should European’s know much about the Oklahoma bombing? I don’t keep track of bombings in every country in the world. 10 years from now I’m not going to remember details about the Norwegian Anders I can’t spell the last name kook. Currently, it’s in the news. I imagine Norwegians will remember it longer than Americans.
I’ll admit I’m winging it here. But Deltoid’s author is in Australian. Why wouldn’t Australian’s just wing it on a story about the bombing of a building in Oklahoma?
It’s also the most obscure event. Just saying.
Lucia,
some of the responses were clearly fake. One respondent claimed to strongly believe in ALL the conspiracies. Another believed “strongly” in all the conspiracies except one.
Needless to say, they also purported to be “skeptics”.
lucia:
It would have been helpful if the questionnaire had a midpoint (neutral) option. Then how widely known something is wouldn’t be much of an issue. As it stands, the only real control we have for “guessing” is people who would “guess” would generally guess to one of the middle options, not an extreme. That does support your interpretation as only 3% of the people who agreed about the Oklahoma City bombing strongly agreed.
But given the quality of the paper, I still say the Oklahoma City bombing results deserve some attention. After all, the paper uses the moon landing and AIDs conspiracies, each with less than ten “votes,” as part of their conclusions. If you can get 30x as many responses because of guessing…
Steve McIntyre:
It cuts both ways. There’s at least one entry where a “skeptic” disagreed with every conspiracy and said he/she believed 0% of scientists believe HIV causes AIDs, smoking causes cancer and CO2 causes warming.
The data is just a mess.
Brandon–
I wouldn’t disagree with the idea that those answers deserve attention. I just think it’s difficult to know what they mean.
Ideally, someone would do a pre-study about that question. That pre-survey could ask people all of the following three:
1) The question on the form involving Nazis.
2) How familiar they were with the history. (5 could be ‘follow the story avidly from the day of the incident until the day the sentence was carried out’. 1 could be: I know what I couldn’t help reading while standing in the grocery store line or watching tv at the gym way back when the story was everywhere I’d rate about a 2 on this scale.)
3) Whether their answer to (1) was a guess or whether they really thought their answer was correct.
In fact, if they want to go further, the could ask:
4) Do you consider skin-heads to be neo-Nazis?
5) Do you consider all white supremist groups to be neo-Nazis?
6) Do you consider all militant gun-toting groups plotting the over throw of some part of the government neo-Nazis?
After that, they could quiz people on what “received assistance” might mean. Suppose one of the bombers bought a gun from a dealer who was a neo-Nazi. Would that be “receiving assistance”?
If we knew all these things and we knew that the people answering that survey weren’t just blowing off after having a few drinks, then we might be able to interpret that it means that 30% or respondents to the Lewindawsky survey thought the two guys received assistance from neo-Nazis.
That would be consistent with people whiling away their happy hour while laughing and putting in intentionally stupid answer on a survey.
lucia:
I agree. I mostly thought it was funny such a huge outlier gets no attention while answers given by 10 people got made into the paper’s title.
I’ll admit I likely wouldn’t have been familiar enough to know there were two people involved (I’d have still heard of McVeigh), but I was close enough to the explosion to feel the shock wave. Even if that wasn’t enough, it was all anyone talked about in my area for some time. I have no idea what it was like in other areas.
It would, but there aren’t that many answers which seem stupid. I mean, most conspiracy theories got fewer than 50 votes. If people were goofing off with it, they likely either got caught by the filtering, or they did it in a non-systematic way (like just picking random answers).
BillC (Comment #102280)
August 29th, 2012 at 10:35 am
I have decided some time ago that while the moon landing was probably real, the photos are probably fakes!
I have personally autographed prints from Pete Conrad so I beg to differ.
@ Lucia “..I think the man really landed on the moon, Kennedy was almost certainly shot by Lee Harvey Oswald, and Princess Diana died in a car crash.”
Tut tut. You should know men have never landed on the moon, though Martians have on Earth. Kennedy was shot by the CIA and Princess Diana assassinated by the MI5. (And the Prince Harry pictures were fake).
True. See
My brother also told me the photos were evidence the situps have reduced his belly and that he’s discovered a way to remove the unruly curls from his otherwise kinky flame red hair.
@Carrick, take your pick
http://joannenova.com.au/tag/data-manipulation/
http://joannenova.com.au/tag/climate-money/
lucia (Comment #102417)
Lucia, in this post I think you have hit upon a reason we should judge a person’s view and its validity or even seriousness based on how well we think that person comprehends a situation or process. Ignorance and/or partisanship I think can explain a lot of the off-handed remarks we see from all sides of the AGW issue and floating around blogs. In blog land the key to learning from and separating material one reads is carefully considering the source and even determining whether the source/person is acting in a technical capacity or is being an advocate for a given position.
I have heard scientists, Mann and Hansen, who are held in esteem by their colleagues, make rather juvenile assessments of who the skeptics are, their implicated association with fossil fuel interests and motivations. I have heard similar remarks from other sides of the AGW issues. I would not judge the validity of those person’s technical positions based on off-handed partisan or advocacy comments. I would, however, be much more thorough and complete in my analyses of the technical work/statements of those who are obviously partisan and advocates in matters where partisanship/advocacy and technical issues overlap.
In the case of the Lewandowsky survey and paper, I would be very suspicious of his motivations and simply because I do not see what the connections he is making or attempting to make have anything to do with the validity of the conclusions and evidence coming out of climate science and in particularly as it relates to the issues of AGW. I would guess it is a weak attempt to connect those who oppose the advocacy position favoring more immediate and strong government intervention in the AGW issue with the less thoughtful people who might also be conspiracy theorists. What would motivate one to show that non thinkers exists on any side of the AGW issue when thoughtful people know that real issue is what we judge the science to be. My thought on that matter is that one might attempt that approach if they thought the science on the matter was clear and conclusive but that in order to push those conclusions into policy those undecided and less than informed voters could perhaps be made sufficiently embarrassed to want to be associated with the consensus and away from the more skeptical. In turn that situation would say more about Lewandowsky than it would about the science or even those participating in the discussion.
@Chris (Comment #102534)
September 2nd, 2012 at 5:08 am
@Carrick, take your pick
http://joannenova.com.au/tag/data-manipulation/
http://joannenova.com.au/tag/climate-money/
I get a 403 problem, restricted access?????? Is she hiding something 🙂