In accusing people I don’t know and have barely encountered before of fraud, I am respecting the exact nature of this blog. If you don’t like it, stop running around the internet accusing everyone else of fraud!

Steve: In my comments, I clearly stated that there was no reason to believe that Lewandowsky himself had been personally involved in the submission of fake responses in the online survey. However, in my opinion (and Tom Curtis’), the survey included fake responses and that Lewandowsky’s methodology was unequal to the task of ensuring data integrity.

I do not regard Lewandowsky’s sensitivity test as being an adequate test of fake responses, since it doesn’t cover all styles of fake responses. Nonetheless, even this limited test reduced the number of “skeptic” purporting to hold CYMoon to 1 and left the proportion of warmists adhering to the signature MLK and 9/11 conspiracies as exceeding the proportion of skeptics. One doesn’t need to do a chi-squared test to see this.

If you can’t replicate Lewandowsky’s results, maybe the problem is that you lack the ability? After all, you still aren’t able to explain why you didn’t conduct a simple statistical test of the data you present here, and your explanation of the numbers in the charts in this post is probably wrong. Why should we be expected to believe that your attempts at his research are more accurate than his, when you can’t explain a simple chart from your own work and won’t respond to questions about basic statistical tests?

In respect to [sic] wacko conspiracies, you have put up maybe 5 or 6 posts that allege scamming, faking, or lying. You have repeatedly alleged fraud at his site. Your response to Hanich’s email (suggesting the survey was completed multiple times in Hanich’s own lab) was obviously both disingenuous and an extreme example of a conspiracy theory. So no, his claims are not “fake”, you have no evidence of that, and all your behavior supports his findings.

[mod: You have completely misinterpreted the original posts. And your comment demonstrates a complete lack of understanding for the high quality, high volume readership, and volunteer-admin nature of this blog. There are no paid staff here to follow your every whim. It takes time to go through the many hundreds of auto-held posts at any given time. YES there's that much spam here. Regular readers will laugh at your assertion that the proprietor of this blog lacks in statistical ability. Thanks for the grins. Now, please respect the nature of this blog or you may find yourself one of the very few who actually does get blocked. It's no badge of honor; rather a sign of the blocked commenters' immaturity. I'm leaving this comment here for now. Regulars: please don't feed this troll.]

Furthermore, Lewanowsky used factor analysis and SEM, which rely not on the means but on the correlation between variables. If you are sure that the outliers and “inconsistent” data change his results, why don’t you reproduce his analysis on your revised data set? Why are you (and for that matter, Mcintyre) doing different, unrelated analyses?

Finally, it’s not unusual for people to answer questions inconsistently in a questionnaire. While removing inconsistent answers is accepted as a technique in data cleaning, it’s not the only one or the most valid one, and such inconsistent answers are in no way proof of scamming or faking. In suggesting so you’re showing you endorse exactly the kinds of conspiratorial thinking Lewanowsky has identified with skeptics in his survey …

Steve: I’ve tried to replicate Lewandowsky’s method and thus far can’t replicate it. I get different results using factor analysis. In addition, as I understand it, he only used factor analysis for exploratory analysis and then used weighted means. If you can clarify this, it would help.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_INFEKTION