{"id":1862,"date":"2020-08-23T12:42:01","date_gmt":"2020-08-23T12:42:01","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.rasmusen.org\/blog1\/?p=1862"},"modified":"2020-08-23T12:42:01","modified_gmt":"2020-08-23T12:42:01","slug":"the-lizard-man-constant","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.rasmusen.org\/blog1\/the-lizard-man-constant\/","title":{"rendered":"The Lizard Man Constant"},"content":{"rendered":"

Slate Star Codex<\/em> in 2013 wrote Lizardman\u2019s Constant Is 4%Beware of Phantom Lizardmen<\/a><\/p>\n

\nPublic Policy Polling\u2019s recent poll on conspiracy theories mostly showed up on my Facebook feed as \u201cFour percent of Americans believe lizardmen are running the Earth\u201d.
\n
\n(of note, an additional 7% of Americans are \u201cnot sure\u201d whether lizardmen are running the Earth or not.)
\n
\nImagine the situation. You\u2019re at home, eating dinner. You get a call from someone who says \u201cHello, this is Public Policy Polling. Would you mind answering some questions for us?\u201d You say \u201cSure\u201d. An extremely dignified sounding voice says \u2013 and this is the exact wording of the question \u2013 \u201cDo you believe that shape-shifting reptilian people control our world by taking on human form and gaining political power to manipulate our society, or not?\u201d Then it urges you to press 1 if yes, press 2 if no, press 3 if not sure.
\n
\nSo first we get the people who think \u201cWait, was 1 the one for if I did believe in lizardmen, or if I didn\u2019t? I\u2019ll just press 1 and move on to the next question.\u201d
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\nThen we get the people who are like \u201cI never heard it before, but if this nice pollster thinks it\u2019s true, I might as well go along with them.\u201d<\/p>\n

Then we get the people who are all \u201cF#&k you, polling company, I don\u2019t want people calling me when I\u2019m at dinner. You screw with me, I tell you what I\u2019m going to do. I\u2019m going to tell you I believe lizard people are running the planet.\u201d
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\nAnd then we get the people who put \u201cMartian\u201d as their nationality in psychology experiments. Because some men just want to watch the world burn.
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\nDo these three groups total 4% of the US population? Seems plausible.
\n
\nI really wish polls like these would include a control question, something utterly implausible even by lizard-people standards, something like \u201cDo you believe Barack Obama is a hippopotamus?\u201d Whatever percent of people answer yes to the hippo question get subtracted out from the other questions.\n<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

He elaborates on the third problem: <\/p>\n

\n Another link I\u2019ve seen on my Facebook wall a few times is this one: Are Climate Change Sceptics More Likely To Be Conspiracy Theorists? It\u2019s based on a paper by Stephen Lewandowsky et al called NASA Faked The Moon Landing, Therefore Climate Science Is A Hoax \u2013 An Analysis Of The Motivated Rejection Of Science.
\n
\nThe paper\u2019s thesis was that climate change skeptics are motivated by conspiracy ideation \u2013 a belief that there are large groups of sinister people out to deceive them. This seems sort of reasonable on the face of it \u2013 being a climate change skeptic requires going against the belief of the entire scientific establishment. My guess is that there probably is a significant link here waiting to be discovered.
\n
\nUnfortunately, it\u2019s\u2026possible Stephan Lewandowsky wasn\u2019t the best person to investigate this? Aside from being a professor of cognitive science, he also runs Shaping Tomorrow\u2019s World, a group that promotes \u201cre-examining some of the assumptions we make about our technological, social and economic systems\u201d and which seems to be largely about promoting global warming activism. While I think it\u2019s admirable that he is involved in that, it raises conflict of interest questions. And the way his paper is written \u2013 starting with the over-the-top title \u2013 doesn\u2019t do him any favors.
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\n(if the conflict of interest angle doesn\u2019t make immediate and obvious sense to you, imagine how sketchy it would be if a professional global warming denier was involved in researching the motivations of global warming supporters)
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\nBut enough of my personal opinions. What\u2019s the paper look like?
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\nThe methodology goes like this: they send requests to several popular climate blogs, both believer and skeptic, asking them to link their readers to an online survey. The survey asks people their beliefs on global warming and on lots of conspiracy theories and fringe beliefs.
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\nOn first glance, the results are extremely damning. People who rejected climate science were wildly more likely to reject pretty much every other form of science as well, including the \u201ctheory\u201d that HIV causes AIDS and the \u201ctheory\u201d that cigarettes cause cancer. They were more willing to believe aliens landed at Roswell, that 9-11 was an inside job, and, yes, that NASA faked the moon landing. The conclusion: climate skeptics are just really stupid people.
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\nBut a bunch of global warming skeptics started re-analyzing the data and coming up with their own interpretations. They found that many large pro-global-warming blogs posted the link to the survey, but very few anti-global-warming blogs did. This then devolved into literally the worst flame war I have ever seen on the Internet, centering around accusations about whether the study authors deliberately excluded large anti-global warming blogs, or whether the authors asked the writers of anti-global-warming blogs and these writers just ignored the request (my impression is that most people now agree it was the latter). In either case, it ended up with most people taking the survey being from the pro-global-warming blogs, and only a few skeptics.
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\nMore interestingly, they found that pretty much all of the link between global warming skepticism and stupidity was a couple of people (there were so few skeptics, and so few conspiracy believers, that these couple of people made up a pretty big proportion of them, and way more than enough to get a \u201csignificant\u201d difference with the global warming believers). Further, most of these couple of people had given the maximally skeptical answer to every single question about global warming, and the maximally credulous answer to every single question about conspiracies.
\n
\nThe danger here now seems obvious. Global warming believer blogs publish a link to this study, saying gleefully that it\u2019s going to prove that global warming skeptics are idiots who also think NASA faked the moon landing and the world is run by lizardmen or whatever. Some global warming believers decide to help this process along by pretending to be super-strong global warming skeptics and filling in the stupidest answers they can to every question. The few real global warming skeptics who take the survey aren\u2019t enough signal to completely drown out this noise. Therefore, they do the statistics and triumphantly announce that global warming skepticism is linked to stupid beliefs.
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\nThe global warming skeptic blogosphere has in my opinion done more than enough work to present a very very strong case that this is what happened (somebody else do an independent look at the controversy and double-check this for me?) And Professor Lewandowsky\u2019s answer was\u2026
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\n\u2026to publish a second paper, saying his results had been confirmed because climate skeptics were so obsessed with conspiracy theories that they had accused his data proving they were obsessed with conspiracies of being part of a conspiracy. The name of the paper? Recursive Fury. I have to hand it to him, this is possibly the most chutzpah I have ever seen a single human being display.
\n
\n(the paper is now partially offline as the journal investigates it for ethical something something)\n<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

A comment says<\/p>\n

I recently received a psychological survey which included a number of odd, irrelevant seeming statements to rate the truth value of, such as \u201cMy favorite poet is Raymond Kertezc,\u201d Raymond Kertezc being a made-up poet whose purpose in the survey is to help weed out people who\u2019ll say yes to anything. If you type in his name as a search on Wikipedia, it redirects to \u201cScientific Control.\u201d\n<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

after which Scott Alexander (whom it turns out, because the New York Times unmasked him to destroy him, is the blogger) commented: <\/p>\n

\nWhen I Google it, the first result is a blog called Poetry By Raymond Kertezc which has some actual poems on it \u2013 albeit not very good.<\/p>\n

I love the idea that somebody took this fake poet used for scientific controls and wrote poetry in his name. That is really playing the long game as a troll.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

I was commenting on twitter about how anybody who teaches large classes knows that 5% of the class will always get the instructions wrong so you need to repeat them over nad over– which I guess you could call The Lizard Man’s Corollary.<\/strong><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Slate Star Codex in 2013 wrote Lizardman\u2019s Constant Is 4%Beware of Phantom Lizardmen Public Policy Polling\u2019s recent poll on conspiracy theories mostly showed up on my Facebook feed as \u201cFour percent of Americans believe lizardmen are running the Earth\u201d. (of note, an additional 7% of Americans are \u201cnot sure\u201d whether lizardmen are running the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1862","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rasmusen.org\/blog1\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1862","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rasmusen.org\/blog1\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rasmusen.org\/blog1\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rasmusen.org\/blog1\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rasmusen.org\/blog1\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1862"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.rasmusen.org\/blog1\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1862\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1863,"href":"https:\/\/www.rasmusen.org\/blog1\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1862\/revisions\/1863"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rasmusen.org\/blog1\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1862"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rasmusen.org\/blog1\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1862"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rasmusen.org\/blog1\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1862"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}