It’s Getting Harder To Know Who To Believe

Yes, I know that should be ‘whom’ to believe, but who sounds better. Steven Hayward posted an article at Power Line today about another scientific fraud. For those of you who still believe that you are responsible for global warming, please see any post at wattsupwiththat to find out how climate scientists have been fudging their data. For those of you concerned about statistical information concerning support for gay marriage, stay tuned.

The article at Power Line states:

New York magazine has a terrific piece up this weekend that tells the whole story of how the Green-LaCour Science magazine article on changing support for gay marriage by way of a canvas was exposed as a fraud—by another graduate student. It’s a long piece, but worth an extra-grande latte and a good slow read. In addition to the details of the fraud itself—which involved LaCour fabricating emails with a non-existent senior executive at the survey company he said he used—there are some clear subtexts of this article that reveal endemic problems within the world of academic political science.

The article at Power Line is complex and takes time to read. It is worth it to take the time to read the entire article, but if you are impatient, this is the conclusion:

Even if the data had been gathered legitimately, there is simply no way to assure data quality in a survey exercise of this sort, and by its very design it likely pre-determined the outcome. Even if legitimate, this study was close to useless for the serious business of settling our moral disagreements about gay marriage. That ought to be as much of a scandal to academic political science as fake data. For all of its statistical sophistication, this study was entirely superficial.

By the way, for further reading, here is the devastating review (PDF file) of the LaCour-Green paper that Broockman and two co-authors produced.

Again, the things that we are told are scientific facts are not always as they are explained to us. It is becoming more and more difficult to distinguish science from politics.