October 29, 2010 | 11:52 AM | By

Criticism of SciAm poll abounds

FILED UNDER: Straight talk, Judith Curry

flickr/sunfrog1

While Scientific American’s coverage of the climate change debate is taking some heat, their online reader poll about Judith Curry and climate change is drawing the heaviest fire. Criticism is coming from all sides – be it skeptic Anthony Watts, climate activist-blogger Joe Romm, or Salon’s Andrew Leonard. The primary complaint is that far-right deniers have gotten out the vote and rigged the results. Even SciAm contributor and former editor-in-chief, John Rennie, calls the poll “pitiful.”

Maybe I should begin by noting that I loathe nearly all multiple-choice polls on complex subjects. Even the most artfully written ones flirt with oversimplifying the issues being probed and the range of possible views; listed answers are often frustratingly vague or not mutually exclusive. Sometimes I’ve answered polls, looked back at my own answers and wondered whether I could ever recognize my own true positions in them. And online polls are worse still: they’re usually cobbled together hastily, with little to stop anyone from voting repeatedly or enlisting others from doing so—not to mention the problems with sampling error that hopelessly confound the question of what group the poll results are supposed to represent. No number of footnotes that such polls are not a scientific survey compensate for how misleading the results can be (not that I see such a warning on the SciAm results anyway).

And for SciAm to do an online poll about site visitors’ views on a contentious subject like global warming? Sheer folly. Nothing good could come of it. The likelihood that SciAm’s name would be associated with gamed results that nobody really believed but that would be trotted out embarrassingly hereafter would border on a dead certainty.

Too bad nobody told them that before they launched the beleaguered questionnaire.

  • Klem

    “And for SciAm to do an online poll about site visitors’ views on a contentious subject like global warming? Sheer folly. Nothing good could come of it.”

    I disagree. I completed the questionnaire and I see nothing wrong with it. They are polling their readers and site visitors, as they should, to see what they are interested in. To survive in a medium which is under stress they need to continually poll their readers so that they do not get out of step with them, so they can continue to sell magazines and have visitors to their site. They have already learned that if SA moves too far to the left or right, readership will fall off. I see nothing wrong with this questionnaire.

  • Jed

    If SciAm were merely polling their readers and people who visited their whole site I think it would have more validity. Instead, especially now, it appears to be a page you can visit without reading SciAm and without visiting the rest of the debate on her position. I don’t think most SciAm readers/subscribers actually believe that the IPCC is “a corrupt organization, prone to groupthink, with a political agenda” and favor “keeping science out of the political process.” Particularly that latter poll result makes me extremely suspicious. Online polls are notorious for being weirdly influenced by interested parties – check out the Time 100 polls [2008 top? Shigeru Miyamoto, videogame designer and creator of Mario and Donkey Kong].