Strangling the Gorilla in the Echo Chamber of Your Mind
Lewandowsky Cook and Ecker (who he?) have two new articles at the Journal of Applied Research in Memory and Cognition.
The first “Beyond Misinformation: Understanding and Coping with the ‘Post-Truth’ Era”
“…explores the growing abundance of misinformation, how it influences people, and how to counter it. And outlines “a number of recommendations to counter misinformation in a post-truth world.”
The second “Letting the Gorilla Emerge From the Mist: Getting Past Post-Truth”
welcomes “the nine constructive and insightful commentaries on our target article” and synthesizes “the suggestions from the commentary into a proposal that may help overcome the post-truth malaise, provided a final obstacle can be overcome. This obstacle is the gorilla in the room: Policy making in the United States is largely independent of the public’s wishes but serves the interests of economic elites.”
Members of the public who want to learn more about Lewandowsky’s campaign to take policy making out of the hands of economic élites and hand it back to the people are invited to fork out $63 for 24 hours access to the two articles, and a further $31.50 for each of the “nine constructive and insightful commentaries.”
Or you can get a peek at some of the first pages by clicking here
For example, R. Kelly Garrett, School of Communication, Ohio State University, in his or her constructive and insightful commentary, says
The importance of the arguments made in “Beyond misinformation” (Lewandowsky, Ecker, & Cook, 2017) is difficult to underestimate.
Or, to put it another way, easy to overestimate.
The primary goal of this response, however, is not to underscore the article’s insights. Those contributions speak for themselves. Lewandowsky, Ecker, and Cook (2017) cover considerable intellectual territory..
Well I’m sure they do. But what territory exactly?
Aaron M. McCright and Riley E. Dunlap come straight to the point in their commentary: “Combatting Misinformation Requires Recognizing Its Types and the Factors That Facilitate Its Spread and Resonance.” It’s all about climate denial.
As sociologists who have studied organized climate change denial and the political polarization on anthropogenic climate change that it has produced in the US since the late 1990s, we have closely followed the work of Lewandowsky and his collaborators over the years. Like them, we have observed how the “climate change denial countermovement” has employed the strategy of manufacturing uncertainty — long used by industry to undermine scientific evidence of the harmful effects of products ranging from asbestos to DDT and especially tobacco smoke — to turn human-caused climate change into a controversial issue in contemporary American society. And, like Lewandowsky, Ecker, and Cook (2017) in “Beyond Misinformation,” we view these past efforts as key contributors to the present situation in which pervasive misinformation has generated “alternative facts,” pseudoscience claims, and real “fake news”—a “post-truth era” indeed.
Indeed. These “past efforts” are “key contributors to the present situation” in which large swathes of the population believe that tobacco smoke, DDT and asbestos are good for you. Don’t they? Where was I? Oh yes, Dunlap and McCright on alternative facts.
The current state of affairs has provoked much consternation among academics … Within this context, we widen our scope beyond climate change denial to discuss misinformation more generally and, in doing so, offer a sociological response to Lewandowsky et al. (2017), aimed at complementing and extending their analysis.
[At the bottom of page one of the Dunlap and McCright article is this peculiar little Author Note:
For their respect for facts, dedication to truth, and pursuit of justice, we thank Eric Schneiderman, and Robert Mueller, as well as Mueller’s all-star team …
I can think of a country or two where it might be normal for a scientist to thank effusively government employees for doing their job properly, but the USA? Is it post-normal for visions of gorillas in the mist to lead to such rank arselicking?]
Fortunately there’s a prepublished version of “Beyond Misinformation” at
http://websites.psychology.uwa.edu.au/labs/cogscience/Publications/Lewandowsky.2017.JARMAC.pdf
while “Letting the Gorilla Emerge From the Mist: Getting Past Post-Truth” can be found at:
and McCright Dunlap‘s “Combatting Misinformation Requires Recognizing Its Types and the Factors That Facilitate Its Spread and Resonance” is here
Happy New Year, and good reading.
Climate Scepticism 
UKH Ecker : Searching Goggle scholar gives 10+ times he is mentioned on Lew papers
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Ullrich K H Ecker Scholar Page
Top co-authors : Lew & Cook
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Lew and gang are increasingly creepy and transparently calling for overt censorship and suppression.
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It might help you understand this issue better if you avail yourself of this free online course that starts on January 9th: Making Sense of Climate Science Denial.
The New York State Department of Environmental Conservation helpfully announced the availability of this class. According to the description they distributed:
This massive open online course (MOOC) is offered by edX, a MOOC provider founded by Harvard University and MIT. Course material is primarily delivered via short videos. This MOOC focuses on climate change communication and includes forums for online conversations with fellow learners and course moderators.
Course Title: Making Sense of Climate Science Denial
https://www.edx.org/course/making-sense-climate-science-denial-uqx-denial101x-6
What You’ll Learn:
• How to recognise the social and psychological drivers of climate science denial
• How to better understand climate change: the evidence that it is happening, that humans are causing it and the potential impacts
• How to identify the techniques and fallacies that climate myths employ to distort climate science
• How to effectively debunk climate misinformation
Price: Free. (Certificates are available for a fee.)
Dates: 7 weeks starting on January 9, 2018
Level: Introductory
Effort: 2-4 hours a week
Reading this description there is no mention that the class is given by the University of Queensland. The first instructor listed is John Cook, adjunct lecturer. The description about of the course says:
In public discussions, climate change is a highly controversial topic. However, in the scientific community, there is little controversy with 97% of climate scientists concluding humans are causing global warming.
• Why the gap between the public and scientists?
• What are the psychological and social drivers of the rejection of the scientific consensus?
• How has climate denial influenced public perceptions and attitudes towards climate change?
This course examines the science of climate science denial.
We will look at the most common climate myths from “global warming stopped in 1998” to “global warming is caused by the sun” to “climate impacts are nothing to worry about.”
We’ll find out what lessons are to be learnt from past climate change as well as better understand how climate models predict future climate impacts. You’ll learn both the science of climate change and the techniques used to distort the science.
With every myth we debunk, you’ll learn the critical thinking needed to identify the fallacies associated with the myth. Finally, armed with all this knowledge, you’ll learn the psychology of misinformation. This will equip you to effectively respond to climate misinformation and debunk myths.
This isn’t just a climate MOOC; it’s a MOOC about how people think about climate change.
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I’ll be getting into Lew’s epistemological argument in a while, after a few deep breaths, and possibly deep draughts of something strong. But first, let’s take a peek at what’s going on in Stephan’s mind by means of a quote (Misinformation p11.)
The idea of clearing a blemish off a mirror with disinfectant raises the question: “What has the first author been doing in front of the mirror – again?” The two sentences which follow resolve the mystery:
Lew looks into the mirror and sees a window into an alternative reality. Hence the gorilla in the mist.
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Sorry folks but does
“Lew looks into the mirror and sees a window into an alternative reality. Hence the gorilla in the mist”
have any real meaning? I read such as this and wonder if I have been dipping into the remnants of the Christmas trifle too often.
I also ponder if I should be re-indoctrinated by taking that oh-so-inviting MOOC which offers to explain away all my doubts about climate denial. Oh to have an untroubled mind and join the mythical 97%.
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Thank you Roger Calazza. The course you mention was prepared by John Cook, coauthor of “Beyond Misinformation” and “Gorilla in the Mist.” In the “Beyond Misinformation” paper (p5) he says:
In 2010 Cook and Lewandowsky discussed using spambots to place fake comments on his own blog. Two years later he became Lewandowsky’s doctoral student, and now he’s an assistant professor of psychology.
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Is anyone offering a course on how to become a botnet puppeteer? The problem of disinfecting my information landscape I will defer till tomorrow. Only then will I feel able to work out whether it is a mirror of reality or a window into a multiverse. I confess I am not good at multi-tasking
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A modest alternative to the Cook Program is available:
The 12-step program is here:
https://rclutz.wordpress.com/2017/12/27/alarmists-anonymous/
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There are some interesting nuggets of social science in Beyond Misinformation, e.g.:
So which news is fake, that conservatives are more likely to believe in hazards, or that they deny climate catastrophism?
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Beyond Misinformation p31
Tell that to Dana Nuccitelli, who wrote a glowing report about this paper in the Guardian
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/climate-consensus-97-per-cent/2017/dec/27/fake-news-is-a-threat-to-humanity-but-scientists-may-have-a-solution
without revealing that three of his papers are cited in the bibliography, and that he cowrites the Skeptical Science blog with second author Cook.
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Here are two quotes which need to be read together, face to face, in the mirror which is a window into an alternative reality:
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I have to admit to being intrigued…
Although I thought I could work out what I think they intended, I had to look up ‘fractionated’. It’s a word from chemistry, though appropriated by media science (pka A-level media studies) by Lew and Cook, who by now can be abbreviated as Lewk. Surely Sokal would have something to say about the misappropriation of technical terms by the cock-eyed champions of “science”?
fractionate
ˈfrakʃ(ə)neɪt
verb CHEMISTRY
past tense: fractionated; past participle: fractionated
divide into fractions or components.
“samples were fractionated by electrophoresis”
separate (a mixture) by fractional distillation.
“the products were fractionated with boiling acetone in a Soxhlet apparatus”
The psychologists have no equivalent to Soxhlet apparatus; they have only dodgy Internet surveys, speculation from dodgy presuppositions, and dubious statistical methods. There is no equivalent to fractionation in social-psychology: you can’t boil Breitbart and The Guardian in acetone. (Well, you can, but all you would be left with is a highly-flammable paper mache, not James Delingpole and George Monbiot staring back at you from the other side of laboratory glassware.
The ‘societal megatrends’ are the preoccupations of erstwhile Occupiers and left wing academics — arguably not constituencies that in fact suffer from the alienating effects of ‘inequality’ or the ‘decline of social capital’, nor who have sat in the middle of an increasingly polarised cultural sphere, rather than sought to create wedges to serve as weapons in the Culture War. Weapons, that is, which have not served as well to capture the masses as much as served to alienate the public from high-minded academic truthsayers who believe that climate change and taxing the 1% slightly harder are the most important things to the American worker on minimum wages. Unfortunately for them, that worker is not so dumb as to have noticed that the academic presumes to speak on his behalf, but speaks on behalf of the academic’s self-interest, the same as any political constituency, albeit with better graphs.
Which makes Lewk’s opening all the more interesting:
Lewk’s dystopian projection is of course an allusion to Gove. As Barry likes to rightly point out, however, the experts in question were largely from organisations of a particular kind, with a particular agenda, and with a particular stake in the continuation of the status quo — the maintenance of the political order that has been dominant in the era in which those ‘megatrends’ have developed now to the point of denouement. Rather than ‘post-fact’ or ‘post-truth’, that era is better described as ‘post-political’ and ‘post-democratic’ — ‘post truth’ is a symptom of the expertisation of policy-making and the professionalisation of politics, not a cause, owed to the fact of facts being issued by authorities on truth, not by the contest of ideas in the public sphere from which the voter has been excluded by precisely the ethics Lewk champions. It only matters what proportion of lies or truths were uttered in either the US presidential campaign, or the Brexit referendum if you make an equivalent of financial economists at lofty NGOs with paediatric oncologists. Making such an equivalence makes a voter as powerless to participate in politics — i.e. economic decisions — as he or she would be in the treatment of his or her child’s cancer.
Lewk fears the minimum wage worker. And it is this cynicism and mistrust which causes his fantasy — his conspiracy theory, in fact — about Bondesque villains operating “millions” of Twitter bots. It could happen. And in the post-fact world of Blair’s dossiers, Rumsfeld’s unknown unknowns, and greens’ precaution (aka, Lewandowsky’s very own “uncertainty is not your friend”), what could happen is equivalent to what is happening. So Something Must Be Done. Lewk takes aim at democracy:
Here, Lewk again makes an analogy of parental choice in clinical intervention and voting. But it was not incredulity towards expertise and institutions of knowledge that caused the MMR-autism panic. Nor was it some blowhard billionaire posting in Twitter — Twitter had not yet been invented, and domestic Internet was still a new thing in 1998. It was a researcher who mis-identified the possible link. And it was the clumsy response of a trusted scientific institution that fuelled the panic, and then politicised it. It fed into growing suspicions towards corporate capitalism and its dominance in the field of medicine — which arguably (according to at least one of Wakefield’s notable critics, who is broadly sympathetic to Lewk) has put commercial interests before effective and safe treatment, with the acquiescence of the scientific establishment, and which, as many from within that field have noted, demonstrate the inadequacy of peer-review, the fact of confirmation and publication bias, and the extent to which many published articles are simply wrong. These are the consequences of Lewk’s own analogy. He should own it. the only way he can disown it is to call it either a ‘conspiracy theory’ or ‘post-factual’. You don’t need to be an expert to know that he would be lying.
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Ben
I thought the Lew/Cook “megatrends” comment you quote was a first timid step towards
sanity, away from the view they expressed just a couple of months ago in their OUP article that scepticism was a result of a mental malfunction of a certain kind of person incapable of rational thought.
However, the impression of dawning common sense was spoiled by a comment in their second paper, where, under the title: “Demisting the Gorilla” they say:
What kind of social scientist can admit that their list of mega trends is “largely arbitrary”? Or that the rise of individualism was news to them, only revealed in a paper published this year?
What alternative reality have they been inhabiting?
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Give Lew a break, Geoff. The kind of disinfectant that can clean a mirror of reality is hard to acquire and it probably takes a while to convert a mirror into a window. And how would you set about cleaning an information landscape anyway? While Lew was locked away in the smallest room, he just didn’t have the time to observe mega-trends. I imagine he had to ask his research assistants to read back-numbers of the New York Times selected by the 5 year old who participated in the moon hoax paper.
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Dr Lew is the psychological equivalent of Tracey Emin. No real talent but attractive to people who have no talent either but dream of acclaim. They think ‘if Dr Lew can make it, we all can’. But ultimately Dr Lew’s work is an unmade bed with used condoms and skid marks. No deep insight, no skill, just gimmick and bluster.
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TINYCO2 (29 Dec 17 at 11:57 pm)
Gosh. I thought I’ve sometimes been unfairly hard on Lew. But never would I have dared compare him with Tracy Enim. But now you say so …
She got a job at the Royal Academy. He got a six figure sum from the Royal Society…
That’s a potentially libellous accusation about the quality of the average Lew paper.
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$63 is a snip compared to what you get from a National Post subcription.
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“That’s a potentially libellous accusation about the quality of the average Lew paper.”
So you think Tracey Emin would be offended?
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Having read through the preprint version of Cook, Ecker, & Lewandowsky, 2017 I can find no clear definitions of either “post-truth” or “misinformation“. I will help fill in those glaring gaps. From the Oxford Living Dictionaries the adjective “post-truth” is defined as
I believe that the response of those who desire to be genuine experts is to differentiate themselves from those who seek to drive the mass appeals to emotion and belief. That is to appeal to conventional standards of evidence. Climate alarmism seems to reject this approach. It is the use of mantras like “AGW is real, human-caused, serious, and solvable” (Supran and Oreskes 2017) or support of banal belief-statements (the 97% consensus) that IMO is driving the climate alarmism in the opposite direction to what I would term a more academic approach for a subject on the periphery of science, and strongly influenced by value-judgements. In these terms “climate denial” becomes disagreeing with the belief-statements, not with rejecting objective facts or well-verified empirical statements. So the term “climate-denier” can be applied to both someone who rejects facts out of hand, and those who show that the believed mantras are at odds with the real world data, defy logic, and/or reject alternative belief systems. In the climate alarmist’s terms “misinformation” can be either false information, or pointing out that the climate propaganda is false, unsubstantiated, opinions. Note that Cook, Ecker, & Lewandowsky, 2017, with respect to the 2016 presidential campaign only look at “misinformation” by the Donald Trump campaign and not the Hillary Clinton campaign. Similarly, in previous articles from the Lewandowsky school have only looked at what he believes the reasons why people reject the mantras of climate and not the direct reasons. To do so would be a tacit acknowledgment that other valid beliefs are not only possible, but evaluated on the same basis as alarmism, are often comparatively superior.
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With considerable respect to those favouring the comparison between Lew output and Tracy Emin’s bed I do recognize the awful similarity but would point out that the “bed” was a one-off, never to be repeated. Lew (and chums) on the other hand have produced many undelectable items and have the stamina to produce many more. If artistic comparitors are required might I respectfully suggest Chris Ofili’s Oeuvre – both probably gave off a similar smell when being composed.
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Manic, further to your well-taken points was the display of post-truth during the last US presidential election, and then of course multiplied since then.
It was seen that a politician or a leader and his followers know they are playing a game, and winning depends on having the more compelling narrative, never mind the “truth.” In fact, these falsehoods are not even concerned with any “truth,” they are just making up stuff that sounds good to an audience. In other words, they are not lying, they are bullshitting. Insiders know it and are OK with it, while much of the public is naive and therefore gullible.
As it happens Harry Frankfurt of Princeton gets to the heart of the matter in his provocative essay, On Bullshit, he says:
It is impossible for someone to lie unless he thinks he knows the truth. Producing bullshit requires no such conviction.
Frankfurt’s essay is here: http://www.csudh.edu/ccauthen/576f12/frankfurt__harry_-_on_bullshit.pdf
My synopsis: https://rclutz.wordpress.com/2015/12/26/post-truth-climatism/
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As to my previous point on 30 Dec 17 at 2:35 pm, I have found a definition of “misinformation”. Ecker, U.K.H., Lewandowsky, S., Fenton, O. et al. Mem Cogn (2014) 42: 292. starts the abstract with
Given that two authors are the same, it is a valid to assume this is the definition used in the latest missive. In the terms of the Lewandowsky corpus the implications are
If an article in a peer-reviewed journal states that an item of information (be it fact, conjecture or opinion) is incorrect, or might not be valid, then it is invalid.
If an item of information in a peer-reviewed journal is claimed to be incorrect by something published outside of a peer-reviewed journal, then it has not been corrected.
If the original authors of an article respond to the “correction” in another peer-reviewed article or comment, then that “correction” is countered and so the original claims are not misinformation. An example is the countering of the Ruth Dixon and Jonathan Jones commentary entitled ‘Conspiracist Ideation as a Predictor of Climate Science Rejection: An Alternative Analysis.’ (A more detailed explanation is here.)
If the alarmist academic community ignores the correction, it is not a correction.
Misinformation is therefore not primarily about false statements. or inferior opinion statements. It is the making statements that the consensus of academics in the field deems to be incorrect or inappropriate. In the climate change arena, misinformation has become anything that contradicts the claims of the climate ideologues.
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