Socrates on the ropes

'Shaping tomorrow's world...Yes we would have to be part of that. We have 60 PhD students working on these matters at CUSP alone. We only do academic work if it is shaping tomorrow's world...Not worth doing otherwise, when you see how little time we have to change."

STW was launched at UWA on Friday 13^th May 2011, but the site never achieved its ambitious goals. The "only thing missing was 100,000 readers a day."

Concerns were raised last year about some STW posts (here and here). The site's moderator policy seemed incompatible with the University's mission to "achieve international excellence".

There were instances where some comments had been deleted; while others – often containing pejorative words such as "conspiracy", "denier" and "denialist" - escaped scrutiny, despite STW's comments policy.

Scuffles in the Academy are a dime a dozen, but this one continues to have an intriguing smell about it. For those who came in late and missed last year's psychodrama, it all began when something weird happened in the University's Cognitive Science Laboratories. A fish began to rot from its head.

On 23^rd August, 2012, Lewandowsky made a University News media release: "What motivates rejection of (climate) science?" He and two co-authors, Klaus Oberauer and Gilles Gignac, described how they had used online surveys, multivariate analysis and their specialist insight to explore "conspiracist ideation", a murky phenomenon allegedly endemic in the "climate arena" and elsewhere.

Their (peer-reviewed) paper, NASA faked the moon landing, therefore (climate) science is a Hoax: An anatomy of the motivated rejection of science, which was accepted by Psychological Science on 7^th July, 2012 and published online on 26^th March this year, apparently "provides empirical confirmation of previous suggestions that conspiracist ideation contributes to the rejection of science."

One problem with the paper – at least according to Climate Audit principal, Steve McIntyre – was the quality of its "denialist" data-set.

The authors claim their raw online survey data came from "more than 1,000 visitors to blogs dedicated to discussions of climate science". But how could they be sure whether it was from genuine – and not just pretend - climate sceptics, aka doubt-manufacturing denialists? And was there a risk of scamming contamination?

For McIntyre, "Lewandowsky's results are bogus because of his reliance on fake and fraudulent data, not because of replication issues in his factor analysis. Nor do I believe that there should be any "doubt" on this point. In my opinion, the evidence is clear-cut: Lewandowsky used fake responses from respondents at stridently anti-skeptic blogs who fraudulently passed themselves off as skeptics to the seemingly credulous Lewandowsky."

The "backfire effects" forced Lewandowsky to defend his paper on Shaping Tomorrow's World in ten posts during September last year, including: Drilling into Noise, An Update on my Birth Certificates, Confirming the Obvious and A Simple Recipe for the Manufacturing of Doubt.

Ben Pile went further in a recent post on Spiked Online, The Pathologising of Climate Scepticism. He suggested Lewandowsky was attempting "to turn criticism into a psychological illness" solely to justify his sceptic-bashing.