lewandowsky

Jonathan Jones and Ruth Dixon have published (see Ruth’s blog here) a comment  in Psychological Science on conspiracy theorist Stephan Lewandowsky’s Hoax article, much discussed at CA at the time.

In today’s post, I will discuss the ethics application and approval process for Fury.
According to Fury, on August 28, 2012, Michael Marriott (of Watching the Deniers) and John Cook (of SKS) began a program of monitoring and “real time” categorization of “conspiracist ideation” within blog articles and comments. The monitoring program continued until October 18, 2012.

Following a variety of untrue allegations by Lewandowsky and his supporters, Frontiers have issued a new statement stating that they received “no threats” and that they had received “well argued and cogent” complaints, including mine here and here.

Barry Woods has been trying to get Lewandowsky’s data, inclusive of any metadata on referring blogs, since August 2012 (before anyone had even heard of Lewandowsky). Woods has made multiple requests, many of which have not even been acknowledged. Woods has expressed concern about Hoax to Eric Eich, editor of Psychological Science, who suggested that Woods submit a comment.
The UWA’s Code of Conduct for the Responsible Practice of Research states clearly:

Over the past 15 months, I’ve made repeated requests to the University of Western Australia for a complete copy of Lewandowsky’s Hoax data in order to analyse it for fraudulent and/or scammed responses. Up to now, none of my previous requests were even acknowledged.

Following the retraction of Lewandowsky’s Fury, the validity of University of Western Australia ethics “investigations” is again in the news. At present, we have negligible information on the University’s investigation into Fury, but we do have considerable (previously unanalysed) information on their earlier and illusory “investigation” into prior complaints about the ethics application for Moon Landing Hoax (“Hoax”).

Moon Hoax author Stephan Lewandowsky is furious that Frontiers in Psychology has retracted his follow-up article, Recursive Fury. See also Retraction Watch here.

Lewandowsky’s recent article, “Role of Conspiracist Ideation” continues Lewandowsky’s pontification on populations of 2, 1 and zero.
As observed here a couple of days ago, there were no respondents in the original survey who simultaneously believed that Diana faked her own death and was murdered. Nonetheless, in L13Role, Lewandowsky not only cited this faux example, but used it as a “hallmark” of conspiracist ideation:

Mann rose to prominence by supposedly being able to detect “faint” signals using “advanced” statistical methods. Lewandowsky has taken this to a new level: using lew-statistics, lew-scientists can deduce properties of population with no members. Josh summarizes the zen of lew-statistics as follows:

Another bogus claim from Lewandowsky would hardly seem to warrant a blog post, let alone a bogus claim about people holding contradictory beliefs. The ability of many climate scientists to hold contradictory beliefs at the same time has long been a topic of interest at climate blogs (Briffa’s self contradiction being a particular source of wonder at this blog). Thus no reader of this blog would preclude the possibility that undergraduate psychology students might also express contradictory beliefs in a survey.