There were no “threats” against Frontiers In Psychology. They retracted the paper because it was crap.
2 thoughts on “No, Lewandowsky Minions”
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There were no “threats” against Frontiers In Psychology. They retracted the paper because it was crap.
Comments are closed.
Let me understand you clearly, please? You are saying it is crappy that a psychology paper attempts to diagnose maladies afflicting individuals, via indirect and long-distance methods, and then names or otherwise specifies the identity of those individuals, right? You are saying that the ethical standards of psychology research were violated in a fashion or to a degree that a layman might describe the work as “crap” — ethically.
You are NOT saying these respected scientists have published crap (which is to say, fraudulent) results, using fabricated data from non-existent polls supposedly conducted by friendly-bias websites by shills pretending to be skeptics or that the authors have attributed to true skeptics opinions, and psychological maladies, which defame those specific individuals by name all in violation of widely recognized scientific and professional standards for fraudulent crappy purposes such as personal aggrandizement, political influence, or appointments to and membership in prestigious scientific societies. Are you?
The use of the term “crap” is at present a little ambiguous. Perhaps it may be quicker to specify your meaning now rather than two to ten years from now in a distant courtroom.
Can’t the paper be both? In fact it is. Note that Frontiers commented that the authors were unable or unwilling to fix the paper. Does it seem that hard to you? Leave out the names and identification! But they could not leave off the names of the people described, because, as the authors themselves said, the purpose of the paper was to knock down some prominent skeptics. As has been pointed by others, the examples they chose of conspiratorial thinking were poor (http://rankexploits.com/musings/2013/lews-furious-recursion/ is one of many such). Note that they were chosing from _comments_ on blogs; all of us know that any climate blog, skeptical or non-skeptical, has numerous examples of conspiratorial thinking in every comments string. The authors weren’t interested in choosing good examples; as they said, their goal was to harm prominent skeptics.
Could be Frontiers eventually decided that they weren’t interested in being used as a pawn in someone else’s war. Especially when a number of posts this last week attacked them for “caving to threats”.