Lewandowsky peer reviewed study includes someone 32,757 years old

By Jo Nova

The worst paper ever published has competition. I was going to mock this, but it has all rather slipped beyond the Plains of Derision and sunk in a parallel universe. Researcher Jose Duarte is flummoxed, he simply can’t explain why a paper so weak was written, but moreso why it was ever published, and why everyone associated with it is not running for cover. It’s not so much about the predictable flaws, biased questions, and mindless results, it’s now about why UWA, The Uni of Bristol, PLOS, and the Royal Society are willing to wear any of the reputational damage that goes with it.

Lewandowsky, Gignac and Oberauer put out a paper in 2013 which was used to generate headlines like “Climate sceptics more likely to be conspiracy theorists”. The data sample is not large, but despite that, it includes the potential Neanderthal, as well as a precocious five year old and some underage teenagers too. The error was reported on Lewandowsky’s blog over a year ago by Brandon Shollenberger, then again by Jose Duarte in August 2014. Nothing has been corrected. The ages are not just typos, they were used in the calculations, correlations and conclusions. The median age was 43 but the mean age was a flaming neon 76. One wildly old person in the data skewed the correlation for age with nearly everything:......To Read More.....

My Take - The fact that some scientists are corrupt - that has always been so - and some science is fraudulent - that also has been so throughout time - never has any time been so fraught with obvious ideologically fraudulent studies and outright lies since Nazi Germany's green movement that juxtoposed environmentalism with race or Russia's Stalinist era that promoted the idiotic ideas of Trofim Denisovich Lysenko, in both cases politics trumped truth - or if you will - science.

 

Scientific integrity wasn't only oxymoronic, it became a tool to promote insanity! Hitler's green concept of "soil and blood" required purifying the German people by eliminating the Jews. Stalin starved tens of millions of his own people to death in the name of collectivization.  Beyond the evidence presented here that calls the competence or integrity of the “researchers” writing this paper into question, there is one question byJo Nova’s that should concern everyone:
 

“It’s not so much about the predictable flaws, biased questions, and mindless results, it’s now about why UWA, The Uni of Bristol, PLOS, and the Royal Society are willing to wear any of the reputational damage that goes with it.”
 

What should concern everyone is this problem clearly pervades the scientific community at the highest levels. The only conclusion the layman can arrive at is science is filled with either incompetent or corrupt people (or both) in huge numbers at every level, and at the highest levels.

 

When scientists refuse to divulge the data that allows for proper peer review, it isn't science, it's fraud. When scientists peer review bad science and fail to call it for what it is, it isn't science, it's collusion to fraud. When scientists take the attitude they're the professionals and everyone else must accept what they say without question, it isn't science, it's hubris. When the media fails to properly investigate and expose junk science, it isn't science, it's incompetence. When the problem becomes so pervasive the  professional community loses all sense of moral outrage, it's corruption. From that point on - which is right now - “it falls upon the amateur community to be the conscience of science”.