Nature endorsed Joe Biden for president [1]. What if Bob and Steve see Nature as a political organization? Are they incorrect? Should they be silenced?
- "banning books because they criticize the government"
- "banning books because they have immoral content"
And on the other hand:
- "shutting down a viral video with advice dangerous to individuals, where protecting the public from direct physical harm is the goal"
I don't know of any instances in History where we looked back at the latter in disapproval.
> "those who do the silencing usually end up silencing their own critics"
I'm not even sure that this usually happens. It is certainly the case that when that happens, it is very memorable. But that's probably just a "selective attention bias" applied to History, that is, because the other cases are unremarkable.
I'd say "viral videos" are too recent to be part of History yet, but shutting down a dangerous viral video is not very far from "banning immoral content", which is not very far itself from "banning hate speech".
It's not that easy to draw a line because it is a continuum.
Consensus and censorship is what many countries do: People vote for MPs, MPs vote laws against hate speech, pornography, etc. Or at least how it's supposed to work on the paper.
The same way, we could decide for laws against media that propagates misinformation - and a judge would decide. We could do that. The tools are on the workbench, why we can't use them is another problem.
The way this works is that there are some questions that have clear answers. For example, anthropogenic climate change (or to be more precise, the idea that "Most of the warming of Earth’s average global temperature over the second half of the 20th century has been caused by human activities."). The middle ground fallacy is what you call it when you put up two people on TV, one who is an expert on climate change, and another who is just a contrarian, and where you don't frame it exactly as it is: one is wrong and the other is right.
That's not the same thing as this conversation we're having.
(Of course, any media that gave the details wasn't wrong at any time. But the simplified advice still was.)
https://www.nature.com/nature/articles?type=editorial
Many of the editorials seem approximately apolitical, e.g. "Get childhood immunizations back on track after COVID" or "Protecting the ocean requires better progress metrics". People of most any political stripe could have written them. If the editorials were all like this, Nature would look impressively unbiased.
Then there are a bunch of editorials that are obviously political, but in a science-adjacent sort of way. "Equity must be baked into randomized controlled trials" has a very pious vibe to it, though thankfully it also has some obvious points about RCT design thrown in. "Europe must not backslide on climate action despite war in Ukraine" contains some legitimate information, but its message would not play well for most of the ideological spectrum. At one point there's an article titled "Science must overcome its racist legacy" and subtitled "We are leading Nature on a journey to help decolonize research and forge a path towards restorative justice and reconciliation."
Finally, there's a category of editorial that's just taking a stand on [insert current hot-button topic here] and sprinkling in enough science mentions to lend it an air of authority. The endorsement of Joe Biden falls squarely in this category (I read the whole thing to make sure), as does the condemnation of the overturn of Roe v. Wade.
So, yes: Nature's editorial section is a completely one-sided ideological monoculture. You can tell that it's mostly one-sided just by scanning the article titles, but the true magnitude becomes apparent when you read the articles themselves: there's no serious attempt made to persuade, nor to rebut the usual counterarguments. It's unmistakably preaching to the choir, and I can't help but think that this reflects a lack of people at Nature willing or able to play devil's advocate.
Not sure how much this affects the non-editorial part of Nature, but man, it makes me suspicious. Which is very bad for Nature's credibility. If I were in charge, I think I would either get rid of the editorials entirely or move them to a semi-adversarial back-and-forth format like the monthly discussions at Cato Unbound (which has a strong ideological bent but has a format that prevents it from being one-sided.)
It is not exactly a secret that science itself supports more left-leaning ideas than right-leaning ideas (depending on what exactly we're talking about and where the Overton window is at a point in time or at a specific place on earth). I think this has less to do with whether left or right is fundamentally right or best. Unfortunately, a lot of what passes as "the right" these days is just... a bit crazy. Of course they had to take a stand for Biden, the only other choice was a lunatic. Love him or hate him, one thing Trump is, objectively, is a bullshitter (in the academic sense of the word). And scientists really just don't like bullshit.
If you get the feeling that Nature is politically biased (and I mean this in the usual everyday person sense, because of course any politics that affects science will be met with strong views), I think that should serve as a signal to check what your biases are.
Remember that the people reading this are all the top experts in their own fields, so you can bet they'd love to write back and argue if some editor wrote something stupid. It simply is the case that the publication is of exceptional quality, and that for the most part, people who read Nature are not people who care about political nonsense.
There was an obvious third option: not endorsing anyone. There's no law that requires every publication to endorse a presidential candidate. In fact, most of them don't do that.
>If you get the feeling that Nature is politically biased (and I mean this in the usual everyday person sense, because of course any politics that affects science will be met with strong views), I think that should serve as a signal to check what your biases are.
I'm sorry, but this feels like gaslighting. GP has listed numerous examples of editorials that were biased in favor of a certain political platform, including an explicit endorsement of a presidential candidate. I really don't understand how, in spite of that, you could arrive at the conclusion they aren't politically biased.
>Remember that the people reading this are all the top experts in their own fields, so you can bet they'd love to write back and argue if some editor wrote something stupid.
Only if they don't mind committing a career suicide.
Disagreeing with other scientists is not going to lead to career suicide. It's pretty much the norm.
Which is why when there is a scientific consensus that forms, it tends to be mainly the crazy ones who do bad science that go against the grain. And oftentimes their career is doing just fine, because in science we really value academic freedom.
The public has a very distorted view of this, mainly informed by bad priors and odd examples.