http://narrative.ly/pieces-of-mind/nick-brown-smelled-bull/ h/t Mosher.
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Climate Audit 
93 Comments
WOW. Sokal has done some great service for science with his prior “hoax” paper in the journal Social Text. It’s nice to see these three authors come together in such a helpful way for this new project.
There is also an interesting piece on science journal standards and procedures here:
article in The Economist on problems of replicability in scientific research
this problem is systemic and occurs at the most basic levels
“A major factor is the failure to validate methods carefully when
they are first introduced or implemented. This failure can often
be attributed to a lack of sufficient analytical training. Researchers
require a large knowledge base covering a variety of disciplines. Among those, knowledge in statistics and analytical methods is often sadly lacking.”
SN Young, GM Anderson
Bioanalytical inaccuracy: a threat to the integrity and efficiency of research
J Psychiatry Neurosci. 2010 January; 35(1): 3–6.
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2799499/
I particularly resonated with this bit:
CA readers could no doubt fill in the blanks…
“For me, the real question is not about ____ or ____ or ____,” Sokal says. “It’s about the whole community. Why is it that no one before ____ —and I mean ____ was a part-time ____, at, let’s be honest, a fairly obscure _____ in ______ who has no particular training in ____ —why is it that no one realized this stuff was bullshit? Where were all the supposed experts?”
“Is it really true that no one saw through this,” he asks, “in an article that was cited 350 times, in a field which touts itself as being so scientific?”
Ross,
Maybe it touts itself as “scientific” because it isn’t. In the ’50s, answering “false to the question “Sociology is a science equal in stature to chemistry or physics; true or false?” got me an interview with the sociology teacher to have the correct view better explained to me.
It was amazing that she taught the scientific method in this class yet didn’t grok that none of the social scientists employed it.
Ross
I think this was the uni I attended some 30 yrs ago. It wasn’t called Uni of E London then. At that time all the lecturers in physics had PhDs in physical subjects and I thought I was well taught. However, you are right that it is not well known.
Steven Mosher, thanks for finding this and persuading SteveMc to put it on his great site.
no persuasion required. I read it and was speachless.
Ross,
I’m with you completely, I was going to ‘go off’ on that quote too – so widely applicable these days. I guess I dump it from clipboard now.
Highly interesting and impressing! Any resemblance to other branches of science is purely coincidental.
Remember this: http://www.shapingtomorrowsworld.org/Lewandowsky_2013_Recursive_Fury.pdf with his analysis of McIntrye’s analysis, all of it was based on we are honest, competent, scientist working here!
If only Fredrickson and Losada had included some commentary along the lines of, “the recursive fury of the Lorenz attractor”, they might have got away with it.
Ha. The recursive fury of the Lorenz attractor becomes my phrase of the week.
Wow! Amazing similarities – particularly, as Ross notes above, “It’s about the whole community. Why is it that …”
This “sacred shield” known as “peer review” certainly seems to have been doing an awful lot of damage to itself, for quite some time. I sure hope that these silently acquiescent “communities” begin to wake up and take some concrete steps towards reversing this … uh … trend towards “mediocrity forever”!
As an aside, back in the early ’90’s, somewhat tired of the proliferation of pseudo-psych books on the market, I started writing a parody, Calling a Spade a Spade: Life’s not a b*tch, it’s a bridge game in which I introduced the concept of “bridging”. From the intro:
Perhaps now’s the time to retrieve it from the back-burner, dust it off, update and complete it 😉
Reblogged this on CraigM350.
We been here before in Psychology , for years Cyril Burt’a work on intelligence was treated as ‘god like ‘ with this work being cited time and again with it going far as to become a standard text for many universities.
Trouble was it was all lies , he never even did the claimed research his claims were based on , for instance he claimed he had research assistants that no one ever heard of and of whom there is no record .
And what brought all this out was an outsider , Eysenck, looking at the maths and seeing for the BS it was at a rather basic level. Why for years had no one done the same thing , and why even now some will defend it , is a very good question.
So its not just climate ‘science’ were academic BS can be turned into gold if the will is there and people cannot to bother to challenge the consensus.
KNR:
The Burt affair has many complexities. The issue of whether he in fact faked his data as far as I can tell remains unresolved. His assistants have been identified. Given the political and ideological perspectives of many of those involved at the time – including Kamin and Hudson – and more recently, I see no quick resolution. Gould, who in some ways reignited the debate, has been shown to have completely screwed up his PCA. Ring any bells?
Re: bernie1815 (Oct 22 00:02),
Gould also opposed the Data Quality Act as an attack on scientists. I used to love to read Gould, but he was, in his own way, a part of the team.
I also appreciated this:
aka
a horse is horse of course, except when its a racehorse
Thanks, Steve and Steven. Wonderfully written article.
“The paper had exceeded the two-month limit of which authors were allowed to respond to a target article” makes one wonder how science is supposed to develop. I somehow doubt this is unique to American Psychologist.
Have to love a consensus.
Gosh!
After 28Gate it seems we have a new prefix; 2.9013Gate.
Granted it doesn’t have the same alliteration as its predecessor but it does seem to follow an emerging association with PNS and magic numbers.
1.618Gate, 2.7183Gate and 3.1416Gate seem sure to follow.
Doesn’t roll of the tongue quite as well as 28gate :))
After reading a paper that showed that her positivity ratios were of little empirical value Ms. Fredrickson wrote,
“It is important to recognize that considerable theory and evidence point to the continued value of tracking and raising positivity ratios.”
That’s an A+ for chutzpah.
In other words, “It doesn’t matter” She has the “right” answer.
Could that possibly be the “Appeal to Authority” logical fallacy? Say its not so!
Thank you for bringing this to my attention. Special thanks to Steve Mosher.
I’ll channel Karl Popper yet once again: It actually is not SCIENCE until it (the paper) has been thoroughly checked over and the methods found to be sound and the results found to be reproducible. “Publishing the paper” is in itself merely the introduction to the science. And what needs to follow after the publication of the paper is often the most difficult part of the process called “science”. That is one large reason why CA–in my opinion, and probably in yours–is so very valuable. Nick Brown, credentials or not, you have done some true science.
papers advertise science. the data and code document it.
Who’s Afraid of Peer Review? By John Bohannon, a science journalist. http://www.sciencemag.org/content/342/6154/60.full
Few smelled BS or even smelled. It must be a hot topic even amongst the Establishment considering the 196 comments. “Mysteriously” he missed the opportunity to include the two biggest – but non Open Access – publications: Science and Nature: was he afraid of the outcome?
Reminds also of: “Glowing reviews on ‘arseniclife’ spurred NASA’s embrace” http://www.usatoday.com/story/tech/columnist/vergano/2013/02/01/arseniclife-peer-reviews-nasa/1883327/
Thanks to SMc for putting this example up on a thread
Been said quite often before: “There is little problem with being wrong. The grievous sin is not being published”
Egads! This makes one think of the Dr Strangelove defence:
……………………………
(General in SAC)Turgidson: The duty officer asked General Ripper to confirm the fact the he had issued the go code and he said, “Yes gentlemen, they are on their way in and no one can bring them back. For the sake of our country and our way of life, I suggest you get the rest of SAC in after them, otherwise we will be totally destroyed by red retaliation. My boys will give you the best kind of start, fourteen hundred megatons worth, and you sure as hell won’t stop them now. So let’s get going. There’s no other choice. God willing, we will prevail in peace and freedom from fear and in true health through the purity and essence of our natural fluids. God bless you all.” Then he hung up. We’re still trying to figure out the meaning of that last phrase, sir.
(USA President)Muffley: There’s nothing to figure out General Turgidson. This man is obviously a psychotic.
Turgidson: Well, I’d like to hold off judgment on a thing like that, sir, until all the facts are in.
Muffley: (anger rising) General Turgidson, when you instituted the human reliability tests, you assured me there was no possibility of such a thing ever occurring.
Turgidson: Well I don’t think it’s quite fair to condemn a whole program because of a single slip up sir.
……………..
The movie is suggested viewing from time to time as it has elegant psychology cloaked in narrative.
Geoff, how many times have I told you guys that I don’t want no horsin’ around on the airplane?
Replication-challenge seems to have lost its savour. Wherewith shall it be salted?
“But the editor in chief, he’s honorable,”
This quote caught my eye.
I can see the BS aspect of Nick’s complaint. How you feel about an event is completely subjective. Two different people experiencing the same event in the same context can have two completely different responses. Though I suppose one’s response could be telecommunicated to the other if say their calibration period did not overlap (or something).
“My opinion of the paper has always been that it was a metaphor, disguised as modeling,” said David Pincus, a psychologist at Chapman University who specializes in the application of chaos theory to psychology. [ my strong ]
What is the mapping between the physical and the psychological for the exacting balance between energy input and energy utilization in chaos. This critical balance produces bounded excursions of the dependent variables.
I think human behavior is generally an elliptic-in-time problem. We sometimes make decisions at the present time based on estimations of what might happen at future time. We sometimes consider these future occurrences to be very highly likely, or very highly unlikely. Elliptic-in-time problems are well-known to be ill-posed.
However, at other times our actions are based solely on past information; a hyperbolic problem. A discrete explicit hyperbolic problem is stable if the time extent of the past information meets certain limitations.
Human behavior can never be a parabolic problem because we can never know all boundary conditions at all times.
Seems like hockey sticks come in all shapes, sizes and guises
Not a one among this esteemed group of skeptics seems to have caught the journalistic trick in the subject article. An effectively structured hit piece – in this case aimed directly at the entire field of positive psychology – starts with a general description of a field of study, then seamlessly segues into a description of a particulary embarrassing occurrence. The two are conflated to the extent that the reader is left with the impression that the entire field of study has no more merit than reading tarot cards. Our host has on many occasions warned readers that the statistical antics of Michael Mann do not mean that the entire field of dendrochronology is a circus. The field of positive psychology does have valid tools for posing and answering questions about the human condition, and some thorough and cautious practitioners. This is not to deny that there are field-wide issues that slow progress, such as disinterest in negative results.
Matt,
Is it possible that you missed the point. Brown’s concern was raised by no-one else objecting to this publication. And yes, I would tar the profession for at the minimum not paying attention.
You note the problem. But what’s the solution? How’s a outsider like me supposed to know that anyone in the field is capable of doing real solid reproducible work? I don’t have the time or the inclination to plow through the research papers; I have to trust that the experts know what they’re doing. Or not.
I really don’t see any way out of suggesting, politely but firmly, that if there are any competent people in positive psychology, it is their job not mine to smoke out and remove really ridiculous faux-science from their field.
In climate science: It seems to me that hardly anyone on the AGW-believers’ side really grasps the impression that Climategate made on many of us: Huh – politicians, not scientists. That kind of impression takes a long time to go away, and it was completely self-inflicted, nothing to do with Oil Money. Mann and Schmidt did it to themselves. People like Ross McKitrick and Judith Curry help. Yes, help, fools out there – I now feel that there is some competent oversight. I at least will hear when new stuff is garbage, even if people who read SkS never will. They help. People who heap abuse on them don’t.
Rob Wilson’s recent talk to the students reported at Bishop Hill’s is a good solution. Honest observations of a practitioner. Just as Judith Curry’s.
Sure, one example may not discredit an entire field…. Except that this case involves two of the pre-eminent figures to date in the “positive psychology” movement (Frederickson and Seligman), plus the 350 or so articles which cited the Frederickson work without understanding. There may be much that can be salvaged from work in “positive psychology” to date, who knows, but it will require serious review and re-analysis.
Also, there are many offshoots and spin-offs across more “applied” work in leadership, organizational development, and so on which need to be re-assessed.
For instance, some years ago I picked up a book which had been required in a friend’s graduate level course in “leadership” for an MBA program. It is “Leadership and the New Science” by a Margaret Wheatley. I found it quite unreadable, just a melange of pseudo-scientistic analogies and metaphors posed as having a rigorous scientific basis.
There is always danger from mis-placed physics envy in social science, and this Wheatley book seems to be an egregious example of pretended rigor for people who don’t know better. It is reportedly assigned in many university courses and might be another suitable object of some “auditor” debunking!
So Lewandowsky is not a fluke for this profession.
The Nick Brown article is amazing.
Too bad that AGW is even more insular than psychology.
Retraction watch on this subject:
http://retractionwatch.wordpress.com/2013/09/19/fredrickson-losada-positivity-ratio-paper-partially-withdrawn/
Comment from Sokal at the Retraction Watch link is well worth quoting here as responsive to points raised in this thread (thinking about climate science comparisons):
Sokal told us he thinks the case raises other issues:
“Last but not least, there is a huge open question, which concerns not Fredrickson and Losada but the entire psychology community, and particularly those people working in “positive psychology”. How could such a loony paper have passed muster with the reviewers at the most prestigious American journal of psychology, netted 350 scholarly citations, and been repeatedly hyped by the “father of positive psychology” (and past president of the APA), without anyone calling it into question before a first-term part-time Masters’ student in Applied Positive Psychology at the University of East London came along and expressed his doubts? Where were all the leaders in the field of positive psychology? The leaders in the application of nonlinear-dynamics models to psychology? Was everyone really so credulous? Or were some people less credulous but politely silent, for reasons of internal politics?”
Comment from Sokal at the Retraction Watch link is well worth quoting here as responsive to points raised in this thread (thinking about climate science comparisons):
I found the whole article quite amusing, especially how late the psychologists are to the chaos fad. Peak chaos was about twenty years ago with all sorts of fields claiming new understanding based on chaos theory, of course none of them exhibiting any comprehension of non-linear dynamics. The application I liked the best was the businessmen who claimed that it enabled them to deliver cement to construction sites faster than their competitors in Mexico City. If you’ve ever experienced traffic in Mexico City that’s quite a claim.
Psychology is never going to be a science because people aren’t atoms. Two different people will react to the identical situation differently and the same person may respond differently to the same situation but at different times. You’re probably better off with Aesop’s Fables, Biblical Proverbs, and Poor Richard’s Almanac for advice.
Re: “chaos fad”
Still going strong in many courses and workshops which have relied upon works such as the Margaret Wheatley, “Leadership and the New Science” over the past two decades:
[emphasis added]
“The result is a much clearer work that first explores the implications of quantum physics on organizational practice”
I could at first think of no means through which the discreet energy levels of individual subatomic particles could affect organizational practice. Perhaps they also just assume teleconnection ?
Wheatley:
How much of a grasp of this subject does one actually need to conclude that anything she might have to say in this area is highly likely to be nonsense?
Bulls**t baffles brains
Turning tree rings into numbers, then taking varves and ice cores and corals and stalactites and doing the same thing and then merging them all – you end up with a lot of numbers. Granted science IS quantification, since the days 1050 years ago when reductionism and positivism took over. And it appears to be true that the “soft” sciences DO have “physics envy” in their earnest desire to be taken seriously. They early on had to decide to somehow put numbers to moods and feelings and states of mind.
Something like this was bound to happen.
But it isn’t very far from Deepak Chopra (especially) with self-help claptrap bullsh*t about tying quantum mechanics to New Age concepts. Not far at all. It just happened to be bullsh*t enough – by bringing in math that the editors were not willing to admit was over their heads.
That is exactly what the climatologists have done with the politicians at IPCC – made it impossible for them to admit, “I don’t understand this part – can you explain the math and how it applies?” Instead the pols went the other route – and took the over-their-head math and added ANOTHER layer of bull to it, twisting even the dubious math into policy directions.
Editors, politicians, wannabe scientist/hangers-on – they all allow themselves to be hoaxed by numbers of really dubious relevance and applicability.
And Professor Mann has just the overbearing personality to rub their noses in it if they don’t “get it.” Just like he bullied the hell out of Keith Briffa in order to truncate the tree ring data at 1960 to hide the decline.
People don’t want the world to know something is over their heads, so they will let it pass and hope for the best.
It’s actually cowardice. The cowardice of being phonies – no one wants to admit they are ignorant in some aspect of their field. The original editors should have run the maths by mathematicians in the first place.
Just as Mann should have run his work past statisticians who actually KNEW how to deal with such data.
The public deserves better. Science is supposed to have gatekeepers. Those gatekeepers are the journals. When something gets through the gatekeepers, it is supposed to be vetted – peer-reviewed” they call it – and that is the point of trust in the system. It gets by, it’s good. It doesn’t, it is she*t.
The pols take it the same way the public does: They trust that the science had the gatekeepers’ anointing. But if they have agendas, do they let that trust become gullibility?
And that is what this is all about: Gullibility.
Climatology or positive psychology or Deepak Chopra’s phony New Age guru posturing – throwing scientific bullsh*t at people, and most people think, “Well, he seems to be an authority on this, so it must be true.”
So, what we end up with is Michael Mann being a phony New Age guru, because no one was willing to admit to being skeptical about his Deepak Chopra math. Except that when any skepticism came up about Mann’s work, Mann bullied the tar out of them, bullied them into submission.
At least Deepak Chopra does it with a smile.
Re: Steve Garcia (Oct 22 15:37),
You made me go there.
Well chosen clip, jeez. Thank you, jeez, Nick Brown, Steve & Stephen.
Unfortunately, I have no novel suggestions for combatting the poor science that we meet so often.
Long have I wondered aloud why authors’ colleagues and others skilled in a particular art can sit idly by, knowing that such poor quality material is being reviewed and published as if it was the epitome of excellence.
Craig –
So much for the quality control claimed by the peer review process.
The weak spot is – well, the weak spot is the peers doing the review, it seems. In more ways than one.
I found it funny they called out Tony Robbins in the write-up. He has probably the best TED talk ever given.
I think the larger point being, any attempt to parameterize soft notions in psych/soc is always less compelling than you think. But there is “non-math” approach to understanding humans and desires, which may be in fact more effective.
yup.
the issue has to do with unbridled “positivism” the notion that without numbers you cant say anything. hence the drive to reduce everything to numbers.
also there are interesting things like the nocebo effect.
I don’t often use Math with Psychology, but when I do, I prefer to use Schrodinger’s equation. XX
EdeF
When I mix math with psychology, I think of this –
You must be the world’s most interesting mathematical psychologist 🙂
Wow. I slogged through the Brown paper, all the way to this:
Unfortunately, there is one final, yet crucial, flaw lurking here: the values of sigma, b, and (especially) i plugged into Equation 6 are totally arbitrary, at least within wide limits; so the predicted critical positivity ratio is totally arbitrary as well. Choose different values of the parameters , b, i and one gets a completely different prediction for (P/N)crit. Recall that Saltzman (1962) chose sigma = 10 for illustrative purposes and purely for convenience; then Lorenz (1963) and Losada (1999) followed him. Were humans to have eight fingers on each hand instead of five, Saltzman, and in turn presumably Lorenz and Losada, might well have chosen sigma = 16 instead of sigma = 10 — which (with b = 8/3) produces a very similar Lorenz attractor, except that the borderline of chaos is now rcrit = 1040/37 = 28.108, and the predicted critical positivity ratio (with i = 16) is (P/N)crit = 1233/296 = 4.1655405. Yet other values of sigma, b, i would yield still different predictions for (P/N)crit. Thus, even if one were to accept for the sake of argument that every single claim made in Losada (1999) and Losada and Heaphy (2004) is correct, and even if one were to further accept that the Lorenz equations provide a valid and universal way of modeling human emotions, then the ideal minimum positivity ratio that Fredrickson and Losada (2005) claimed to have derived from Losada’s “empirically validated” nonlinear-dynamics model would still be nothing more than an artifact of the arbitrary choice of an illustratively convenient value made by a geophysicist in Hartford in 1962.
Whoops, missed a link to the actual paper.
Yeah, and here’s something that I HOPE would have tipped me off had I been in Brown’s shoes in that class: This ratio (2.9013) in the article linked is reported to FIVE significant figures! What?? Hello!!? Can you even get any physically measured quality in physics to five sig figs (the density of a substance? the resistance of a resistor?), much less in psychology? Psychology?? And no one smelled this rat? And even in the Brown et al. paper: 1040/37 has only two sig figs and so cannot be reported as “28.108”, etc. I am willing to place a side bet that Fredrickson does not even know the definition of “significant figures”. What percentage of psychologists do know the definition? (I am pretty sure that Groucho Marx would have a definition, actually, but not from the perspective of a psychologist.)
Re: William Larson (Oct 23 19:03),
And even fewer know that in any calculation, the result must be reported with the same count of SFs that is the least used in any factor or additive element.
“Can you even get any physically measured quality in physics to five sig figs (the density of a substance? the resistance of a resistor?), much less in psychology?”
For what it’s worth, yes, there are many quantities in physics which can be measured more precisely than that. See e.g. the first 11 tables in “CODATA recommended values of the fundamental physical constants: 2010” http://physics.nist.gov/cuu/Constants/codata.pdf . Note also that for some specialties this has been true for quite a long time: consider the famous Roemer/Huygens estimate ca. 1680 AD of the speed of light based on anomalies of a few minutes (over the course of many years) in the observations of the orbit of Jupiter’s moons.
(In psychology? Probably not so much.:-)
– – – – – – – –
Mosher, a great find and thank you for suggesting that it be posted here.
What Rotondaro describes was an effective team concept to be encouraged in auditing climate research papers. The team consisted of: the critical questioning new apprentice; the diplomatic old skeptical master; & the independent sharpshooter cum mathematician.
A team like that is led by the passionate apprentice. It says a lot about human collaborative efforts. : )
The post was inspiring.
John
thanks. Steve’s framing commentary says it all.
kinda speaks for itself doesnt it
Before anyone gets carried away throwing laurels at Sokal’s feet, you should check what he’s said about the climate debate. In the preface (on pages xv-xvi) of his Beyond the Hoax he endorses the Republican-war-on-science/merchants-of-doubt explanation for the existence of continued controversy on the issue; the blurb trumpets that idea too. On the other hand, on pp. 97 and 101 he talks about “our lack of knowledge about other subjects, eg. the global climate” and says that “many of the central political issues of the coming decades — from health care to global warming to Third World development — depend in part on subtle and hotly debated questions of scientific fact”, not really in line with the overwhelming-consensus/science-is-settled thesis — but that’s a reprint of an essay written in 1996, unlike the preface from 2010. (Disclaimer: I don’t have access the while book yet.)
(That should read “have access to the whole book yet” of course.)
WOW! I’m in awe. Calculating the ‘positivity ratio’ to FIVE significant digits? TAKE THAT you physicists! What an incredible data set they must have! I wonder where its been archived?
W^3
We all know that peer review has its “issues” – and always will. Usually, it does not matter to the wider world – only to the guys whose paper(s) get the can. We dust ourselves down and either fight the reviewers and win or fight them and loose. If the latter, then we usually move on. The trouble really occurs when politicians and the media latch on to something published by peer review and use it to further an agenda. Personally, I would ban all politicians from entering the Library. Well, I would do if I were convinced they could read.
See no evil! Tone down the language!
Strong negative evidence may be needed!
“Ironically,” (Gaustello) wrote, “I did send American Psychologist a comment on some of the foregoing points, which they chose not to publish because ‘there wasn’t enough interest in the article.’ In retrospect, however, I see how I could have been more clearly negative and less supportive of any positive features of the original article.”
The dichotomy of “positive psychology”!
I don’t know about these tricky positivity ratios.
That great scientist, Walt Disney, had it summed up years ago:-
When you wish upon a star
Makes no difference who you are
Anything your heart desires
Will come to you
If you’re looking for more debunking in the psychology field try this one.
http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/fulfillment-any-age/201301/the-secrets-behind-psychology-s-most-famous-experiment
I heard Gina Perry talking onthe radio recently and very convincing she was. I’m ideologically mistrustful of the conclusions of the Milgram Experiment so it’s possible I find all this convincing because I want it to be true!
It’s worse than we thought…
I was gasping throughout at the parallels of this ABC Catalyst programme ‘Heart of the Matter’ part1 between the Cholestorol Club and the Climatology Club as you can well imagine.
http://www.abc.net.au/catalyst/stories/3876219.htm
I’m looking forward to part2 when the manufacturers of Australias most prescribed stain drugs get asked the hard questions. Watch the Heart Foundation guy Manning up and trying not to smirk.
The sublime irony of it all is completely lost on the left/green numpties at Aunty(our BBC equivalent) who have been busy this last week parrotting Gore, Figueres and having love-ins with McKibben as they all connect CAGW with the Sydney bushfires.
Thinking about the programme later and how the rise and rise of the Cholestorol Club occurred from a cherry-picked hockey stick graph and how it sustained itself for so long took my breath away but you could see how the rise of modern heart surgery began to puzzle the cardiology community. What they were seeing on the operating table was not what their learned elders had taught them at uni and some began to look back at the basis of 40yrs of correlation without causation. Ouch!
oops.. statin drugs
Here’s a quick rundown of statin prescription, bearing in mind there’s only 23mill of us-
http://www.smh.com.au/national/health/statins-offer-quick-fix-for-heart-for-a-price-20130921-2u6na.html
Well this thread certainly turned into an ugly little experiment. Readers were presented two information sources, the article and the paper. The paper is no doubt (I did not read it) a very squishy bit of science, mostly nonsense. The article is a journalistic persuasion piece beginning with the equivalent of “it was a dark and stormy night,” with plenty of character development, misdirection and a helping of nonsense. Both were intended to persuade. But to a certain type of crowd, there was a vast difference between the two. The paper pushed all the wrong buttons for those with the preconceived notion that fields like psychology have no useful tools in the toolbox. In contrast, the article pushed all the right buttons, even leading with the significant figure bait, and full of red meat for self-avowed rational empiricists. In this thread we see nothing but thumbs down for the paper, which is as it should be, but we also see nothing but thumbs up for the article. In short, we see that even a group of skeptics who have self-selected for a blog based on sophisticated critical thinking do a very poor job of remaining objective when presented with an argument that plays to their biases.
Don’t believe me? Answer the question below without rereading the article. The article contains this statement:
“’Is it really true that no one saw through this,’ [Sokal] asks, ‘in an article that was cited 350 times, in a field which touts itself as being so scientific?’”
“No one saw through this” is:
1. True.
2. Not quite right, there was one guy.
3. Totally wrong, lots of folks criticized the paper.
“The article contains this statement:”
you meant : The article contains this question.
The answer is one of the reasons why I forwarded the article to steve.
As we all know from the climategate emails there were other critics of Mann.
They were not so public.
I’ve made the same point with respect to the Piltdown man. Early on the hoax was questioned. But no one paid attention. In fact early on some suggested it was a fluke. To counter this suggested a “confirming” second example was produced. Finally, it continued to be cited after it was discovered as a hoax. There is a lesson there about the sociology of science.
My main purpose in forwarding this to steve was that I saw parallels between
this, steve’s story and the piltdown episode.
You need to look in the mirror Matt Skaggs. You claim:”nothing but thumbs up for the article” Many people did not comment on the article. In any event, you are merely pointing out that even at climate audit where there is a patina of objectivity, many suffer from motivated reasoning and confirmation bias. Your post identified you in this same category with a complete lack of self awareness.
What is disturbing to me is that the lack of critical examination of studies and the overwhelming desire for “positive” results in peer review literature apparently pervades many if not all specialties in science.
This is a human problem and the sooner you and everyone else accepts the philosophy of Pogo, the better off we will all be. Until then, we continue in the endless loop of finger pointing between each territorial circle-jerk.
Matt, I think you’re reading a bit too literally.
When I read the sentence you quote, it seems pretty obvious (to me anyway) that Sokal isn’t literally saying that *nobody* *ever* saw through this. Firstly, the implication he’s making is that nobody saw through it at the time it was published. Obviously, folks started to question it later. I don’t think that’s in dispute is it?
But I think it’s more subtle than that. What I interpret that sentence as meaning (and perhaps he could have worded it better, but it is a quote after all and possibly an off-the-cuff remark) was to say “Is it really true that nobody at the time saw through this *and had both the ability and desire to prevent it from being published*”.
I think a lot of people reading his quote will have a similar interpretation to mine. Did you not read that into it or are you just being obtuse? Admittedly, you have to think about what he actually means rather than what the sentence means if you interpret it completely literally but when I’m reading a quote that’s generally what I’m doing.
Anyway, I think that’s kind of the point of both this episode and the Hockey Stick papers. In both cases, there’s a good chance that not only did multiple people see through the nonsense but that at least some of the were in a position to stop the papers being published or at least make a public objection. In both cases they decided not to. Whether it’s because it was easier to ignore it than do anything about it (probably), would have damaged their careers if they had made a stink, despite them being correct (almost certainly) or as part of an I-look-away-when-you-publish-rubbish-and-you-do-the-same-to-me culture, who knows. Although ClimateGate does give us some insight into what really went on behind closed doors.
Matt, I believe you are trying to say that it would be false to say that “no one noticed”, since the article clearly states that others had issues with the original paper. What I believe Sokal was trying to convey, however, goes a bit deeper, in that he is trying to ask why no one with the clout/prestige/power in that field of study noticed it was based on error/imagination and took steps to have it withdrawn (or at least modified), thus allowing the paper to exist essentially unchallenged for a long, long time. The parallels to other scientific fields should be clear..:)
Thanks for the correction Steven. Even with obsessive proofreading, I always screw something up. There is some fascinating stuff in positive psychology using simple Game Theory models such as the Prisoner’s Dilemma. Personality is even more complicated than climate, but as with all relatively new areas of study, the scientists willing to take baby steps with simple tools can make big discoveries.
I also find the comparison of Mann’s work with Piltdown Man fascinating. Once Piltdown Man was debunked, it was very difficult for anyone to believe that the perpetrator could be so ignorant as to naively assemble parts from different animals into a complete skeleton . Therefore there was not a substantial debate (AFAIK) as to whether Piltdown was fraud or incompetence…it had to be fraud. But if you stitch together a bunch of murky data sets of questionable relevance, apply some murky math and stonewall when asked for details, there will always be some doubt as to what you knew, and when you knew it.
Maybe, to people without brains.
A related issue are graphs – which may be
difficult to read due to incompetence
and/or
are designed to “hide the decline” etc.
Of course, it’s harder to expect people to believe simple incompetence when you calculate verification scores that show your key results are unsupported, hide those scores while publishing others then deny having calculated any at all.
We can see via their code Mann et al knew their r2 scores were zero for the earlier portions of their reconstructions. In Michael Mann’s book, he acknowledged they knew (after the fact) their MBH98 results were dependent on a small amount of bristlecones. Despite (or because of) this knowledge, they went to lengths to hide these facts.
My field of study was economics and in the early 80s we were busy feeding punch-cards into a Dec10 monster ready to mathematically model whole national economies, presumably in order to forecast and solve the world’s economic problems. Yes, well the best laid plans of mice and men as they say.
It made as much sense as trying to model the human condition(Humanology anyone?) or global climate (Globology?) and it’s high time some common sense prevailed at the hubris and naivety of even thinking we can box up with a pretty pink ribbon such complex and chaotic big picture stuff. When men stop believing in God to explain the inexplicable they’ll obviously believe in anything, not least their own importance in the big scheme of things.
JoNova teases out the obvious parallels and similarities-
http://joannenova.com.au/2013/10/catalyst-says-consensus-wrong-on-cholesterol-but-unquestionable-on-climate/
And you surmised correctly there’d be an appeal to authority, the science is settled, remember the precautionary principle, take your statins and let’s have no more of this nonsense Aunty-
http://www.abc.net.au/pm/content/2013/s3878646.htm