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Lessons: Retraction of Highly Publicized Study on Religious Children

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Yet another published social-science/humanities study has been retracted formally. This one got huge attention from secular (of course!) media for supposedly showing that religious children were less generous & altruistic.

Fortunately other scientists, who had been doing similar work with different data, and whose work (along with prior studies) showed much the opposite, didn’t buy it. They suspected something was awry with those results…rightly so! They asked for the study data, got it, reproduced the analyses, and found that the results were indeed bad, due to a simple coding error. See the link I provided above for more details on how this mess happened.

Another festering sore has appeared on the face of peer review as a practice, science as a whole, and on “soft science” humanities in particular. Lessons are many, and include:

  • Peer review is good, but not always good enough. Not just in the “soft sciences” either! It can miss important analytic flaws, as I have seen first-hand in physical (atmospheric) science. I find minor errors in published papers often, and mostly e-mail authors directly about them. Once, however, the problems were so numerous and crucial that I lead-authored a published rebuttal of many points in a formally peer-reviewed work that had appeared in an AMS journal.
  • Peer review in a highly specialized science can be insular, even incestuous. Reviewers are busy, and can slack off details. Reviewers often know the people whose work they’re reviewing, and/or can be awed by admiration for a respected name, and let stuff slide. It helps to have at least one anal-retentive reviewer willing to re-analyze data, or at least question findings that don’t make sense. Obviously this paper’s reviewers did not find anything suspicious—perhaps because their own preconceived biases about religious people clouded their potential to find such results puzzling.
  • Evaluate the biases of the media that promote scientific results, especially in more subjective fields like humanities and social science, but really, any science. What sociopolitical slants are evident in their other stories in general, including choices of subjects about which they publicize scientific results?
  • Don’t count on mass media to promote retractions, to more than a tiny, token, trivial fraction of the extent they pushed forth original, likely agenda-conforming results. Sometimes a retraction will be noted on a deep page (physical or digital) for the purpose of tokenism. Keep up with the latest retraction news on reputable, devoted watchdog sites.
  • In science, reproducibility is paramount! The greatest of alarm bells should go off when relatively recent (less than a decade or so) studies cannot be reproduced, especially if they involve unavailable data. In decades of yore, data were in hardcopy or primitive digital form, and often got lost, burned, flooded, heaved into the dumpster, etc. Today, with data-storage, archival and retrieval capacity smashing new records on a monthly basis, and redundant and cloud storage being common, there’s little, if any, valid excuse for the data not being there. This includes so-called “proprietary” data. Science is about openness, and all research data should be made available upon request, for the fundamental scientific tenet of reproducing analyses and results.

Technological Psyops Against Children, and All of Us

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Some of my posts are intended to get you to think. This is one of the most important I’ve done. Parents, especially young parents, pay attention! Future parents too:

This article (please read it all before proceeding!) is the most comprehensive I’ve seen on how psychologists and social scientists are “weaponized” industrially to hook children and teens on Internet chat, social media and video games.

Excerpt: “The parents I work with simply have no idea about the immense amount of financial and psychological firepower aimed at their children to keep them playing video games “forever.””

Another excerpt: “These parents have no idea that lurking behind their kids’ screens and phones are a multitude of psychologists, neuroscientists, and social science experts who use their knowledge of psychological vulnerabilities to devise products that capture kids’ attention for the sake of industry profit. What these parents and most of the world have yet to grasp is that psychology — a discipline that we associate with healing — is now being used as a weapon against children.”

The issue is bigger still. I’ve seen this play out first-hand in people I’ve known — adults and kids who neglect reality for online. This is not a conspiracy theory. This is well-known in intelligence circles as psyops: psychological operations. It is reality, and at work every day online, as it has in other forms for decades.

Psyops: know this concept, and learn to recognize it, because there truly is a war for the mind being waged on you and your children. The same could be said about social media, or 15-20 years ago, online chats. They all can be tools for good…but also, evil and destruction.

Psyops isn’t just a military concept, despite that origin of the acronym, but has been employed by governments, news media, and corporations for generations in the form of propaganda, overt and covert (including subliminal) mind games. Digital online psyops take it to a whole new level. Artificial intelligence, psychology, social science, and neuroscience work together to build ever-more persuasive yet subtle algorithms to hook people — especially vulnerable, immature, cognitively and emotionally underdeveloped pre-teen and teen minds. [Of course it works with plenty of adults too, but teens are especially susceptible to industrialized online psyops.] The best tactics manipulate individuals and the masses without their knowing it.

Sociopaths are masters of psyops on the individual level. Even simple ol’ stereotypical Bubba, the former dropout and current alcoholic woman-beater, employs psyops to convince the woman to stay in that abusive relationship. So…imagine how well that richly funded and highly coordinated teams of hard-core professionals, including published scientists and their findings, most certainly can manipulate children, teens and vulnerable adults corporately on large scales — and as the article notes well, they do.

Likely without realizing it — since he doesn’t acknowledge the deep history nor the old acronym — the author:

    1. Has stumbled upon the age-old concept of psyops and
    2. Is engaging in taught manipulation tactics himself — the long established, formulaic, paint-by-numbers method of Journalism 101 to hook the reader: a) personal anecdote, b) background, c) interviews for credibility, etc.

Point is: it doesn’t matter if you lean left or right, claim the middle ground (which rarely is, in reality), or are simply apathetic. Psyops are being used on us all, corporately, right where we are, right now. Included in the corporate for-profit psyops is media (this is why clickbait works, as well as more subtle and subliminal forms buried in stories, including media bias).

Governmental deep-state agencies are well-versed in this too. China, for example, is creating a systemic Big Brother psyops control system leveraging AI, cellular tracking, real-time big-data analysis, ubiquitous video cameras, and social-worthiness ratings to control the movements and actions of the people. Orwell and Huxley were prescient, if a few decades early. Russia — and yes, the U.S. — are at the forefront of covert psyops “advancement” and have been for many decades.

These methods are only going to get more sophisticated with time. Don’t think, for a minute, that won’t include government and media agendas as well as non-media corporations. Let’s address three other main areas besides effects on youth (and there are many others!).
……………

Societal impacts: Minds altered in the process of practicing these addicting behaviors do destroy relationships on individual levels, and cause a collective drag on society. Twenty years ago, social media didn’t exist, but video games and especially online chats did. I have witnessed this phenomenon with a ringside seat (as a former spouse of one deeply involved), and it can lead to dangerously risky behavior toward self and others, as well as attempted or successful suicide. Permitting oneself to get tangled up in this does not absolve one of the personal responsibility to acknowledge, get out of the situation, and get help to fix their problems, as necessary.

Regardless, the collective societal wreckage of many altered/maladjusted minds is going to cost us all. The young adult who spent teen years game-playing while his/her grades plummeted — even if socially readjusted, still can be ill-suited for college and/or job life afterward, their potential delayed by years or never fully realized. Online gambling addicts, gaming fiends, get-rich-quick suckers, smut addicts, the “likes” obsessed…the possibilities are nearly limitless. These will be a large volume of future welfare dependents, low-paid service workers, prisoners, and/or otherwise wasted talent arising from the herds of people involved.

Science ethics and law: The “weaponization” of science is real and has been for a long, long time. You know this. We have seen it with nuclear bombs developed with direct involvement of particle physicists. We’ve seen it with cruelty to animals in scientific lab testing of dangerous chemicals. We’ve seen it with assorted eugenics activities, from Hitler’s human-experimentation “labs” to Margaret Sanger. Those are tangible activities.

These psyops are less tangible, and as such, more insidious. What he discusses in the article is an example — and may be more destructive today and tomorrow due to its mass perniciousness — messing up millions and millions of minds. To what extent should psychology, neurology and social science self-police this? If they fail to, and so far they are, to what extent should these sciences be policed from the outside? By whom, with what qualifications?

Regulations: These issues cross state and international communications and commerce lines, and have obvious effects on the “general welfare” of the people, as well as Fourth Amendment privacy protection and constitutional separation of powers. As such, federal-level regulation of commercial and even media psyops can be constitutionally justifiable. [It’s harder when the media psyops are jointly run with federal help.] A weak argument can be made that psyops constitute free speech and press, assuming you believe mental abuse and manipulation are protected by the First Amendment. You tell me!

Regardless, it’s clear that some form of regulation may be on the way. Could distant, detached, faceless, suit-and-tie DC bureaucrats, almost certainly ignorant of both the technology and the science behind psyops, make the problem worse via good intentions, as has been the case with so many other issues?

Times are changing, and our world is getting more dangerous psychologically even as it may be getting safer from tangible, physical violence. However, what the “world is getting safer” heads-in-sand conveniently ignore is the intangible: psychological danger, clearly on the increase in systematic ways.

Communicating Forecasts for Dangerous Weather: Points and Counterpoints

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This entry is stimulated by Bryan Norcross’ guest essay in the Washington Post regarding the communication of uncertainty and determinism in the Florida forecasts of Hurricane Irma. Please read this if you haven’t already.

I respect Bryan’s perspective, whether or not I always agree, simply given his extensive experiences in trying to convey the hurricane-threat messages. While doing so somewhat bass-ackwardsly (1-in-1- vs. 1-in-5 or 1-in-3 “odds” as he states), he is arguing for probabilistic forecasting as a solution. Chuck Doswell would appreciate that. Here is a splendid and highly relevant essay by Chuck on weather-hazard decision-making in the face of uncertainty, and another on probabilities in forecasting. Those two pieces also should be “required reading” in this topic.

How those probabilities are translated or expressed don’t necessarily have to be as percentages, or even odds. They can be color fades, categorical labels translated from probabilities, and many other possibilities. It depends on the type of threat and the intended audience. Since intended audiences vary widely, even for the same hazard cause (in this case, hurricanes), and since this source offers multiple *types* of impact threats (wind, surge, heavy-rain floods, tornadoes), the possibilities are numerous. You really need to multiply the threats by the different types of audiences for the information to get the number of ways a forecast can (should?) be expressed. One size does not fit all!

A supply-side effect of taking such an exercise to its logical conclusion is of course a “herding cats” ordeal, where NHC becomes tasked with producing so many different kinds of graphics, texts, and forecast interpretations that the meteorology does suffer…and what good would that do anyone? Meteorological accuracy is at the heart of credibility; without it, all else is useless. Forecasters must not be forced to sacrifice that! Another risk is on the demand side: the “information overload” and head-in-sand or “Ostrich Effect” phenomena.

The bad news is that hurricanes, for their sheer complexity and layers of uncertainty and vast diversity of targeted “publics”, are about the toughest communications nut to crack, front to back. The good news is the same, because once we arrive at better solutions for communicating hurricane dangers, to the most people possible, in the most different effective ways possible, the less-complex weather-hazard producers (heat, for example, or even tornadoes), should be easier to solve from a communications perspective. That’s why I’m glad research efforts and discussion groups like WAS*IS exist, to help to hash these things out.

Still, as a former NHC forecaster and current severe-storms specialist at a different forecasting entity, who has observed closely these developments in the increasingly long time since I left NHC, I can attest that it the hurricane is a nasty hydra — just a big wet multi-hazard mess, tentacles swinging everywhere. Against it we have made amazing progress on the scientific side, but only fits and spurts in terms of COMMS.

Social media is another wild card Bryan didn’t even address, and brings with it a host of challenges in terms of getting the right forecast to the right audience, in the face of lots of rumors, fake forecasts, and non-credible sources.

Another aspect buried in Bryan’s essay, which I’m glad he addressed, is the “limits of science” issue. Excerpt:

    Just about every agency, company, outlet, TV station, website and app — including the National Weather Service, the Weather Channel, and most posts on social media — make explicit weather forecasts of a hurricane’s impact looking days in the future, well before that impact can possibly be known with specificity, based on the modern state of meteorological science.

    These misleading and confusing forecasts are produced by well-intentioned people and organizations because the formats of their text or graphics products demand it. There are seven-days worth of forecast boxes to fill in, so that’s what they do, even though everybody recognizes that the future weather when a hurricane is threatening is unknowable.

As a private-sector meteorologist colleague stated in an offline response: “Essentially we are being required to give a consistent, nearly perfect, 96-hour forecast for these situations because we want people safe (evacuate!) but we don’t want people to spend their scant savings unnecessarily. The problem is, that is beyond the state-of-the-art.”

In a nutshell, unreasonable demands for extended precision and accuracy often are made of forecasters, demands for information that lie beyond the state of the science. This hearkens back to something I have been preaching for years, with mixed effect:

We as meteorologists somehow must be willing and ready to state not only what we do know, but what we do not know.

The obstacle we face in doing so is the CYA cop-out mentality, “If we don’t do it, somebody else will”. Problem is, if the “somebody else” is offering “forecasts” that go beyond the reasonable state of the science, they are not credible! Yet that excuse has been used by managers, both government and corporate, to impose duties on forecasters that go beyond what the science justifies. One company produces temperature forecasts for specific days many weeks out — which is totally unjustifiable rubbish!

I am still not convinced, for a less-extreme example, that a day-7 or day-8 severe-storms forecast is consistently skillful or even useful the great majority of the time. Yet a group of forecasters is mandated to put one out every single night, needed or not, skillful or not, solely because the directives say so. Bryan rightly alludes to this dilemma. And on those (exceedingly rare!) occasions when the forecasters can alert to a hazard 9 or 10 days out? There’s no official means for it. Procedure and policy can handicap hazard communication, in this way, in the ways Bryan notes, and many other ways.

James Franklin, recently retired NHC Hurricane Specialist Unit chief, penned this response, also for Washington Post. The response struck me as overly defensive, even as he was making a valid point about the new “Key Messages” social-media product. Here is an example of that product:

I love this new offering, and wish Bryan had acknowledged it better. One valid question: is it enough? Another: what more can be done with limited time and staffing, on operational deadlines? The answers to those questions may compete and conflict! Bryan didn’t address that.

Still, while I understand and agree with much of what James wrote, I did not see Bryan’s article as an attack on NHC — least of all its forecasting — to the extent James did. Instead I saw it as a call for improved messaging of those forecasts, and not just by NHC! In that sense, Bryan’s piece serves a valuable purpose and is not “a solution in search of a problem”. “Key Messages” is a great step. But it’s not the end-all.

More can be done. More always can. But how, and by whom? Those are tricky questions without easy answers!

That improvement role need not reside solely or even largely with the forecasters themselves. The forecasters are educated and trained not as social scientists or graphics artists, but in this instance, as expert tropical meteorologists. They are the best in the world at what they do, bar none. I see the bulk of needed work — and this applies to other hazardous weather types too — as further along the chain of the Integrated Warning System. This means forecast translation and interpretation, both at the place of production and beyond, in media and emergency management, all the way to the responsibility the public audience has to understand what to do and have a plan in place.

Don’t expect the forecasters to do everybody else’s heavy lifting for them. Their job is to produce the most excellent predictions possible, and as I see it, they do.

Why can’t we as a weather science improve how we communicate hazards even more? Figure out additional ways those outstanding expert forecasts can be translated to even better utility once the data that drives the graphics have left forecasters’ desks. The same applies to severe-storms forecasts, as well as winter weather, heat, flooding, and all manner of weather threats. That is a positive goal and an outcome that I hope the meteorology and social-science communities can continue to work together to accomplish.