EEVblog Electronics Community Forum
General => General Technical Chat => Topic started by: Sionyn on February 06, 2013, 12:25:51 pm
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a paper investigating the link between conspiratorial thinking and the rejection of climate science provoked a response on blogs skeptical of the scientific consensus that appeared to illustrate the very cognitive processes at the center of the research. This generated data for a new paper titled 'Recursive fury: Conspiracist ideation in the blogosphere in response to research on conspiracist ideation.' The researchers reviewed the reactions for evidence of conspiratorial thinking, including the presumption of nefarious intent, perception of persecution, the tendency to detect meaning in random events, and the ability to interpret contrary evidence as evidence that the conspiracy is even greater in scope that was originally believed. Some of the hypotheses promoted to dismiss the findings of the original paper ultimately grew in scope to include actors beyond the authors, such as university executives, a media organization, and the Australian government.
http://www.frontiersin.org/Journal/DownloadFile.ashx?pdf=1&FileId=2918&articleId=40138&Version=1&ContentTypeId=58&FileName=Provisional%20PDF.pdf (http://www.frontiersin.org/Journal/DownloadFile.ashx?pdf=1&FileId=2918&articleId=40138&Version=1&ContentTypeId=58&FileName=Provisional%20PDF.pdf)
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Greetings EEVBees:
--Irony indeed. This is a Politically motivated attack using a non-empirical pseudoscience, which Richard Feynman at different times referred to a "Cargo Cult Science" and "Hocus Pocus" to avoid answering inconvenient questions like: Why no warming in the last 15 years, while CO2 is still going up? Why did Michael Mann try to sweep much of the past climate record under the rug? Why did Mann try to avoid sharing his data? That is not the usual scientific practice. Why was Phil Jones trying to "Hide the decline."? Why were they conspiring to keep opposing voices from being published. Why did Jones advise colleagues to destroy emails and data that might be subject to FOIA subpoenas? Why did Al (Jazeera) Gore in his "Documentary" screed "An Inconvenient Truth" tell people that the geological record shows temperature spikes were preceded by CO2 increases, when if fact it was exactly the reverse that was true.
--Below you will find a working link to the article cited at the beginning of this post.
http://www.frontiersin.org/Journal/DownloadFile.ashx?pdf=1&FileId=2918&articleId=40138&Version=1&ContentTypeId=58&FileName=Provisional%20PDF.pdf (http://www.frontiersin.org/Journal/DownloadFile.ashx?pdf=1&FileId=2918&articleId=40138&Version=1&ContentTypeId=58&FileName=Provisional%20PDF.pdf)
--I used to regularly see articles like this in "Psychology Ptoday". "New study (which would never be repeated) shows that people who do not agree with the Liberal Agenda lack empathy and are less intelligent" Meanwhile, in the US, the Headshrinkers are pushing a pharmaceutical cornucopia on an ever growing fraction of young school children, mostly boys.
--The main reason for citing the article and for the article itself, is to try to convince you not to look into the data, and to just hold up your hand and say Up AGW, or else be thought a dangerous paranoid or perhaps merely a buffoon. Thus since detractors are nut cases, there is really no need to answer the troubling questions at the beginning of this post. I wonder what the correlation would be between AGW advocates and people who believe that 9/11 was a conspiracy involving Bush. Hmm.
--Below is an video where Feynman comments on the Social Sciences.
R. P. Feynman on social sciences (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IaO69CF5mbY#)
--Excerpts (on Psychology) from "Surly You're Joking Mr. Feynman!"
http://www.lhup.edu/~DSIMANEK/cargocul.htm (http://www.lhup.edu/~DSIMANEK/cargocul.htm)
--Pay particular attention to Feynman's discussion of the fact that repeatability is not a feature of Psychology experiments.
--When last we dealt with this topic Dave stated that "Facts are facts whether you believe in them or not." and I answered that that was correct but AGW was not a fact but just a theory "with considerable scientific support". Dave then answered that he had never said that it was, and then locked the thread before I could respond. I was going to add that I did not say that Dave had said that, nor have I ever believed that Dave confuses facts with theories. My statement was directed at the larger readership and not merely Dave, who was merely referenced. I in no way meant for anyone to infer, that I have ever thought Dave could not tell a theory from a fact. I sincerely regret any confusion I may have caused on this point, and offer my apologies. Dave is not stupid. In fact there are very few stupid people on this Blog. A few are pig headed and wrong, but stupid, not so much.
"At the heart of science is an essential balance between two seemingly contradictory attitudes--an openness to new ideas, no matter how bizarre or counterintuitive they may be, and the most ruthless skeptical scrutiny of all ideas, old and new. This is how deep truths are winnowed from deep nonsense."
Carl Sagan 1934-1996
Best Regards
Clear Ether
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Very well put, SgtRock.
I really do try to avoid bringing non-technical subjects into this forum (though it may not seem that way.) So I wasn't going to reply here at all. Glad you did. You're right, it's an attempt to prevent honest inquiry, by painting critics of the global warming scam as mentally unbalanced. When there's a vast amount of solid evidence that it's the AGW supporter core group who are engaging in falsifying data and suppression of the process of open scientific debate. For example the case of the CRU emails leak (actually two massive leaks) where key figures are revealed discussing how and why they will falsify results and suppress investigations.
There've been some interesting essays written on the psychology of 'conspiracy denial' too. A good point that's often made, is that once people have strongly believed in something for a while, there's a strong barrier to consideration of any information that might demonstrate their belief was the result of deliberate deception by others. For one thing, people hate to admit they have been suckered. Especially when the intent behind the original deception was demonstrably evil. To then admit you were fooled, by people with evil intent, a person has to admit to themselves that they cooperated (even passively) with evil.
Most people simply can't make that leap, even when they can only see it subconsciously. So they go into flat denial, and won't examine anything to do with the issue.
I wonder what the correlation would be between AGW advocates and people who believe that 9/11 was a conspiracy involving Bush. Hmm.
You might be surprised.
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There has been too much of this off-topic stuff lately on the forum.
Please refrain from starting such threads here, there are countless other forum to do this on.
This one is again locked.
Dave.