Scientific American's departing editor and the politicization of science | Hacker News Reader

Scientific American's departing editor and the politicization of science

reason.com

499 pointsBostonian994 comments

A book came out in August 2024 called "Soda Science: Making the World Safe for Coca-Cola," by Susan Greenhalgh. She's a professor (emeritus) at Harvard. The book is a history. It shows how the Coca-Cola Company turned to "science" when the company was beset by the obesity crisis of the 1990s and health advocates were calling for, among other things, soda taxes.

Coca-Cola "mobilized allies in academia to create a soda-defense science that would protect profits by advocating exercise, not dietary restraint, as the priority solution to obesity." It was a successful campaign and did particularly well in the Far East. "In China, this distorted science has left its mark not just on national obesity policies but on the apparatus for managing chronic disease generally."

Point being, the science that Coca-Cola propagated is entirely legitimate. But that science itself does not tell the whole, obvious truth, which is that there is certainly a correlation in a society between obesity rates and overall sugar-soda consumption rates. "Coke’s research isn’t fake science, Greenhalgh argues; it was real science, conducted by real and eminent scientists, but distorted by its aim."

"Trust the science" can thus be a dangerous call to arms. Here's the book, if anybody's interested. https://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/S/bo221451...

"Trust the science" was also a propaganda campaign.

What they meant was "Don't question our data or our decisions".

Science isn't trusted, it's understood and practiced. Not everyone has enough scientific literacy to understand the difference between being data driven and hypothesis driven, even if they intuit parts of it on a daily basis.

We can easily be misled by data, but when we make decisions by evaluating the probability that any hypothesis is true conditioned on evidence supported by openly collected and evaluated data, we're much closer to doing science.

This is kind of why I get annoyed at the "facts don't care about your feelings!!!" crowd.

Sure, the raw facts don't care about your feelings, but the way that these facts are interpreted and presented absolutely do care. Two people can look at the exact same data and draw widely different but comparably accurate conclusions out of it.

Using your Coke example, the raw fact that "exercise is good for reducing obesity" is broadly true and not really disputed by anyone as far as I'm aware, but the interpretation of "exercise alone can be a solution to obesity" or "how much exercise vs how much diet restriction is a solution to obesity" is subject to interpretation and biases.

I think this related to the “critical thinking” skill that all my teachers always stressed about growing up.

But I still don’t know how to put in useful words what “critical thinking” is because it’s not one thing.

It requires synthesizing a lot of information together in very specific and meticulous ways. And through feedback, collecting your previous thoughts and keeping track of how often you are correct or incorrect.

You can explain critical thinking in many ways but none of it will teach someone critical thinking.

This is how propaganda works, you don't spread falsities and untruths, but change the mix of what signals get amplified.

There are few slogans I hate more than "trust the science", primarily because it aligns scientific results with faith, which is exactly what science is not about. Science is fundamentally about skepticism, not trust.

Now, obviously that skepticism can be misused by some rando with no qualifications or even time spent researching telling you to be "skeptical" of people who have spent decades trying to figure shit out. What I really believe we should be teaching people is "what are the incentives?". That is, it's become very clear that many people are susceptible to provably false information, so we should train people to try to examine what incentives someone has for speaking out in the first place (and that includes scientists, too).

This is why I hate most conspiracy theories - even if you take everything the conspiracy supposes at face value, conspiracists don't explain how their conspiracy is somehow kept so secret when tons of people involved would have extremely strong incentives to expose it.

If you run 200 studies trying to show nonsense that protects your industry, and you set a statistical significance level of p>0.05 in seeking statistical correlation, you will find 10 studies that achieve statistical significance without fudging any numbers. Then you will announce that an exhaustive meta-analysis of ten studies supports your contentions about your profitable activity.

You cannot entirely separate intention from the merit of the science. Those 200 studies are an elaborate propaganda campaign, and they always were, each and every one of them, regardless of the fact that they had an internal logic.

Scientists should react with violent disgust and ostracism at clear attempts to attain a specific result without a lot of very explicit framing (eg: pre-announcing, announcing the other 190 studies, having a third party independently replicate the 10, etc), but they can't, because this sort of industrial campaign is funding such a huge percent of scientific research.

The NSF is doling out 9 billion dollars a year to run at least semi-objective science, and if this was 90 billion or 900 billion, things would be quite a bit different, and motivated "research" would not have the same place. We are dramatically over-supplied on researchers, to the point that a lot of them are making sub-minimum wage working as adjuncts, postdocs, "grad students", baristas. We built a system of university research that is the envy of the world, that exports knowledge and culture en masse, and we're not using it for more than 0.03% of GDP because some Congressperson has a poster of researchers "Spent $1.5M studying the mating habits of fruit flies, like some kind of pervert", and because Reagan hated government and wanted Coca-Cola to do our science for us.

And this is exactly the problem we face now in so many aspects of life.

If cell phones or microwaves or a hundred other things were harmful we would not find out, because of all the lobbying and armies of scientists paid to find and publish a very narrow version of truth

Intentionally leaving out important or key information is still lying and deception, and is harmful, and can be really harmful if it's a big thing, even in cases when it's done with good intentions.

I wonder how much of this same kind of manipulation/distortion is going on when we are told to "trust the science" with regard to climate change? The pressure to ignore or minimise inconvenient facts would be overwhelming (career at stake situation).

I want to be sympathetic to Singal, whose writing always seems to generate shitstorms disproportionate to anything he's actually saying, and whose premise in this piece I tend to agree with (as someone whose politics largely line up with those of the outgoing editor in chief, I've found a lot of what SciAm has posted to be cringe-worthy and destructive).

But what is he on about here?

Or that the normal distribution—a vital and basic statistical concept—is inherently suspect? No, really: Three days after the legendary biologist and author E.O. Wilson died, SciAm published a surreal hit piece about him in which the author lamented "his dangerous ideas on what factors influence human behavior."

(a) The (marked!) editorial is in no way a refutation of the concept of the normal distribution.

(b) It's written by a currently-publishing tenured life sciences professor (though, clearly, not one of the ones Singal would have chosen --- or, to be fair, me, though it's not hard for me to get over that and confirm that she's familiar with basic statistics).

(c) There's absolutely nothing "surreal" about taking Wilson to task for his support of scientific racism; multiple headline stories have been written about it, in particular his relationship with John Philippe Rushton, the discredited late head of the Pioneer Fund.

It's one thing for Singal to have culturally heterodox† views on unsettled trans science and policy issues††, another for him to dip his toes into HBD-ism. Sorry, dude, there's a dark stain on Wilson's career. Trying to sneak that past the reader, as if it was knee-jerk wokeism, sabotages the credibility of your own piece.

Again, the rest of this piece, sure. Maybe he's right. The Jedi thing in particular: major ugh. But I don't want to have to check all of his references, and it appears that one needs to.

† term used advisedly

†† this is what Singal is principally known for

> (c) There's absolutely nothing "surreal" about taking Wilson to task for his support of scientific racism; multiple headline stories have been written about it, in particular his relationship with John Philippe Rushton, the discredited late head of the Pioneer Fund.

The reason it's not surreal is because it's so banal.

Wilson viewed Rushton as a case of scientific freedom. I.e. research shouldn't be suppressed for socio-political reasons.

You're allowed to disagree with that. But you should understand that the scientifc freedom side isn't racist, even if ends up on the same side as racists.

I don't know what to make of you accusing Singal of "dipping his toes into HBD-ism". Maybe you just phrased that wrong. But it sounds like you're saying "Rushton was a racist, Wilson defended Rushton so he's a racist, Singal defended Wilson so he's a racist". Is that how racism works?

Where on the line are we talking?

It's one thing to say: "In my view, EO Wilson's association with Rushton is defensible and should not be considered a stain on his career".

It's quite another to say: "That, and I believe it so much that I cannot take seriously anybody who disagrees with me on this, I shall call them and their viewpoints names such as 'surreal' and make grandiose claims that their opinion is so ridiculous, it requires a cultural change at this magazine".

The latter is what was said.

I see no conflict between holding both of these ideas:

* EO Wilson's association with Rushton isn't a problem, and it wasn't about him supporting those ideas themselves, it was about supporting the idea of 'let ideas be, do not censor them'.

* Singal is wildly inappropriate with this, and the plan as stated is cancel culture/crazy politication of a magazine.

In:

> "Rushton was a racist, Wilson defended Rushton so he's a racist, Singal defended Wilson so he's a racist"

You've made an evident mistake. It's instead:

> Rushton was a racist, Wilson defended Rushton so he might also be and we should look into that, Singal called that very thought of questioning Wilson's association with Rushton as ridiculous - and THAT means he's a racist'.

Maybe still wrong but not nearly as crazy as you seem to think it is.

The Wilson article really does say:

> First, the so-called normal distribution of statistics assumes that there are default humans who serve as the standard that the rest of us can be accurately measured against.

That’s at best sloppily written, regardless of what one thinks about Wilson. The normal distribution is a mathematical tool; it doesn’t “assume” anything about some particular concrete topic like measuring humans.

The normal distribution does indeed make some assumptions. Certain natural qualities tend to be notmally distributed like height, but other things like net worth are NOT normally distributed because of feedback loops. The choice of distribution either makes an assumption or validates some other prior assumptions.

Thr choice of using a normal distribution vs another mathematical distribution is not purely a mathematical device, the choice either reflects some assumptions (which one would quickly see if they're valid or not generally).

An interesting case in point for me is when a lot of mathematics assume bell curve distribution in stock market price distributions, like the black scholes option equation does, and it turns out to not really be the best fit. It sort off almost works, but systematically underprices extreme events.

This is what can happen when your assumed distribution turns out to be wrong.

So far though, I haven't heard of refutations that height or IQ (as measured on standardised tests and processed in prescribed ways) are indeed bell curve distributions.

What a minute, this sentence was literally in the SA piece: “First, the so-called normal distribution of statistics assumes that there are default humans who serve as the standard that the rest of us can be accurately measured against.”

Is that not a denunciation of the normal distribution?

I don't think so -- the comment in context was not about the "normal distribution of statistics" per se, because when we're talking about Bernoulli trials and the law of large numbers, it clearly is not necessary to assume anything about "default humans".

Rather the article is critiquing the specific use of the normal distribution in assessing population and sub-population statistics. I do think that this critique is kind of nonsensical because the normal distribution assumes nothing of the kind -- a person who is of average height, a "default height" human, is a concept utterly distinct from the concept of a person who is of average weight, a "default weight" human.

It's saying multi-modal data should not be crammed into a simple normal distribution.

Agreed fully on the JEDI stuff. I was somewhat hoping it was from an April first issue. That was bad.

And I thought I recognized the name. I really do not understand how trans debate has come to dominate some online discourse.

I thought the complaint on the normal distribution was supposed to be claims that many things are not normally distributed? Which, isn't wrong, but is a misguided reason to not use the distribution?

I read it as a contrarian think-piece, what people used to call a "Slate pitch" when Slate was still relevant. It lands with a big wet gross "thud" in the context of a lot of the rest of what SciAm has been running.

> And I thought I recognized the name. I really do not understand how trans debate has come to dominate some online discourse.

Much of it is pushback against widespread ideological capture, and in particular the authoritarian idea that everyone else has to change and restrict their behavior to accommodate increasingly absurd and harmful requests from an overly demanding identity group.

" I really do not understand how trans debate has come to dominate some online discourse."

It is a wedge issue, simply. It benefits entrenched interests because it allows them to anger and control people, just like they do with the War on Christmas, the War on Guns, Welfare Queens, Baby Killers, Wokeism, DEI, and so many other catchphrases that collapse nuanced issues to a sports slogan.

This entire discussion is grossly disappointing. So many otherwise intelligent people thinking they are debating issues, when they are being played like a fiddle.

>>It's one thing for Singal to have culturally heterodox† views on unsettled trans science and policy issues††

I think his views are culturally orthodox, outside of liberal-left members of the laptop class.

Red tribe orthodoxy has a lot of disdain for people with trans identities. Blue tribe orthodoxy has maximal dain for those people. But both tribes are willing to promote pseudoscience to achieve their goals. Singal occupies a narrow sliver of the political possibility space where sympathy for those identities can exist at the same time as supporting evidence-based medicine.

Much of the piece leans on the right's habit of "refuting" leftist academia by merely repeating its summed-up headline form in a sneering voice, without offering a real counterargument.

This is not to say that I don't think there should be a rebuttal of any social sciencey claim, but that it should - and can - be done socratically.

it's like any topic you think is simple until you research even a bit of it and go 'oh'

HN has a large discussion on the E.O. Wilson piece at the time...

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29990427

Note the source of that story.

By chance I just started reading Sci Am after a lapse 10 years. This month, there is an article that mentions that empathy is mentally taxing, which is obvious but worth stating. Shortly afterwards it is followed by a series of articles on sickle cell disease.

I suspect the order of these two articles was a deliberate choice by the editor. Subconsciously I never cared much about sickle cell since I am not black and I am more interested in diseases that would affect me and my family. But then I realized that I am choosing to be dismissive, which has zero cognitive cost, as opposed to empathy which comes at a cost. I read the report and immediately reflected on how I should give more blood since transfusions can ease the unbearable pain of this disease. I learned a lot of science too.

The examples in the parent article make it clear the editor needs be replaced. But like all over-corrections I hope some of the changes made during her tenure remain.

You're happy you got psyoped?

The author's critiques seem nit-picky to me. I'd like to hear from somebody that follows this, scrolling through SciAm articles published in the past few years, it seems like the bulk of content is still normal popular science. While it does publish a large chunk of partisan opinions now, a lot of them are pretty normal party-line defenses of democrats and their causes with respect to science, health, and whatnot. While I see they published a half-dozen or so articles defending gender-affirming care in youth, it's not like this is so central to the rag that this was mentioned on the covers. Is the author trying to rationalize an aversion to partisan politics in a magazine coming from a nation with a climate change denialist party?

Make of it what you will, but the author's wikipedia page seems to put this article in perspective: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jesse_Singal

I notice there has been a mixing of expert/academic opinion with advocacy, and this is an example of that. But expertise and advocacy are important but different things.

They don't seem mutually exclusive to me. I would think an issue would only arise if one lets their advocacy jeopardize their expert judgement.

I think Jonathan Kanter lays it out much better than I can here, when it comes to research into monopoly

https://www.justice.gov/opa/speech/assistant-attorney-genera...

I remember when that article wildly mis-describing the normal distribution came out and I was so sad. It was just so embarrassing. The author was in no way qualified, yet the burden rests on the editors of a publication with the reputation to catch this incredible incorrect statement to come out.

I usually think woke/antiwoke complaints go too far, but that was such a failure.

Reference for the curious: https://scottaaronson.blog/?p=6202

Thanks. I didn’t realize how bad things were. I’m not American. Is this an example of America’s culture war I keep reading about ?

Yikes, quite the scathing article and example of a the politicization of science.

“Trust the science” has always bothered me for two reasons: 1) science is frequently not black and white and anyone who has done hard science research knows there are plenty of competing opinions among scientists and 2) while scientific facts are facts, we still need to decide on how to act on those facts and that decision making process is most certainly political and subjective in nature.

The second point is critical. Relevant testimony from the former head of the NIH during the pandemic, Francis Collins: https://www.bladenjournal.com/opinion/72679/confession-of-a-...

> “If you’re a public-health person and you’re trying to make a decision, you have this very narrow view of what the right decision is.” “So you attach infinite value to stopping the disease and saving a life. You attach zero value to whether this actually totally disrupts people’s lives, ruins the economy, and has many kids kept out of school in a way that they never quite recover from.”

I'm pretty happy Collins came to that conclusion and learned from it.

I don't expect public health officials to have a utilitarian function that maximizes global health considering second order effects. This should have been stated more clearly at the beginning of the epidemic.

While I agree with the fundamental point, I find that a kind of ironic choice of examples. I wonder what kind of person attaches so much value to keeping kids in school whether it's good for them or not.

I don't think anyone attached zero value to everything else. The legit question is how do you weigh all of the factors. How do you weigh making things slightly worse for a bunch of people and way worse for some, etc...

It reminds me of a comedian snippet I saw recently who was asking the crowd... "Has life gotten back to how it was before Covid", and one person in the audience yells out, "No"... and the comedian says, "OK, tell me one thing you had before Covid that you don't have now"? And the person says, "My family". The comedian goes -- "Oh yeah, I guess that was the point of it all wasn't it..."

I am taking a graduate level public health course and this trade off is literally covered in the first lecture its something they call prevention paradox. It's surprising to see that the head of the NIH would say something like this when it's literally part of the curriculum for public health. I'm so tired of political opinions masqueraded as we know better than the experts or we know better than the scientist.

I don't think people who say "Trust the science" are saying that science has it all figured out. It's telling people that they should weigh scientific data into their thought process. In reality many people make all of their decisions based on emotions and "feels".

"Trust the science" really came into its full form during the pandemic and was a veiled line in appealing to authority. The CDC, Dr. Fauci, NIH, or any governing body issuing mandates during the pandemic would tell you to trust the science, when in reality they just didn't want people to question their decisions. As it turns out, some of the people questioning school closures or masks were correct! Questioning vaccine safety for young men was and is correct, as long as there were not comorbidities. The people or institutions that were yelling "trust the science" the loudest were indeed saying that they had it all figured out and that anyone that questioned them was wrong.

"Trust the science" became a campaign slogan during the pandemic, and fell into the same realm as "defund the police" or "trust all women".

So yes, "trust the science" does mean what you said that it is a process that should take data new and old into account. However, the sad thing is it was co-opted by people who used it as a cudgel to silence anyone that didn't toe the line.

Anyone who unironically says “Trust the science” automatically tells me that they are probably not an informed person.

I trust that most research is done in good faith and at least some of it is useful. Saying 'Trust the science' might as well be saying 'Trust in God'

The other issue is that science has nothing to say about livelihoods and personal freedom - there's no "Lockdown Science". Those were political decisions, ie. opinions disguised as science to shutdown dissent.

> Saying 'Trust the science' might as well be saying 'Trust in God'

In the past, many cultures had priests doing most of the science as well.

Ultimately it all boils down to trust. The common man doesn’t have time nor intellect to evaluate “the science”. When scientists display obvious bias, they lose trust, since they claim to be impartial. It’d be better if they didn’t claim to be impartial.

> I trust that most research is done in good faith and at least some of it is useful. Saying 'Trust the science' might as well be saying 'Trust in God'

Hopefully this is hyperbole. Any faith I have is separate from, for example, if I cancer, I am going to trust the science on the next steps of treatment.

Generally you should trust science on matters of "is". But on matters of "ought" science only bears indirectly.

then you should just trust in God and forget about science

There is a pure form of science which are basically just methods and principles. Then there is stuff around that like institutions. Some further the core methods and principles. And sometimes it's quite literally a religion.

There is also a weird thing where people will attribute simple natural phenomena to science. Conflating the subject matter with science itself. I recall seeing a post with these colored ants and a caption like "Isnt Science Cool?" https://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/these-rainbow-...

Thats not science. Those are ants being colored by food coloring... that would be true with or without the scientific method and you don't even need it to observe the effect. And when you do need science to discover some phenomena (say the nature of black holes) its not science that is amazing if you are simply talking about how amazing black holes are. Its the method applied to understand them that can show how amazing science is. Black holes arent science.

> while scientific facts are facts

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Half-life_of_knowledge

"Trust the science" is the very antithesis of the scientific spirit. The essence of science is to distrust authority and received wisdom. If you treat scientists as some sort of infallible priesthood then you've missed the whole point of science.

> The essence of science is to distrust authority and received wisdom

The essence of science is the use of scientific method which have specific meaning and way of doing things. It relies on evidence based knowledge not on any distrust. It does not have to do with authority but you would question if your tools you are using is good (calibrated and not interfering with measurements in an unaccounted way ..etc) or if your methodology is flawed.

Somewhat disagree. Science requires trust. In fact, it's the process for building that trust up from nothing. Are you friend or foe? I'm going to assume one but watch you closely until I have enough evidence to trust you. Hurray, that's science!

I totally agree that the phrase is often misused to mean "trust my favorite authority figure" or "trust the status quo," which is distinctly unscientific. Good news though, if we're willing to actually do the work (the hard part) trust in science is what allows us to change the status quo!

The process involves collecting data or performing analysis. Simply saying "ugh, why should we listen to received wisdom" and declaring that the experts are idiots is not the scientific spirit.

Science is built on trust because in reality it’s not practical to check every single result in a paper. Often it’s literally impossible (e.g the result from a one of a kind, billion dollar machine).

If someone hand-waves away the conclusions of scientists without doing any science of their own I feel no obligation to take them seriously.

Is science authority? If science is not authority, then distrusting authority and trusting science are not in opposition.

> The essence of science is to distrust authority and received wisdom.

This is not "the essence of science" by any means.

No, the antithesis of the scientific spirit is to believe anything joe nobody posts on facebook or twitter that fits your worldview, regardless of (or perhaps especially due to) the presence of contradictory facts.

The essence of science, and what is meant by "trust the science", is to accept theories that fit the existing data until such time as new data contradicts them, while encouraging people to ruthlessly search for just such data which would falsify them.

Sadly, there are a lot of people whose only standard of proof for conspiracy theories is that it contradicts what experts claim.

Scientific facts aren’t facts. Empiricism only tells you when you are wrong or have enough data to believe something for now. At any point, something we believe can be proven wrong.

To even get there requires independent, skeptical, peer review. That often doesn’t happen. It’s questionable how many scientific facts are even science. Much less factual.

all of the "Trust/Believe X" statements would be profoundly improved by substituting "Take X seriously". It makes the same point without posing the obvious problems with trust and believe

But that wouldn't capture how it tends to be meant -- an instruction to take things on faith without any questioning, even if it contradicts other known facts or your direct experience.

I feel like rational communication requires an overlap in perspective - not the same point of view, but some amount of overlap.

Science relies on rational communication between people who disagree, because we can fool ourselves, and we can fool our in-group. The narrative fallacy doesn't just affect weak minds; by yourself, you won't outsmart your own filters.

To learn about the world, you have to accept the world, and some things about the world are hard to accept as bare facts. Donald Trump was elected president. Can you accept that as a bare fact? Probably not if you've fought with people about it. There's a drag show in town. Can you accept that as a bare fact? ... IQ tests have a history of racial disparity. ... The earth is round and orbits the sun. ...

A lot of rational minded people tend to disparage emotional intelligence, but I feel that rational communication across strong moral feelings requires a lot of emotional work and trust, and it's really hard to trust while you are fighting.

---

I feel like 'virtue signaling' is poorly named. I think 'Comfort Signaling' and 'Loyalty Signaling' are easier to talk and reason about.

* I am flying this flag because I want my people to be comfortable with me.

* I am flying this flag because I want my people to know that I am loyal to them, and I don't care about what other people think. (Or, I'm fine with the other people hating me because of this flag)

It is 100% virtue signaling because it is used as a means to feel and show moral superiority to others that do not hold those views or 'virtues'.

It is also a loyalty and comfort signal, but as we saw with Helmuth's reaction - it is impossible that Gen X saw fault with Harris' policies. It is only that they are bigoted, narrow minded, fascist loving, misogynist. If a 'virtue' is questioned, you are excommunicated from the 'liberal/ Democrat' party if you want to label it as such.

Yes, this is exactly why I don't like the term; it does not do a good job of describing intent as seen from the person in question.

> I feel like 'virtue signaling' is poorly named. I think 'Comfort Signaling' and 'Loyalty Signaling' are easier to talk and reason about.

> * I am flying this flag because I want my people to be comfortable with me.

> * I am flying this flag because I want my people to know that I am loyal to them, and I don't care about what other people think. (Or, I'm fine with the other people hating me because of this flag)

Why don't you think "virtue" signaling works for that? That's the same meaning.

Because I don't feel that the confederate battle flag is virtuous.

Virtue signaling is done by people in every in-group; when it is done by people my in-group is fighting against Virtue Signaling does not feel like a virtue.

This comment started off really well with the need for successful communication requiring at least a partial overlap of of worldviews but then goes into the weeds with the comment about Trump. No one is denying that Trump won the election. But a huge percentage of Republicans believe that Trump actually won the last election. This is a real example of how worldviews on the right and left differ radically. The drag show is also a terrible example.

Those are examples of things that are hard for some to accept as bare facts.

Person Y won the election

Person Y won the election and that is BAD

Person Y won the election and that is GOOD

It is not a matter of denial, it is a matter of what story is made to accept the event.

If you have not had to fight about the topic, you can just make the first bare assertion. The event happened.

If you have fought about the topic and your central nervous system gets activated when you think about it, then the assertion will likely include moral judgement. The event didn't just happened, it happened for a good or bad reason.

> No one is denying that Trump won the election

Not strictly true, is it? There's a bizarre theory floating around in some liberal circles that Elon Musk somehow stole the election using Starlink satellites. And in years past, George Bush stealing his election was a pretty popular theory.

I'm conflicted about all of this because I gave up reading Scientific American when I felt it had become too political.

But of course, you can't remove politics from science. Scientists are human and humans are political. When a scientist chooses an area to investigate, it is influenced by their politics. You can ask scientists to be factual, but you can't ask them to be non-political.

It's not SciAm's fault that scientists (and science writers) are political.

The root failure, IMHO, is that several professions, including scientists, journalists, and teachers have become overwhelmingly left-wing. It was not always that way. In the 80s, 35% of university employees (administrators+faculty) donated to Republicans. In recent years it has been under 5%.[1]

I don't know the cause of this. Perhaps conservatives began rejecting science and driving scientists away; or perhaps universities became more liberal and conservative scientists left to join industry. Maybe both.

Personally, I think it is important that this change. Science is the foundation of all our accomplishments, as a country and as a species. My hot take is that trust in science will not be restored until there are more conservative scientists.

Sadly, I think restoring trust will take a long time. Maybe this change at Scientific American will be the beginning of that process. I certainly hope so.

---------

[1] https://www.nature.com/articles/s41599-022-01382-3.pdf

It's one thing to have liberal beliefs that influence your work in subtle ways, and a whole other thing to actively manipulate research to promote those social causes. Research on gender affirming care for minors should not be published or buried simply based on which side it supports, but that is exactly what has happened in that field.

Given how anti-science and anti-education the republican party has become I doubt we'll see a swing in political beliefs among researchers any time soon, but they absolutely can and should be as diligent as possible about maintaining their intellectual honesty.

> Research on gender affirming care for minors should not be published or buried simply based on which side it supports, but that is exactly what has happened in that field.

Yes, work done by a liberal researcher, was buries because it didn't support her political views. Liberals hinging the entirety of their scientific "evidence" on political pseudo-nonsense like the WPATH files. Republicans maybe anti-science and anti-education, but the other side is very much the same. One cult does not excuse the other.

> I don't know the cause of this.

I think it's pretty clear when you analyze it from the perspective of Selectorate Theory (c.f. Bueno De Mesquita's Logic of Political Survival).

Basically, there's a natural tendency for political parties to bring entire classes of institutions into their patronage network, leading to extremely high polarization within given industries. The choice of which party an institution class gets aligned with may be entirely arbitrary, but you expect it to happen. It's an efficient way to pork-barrel buy votes.

E.g. the education sector is part of the D patronage network and the ag sector is part of the R patronage network. There's no inherent reason this particular selection needs to be the case, but you do expect some kind of polarization to emerge.

Or perhaps the republican party has developed such an astonishing anti-science attitude that hardly any reasonable scientist can support them? Imagine doing research on vaccines and hearing the soon to be secretary of health speak on that topic. As long as these kind of people count as "conservatives" in the US, how could you be a conservative scientist?

If you look at political identification by academic discipline [1] you can see that the harder sciences tend to have smaller Democrat to Republican ratios relative to things like English Literature, Psychology, or Fine Arts.

To me, this implies there is an explanation other than partisan dislike for science that explains the large discrepancies in academic faculty. Whatever this reason is, perhaps it extends to other academic/scientific institutions.

1 - DOI:10.2202/1540-8884.1067 (this paper also discusses how Republican faculty tend to have better credentials controlling for the quality/rank of institutions they teach at)

Back in 2008 RFK Jr was a Democrat and Obama was considering appointing him to a cabinet post. Anti-vaxers have historically been crunchy-granola hippie folks.

https://www.politico.com/story/2008/11/obama-considers-stars...

It might be because what being a "conservative" in America means has been grotesquely distorted into what it is today.

> Perhaps conservatives began rejecting science and driving scientists away

There isn't even a "perhaps" about this. My parents (both physicists at a research university) voted Republican my whole childhood. The last 15 years has changed that despite the fact that they are still fairly conservative.

Why would they align with people who are vocally anti-education, consistently work to undermine trust in the scientific process, censor research and constantly try to shift schooling away from being a public right to a private good?

"Perhaps conservatives began rejecting science..."

Naah...I think left-leaning/collectivists tend to be much less tolerant of people they disagree with, and when the pendulum swing of the wider culture allows it, this is manifested in hiring outcomes over time.

This may swing back in the years to come...

> In the 80s, 35% of university employees (administrators+faculty) donated to Republicans

The Republican party used to be the leftwing party, right up until the 1960s - which is the right timeframe for the staff to have grown up in a "Republican family" without being conserve themselves.

AFAICT academia, in any country, since the 18th century, has leaned more towards being progressive than conservative, which is why academia has been consistently near the top of (s)hit-lists by dictators or strong-man "revolutionaries"

I grew up believing that science was the search for truth and fact, and that it should be constantly challenged to further that. What has happened I think, is that there has been a great polarization of science as government and groups have used and twisted it to fit a political agenda. Which essentially stops that search for truth. Challenging scientific conclusions should be encouraged not cancelled.

Science is a search for truth and fact but it is performed and funded by humans and institutions.

We could spin up a theorem generator that just starts from mathematical axioms and exhaustively recombines them to create theorem after theorem. This would create facts, but the process would be almost entirely useless. A pure undirected "search for truth and fact" does very little for us.

Researchers decide what problems to tackle. Funding organizations decide what research to fund. Researchers make choices about how to tackle these problems. Research labs are staffed depending on things like admission decisions and immigration decisions. Journals decide what papers to publish, not just on validity but on impact and novelty. Journals then charge money to access this research as part of a profit-driven business model.

All of these human elements bend the "search for truth" and a failure to recognize these institutions and their many historical analogues just means that you miss out on some rather important understanding when interacting with the literature.

I still feel the ideal should be a search for truth, even if human institutions do the work. I'm a fan of Feynman's stuff:

>...As a matter of fact, I can also define science another way: Science is the belief in the ignorance of experts. When someone says, "Science teaches such and such," he is using the word incorrectly.

>Science doesn't teach anything; experience teaches it. If they say to you, "Science has shown such and such," you might ask, "How does science show it? How did the scientists find out? How? What? Where?"

>It should not be "science has shown" but "this experiment, this effect, has shown." And you have as much right as anyone else, upon hearing about the experiments--but be patient and listen to all the evidence--to judge whether a sensible conclusion has been arrived at. https://feynman.com/science/what-is-science/

I always took that for granted but seems some don't.

> What has happened I think, is that there has been a great polarization of science as government and groups have used and twisted it to fit a political agenda.

Exactly. "In this house we believe ... science is real." is about the most unscientific sentiment possible. There, the word "science" exists to give the air of authority to a set of ideological and policy positions.

I always found that quote kind of funny. So the scientists who have views on political issues that are the extreme opposite of yours (because there are many such people)... what then exactly?

But only to a point, correct? Otherwise we end up in the current dialogue where flat earthers, moon landing deniers, and a large percentage of religious believers feel more platformed than ever. It's far too easy for the uninformed to challenge science simply because it challenges their non-scientific beliefs.

Scientist 1: If we put a sugar cube into water whose temperature is exactly 74.7373 degrees centigrade, the water will likely turn pink. here is our evidence for this.

Scientist 2: we tried this and found that if the water is cooling that it doesn’t work, it has to remain at a constant temperature.

Scientist 3: we tried it with refined and unrefined sugar. unrefined sugar did not work.

scientist 1: we took another look - it seems there was some weird additive in the refined sugar, when this additive added to water at 74.7373 degrees centigrade the water turns pink.

that’s a very silly and stupid example of “challenging” other scientist’s work. you precisely explain what you tried and how it differed, in the hope it leads to a more specific and accurate picture down the line.

flat earthers et. al just “say stuff” they think is right, where the evidence does not actually challenge any hypothesis or existing evidence because the claims are just … bad.

this is not “challenging” science. it is stubborn ignorance. pure and simple.

most of it is so easy to refute any random youtuber with a spare hour can do it (read: 6-12 months [0])

- https://youtu.be/2gFsOoKAHZg

however, your point about platforming is important, because people who wouldn’t have had a soapbox 15 years ago, now have a soapbox anyone in the world can find them on.

if you’re looking for something to confirm your world view, there’s something on the internet for you.

rule 1 of the internet should be spammed in front of everyone’s eyes for seven minutes before anyone is allowed to use a web browser — don’t believe anything you read on the internet.

[0]: there’s a running joke about how long this person takes to make new videos.

I don't think it helps to cancel them, probably hurts. It's not as if you have to either censor or send your highest-status scientists to debate them, and that exhausts the finite menu. In a diverse info ecosystem someone will have their comparative advantage on engaging with cranks. The important thing about overall ecosystem health is, is it reasonable in what it amplifies?

Scientific American hasn't seemed very healthy after the 80s. In the decades before, it was an unusual labor of love by one or two chief editors (I don't remember specifically).

Not just search for truth and fact, but use these truths and facts to develop ways that benefit people. The meaning of "benefit" is a philosophical/political consideration.

> Not just search for truth and fact, but use these truths and facts to develop ways that benefit people.

Wait, when did "how to use these truths" become part of science?? How you use science to develop things that benefit people (or organizations) is normally called engineering! Science is normally concerned only with finding useful facts about the world. There are some exceptions, like when you're using the scientific method exactly to figure out what benefits people (or any living organism), for example, using pharmacology to develop drugs that help people. But I would argue that even then, the main concern of pharmacology is to figure out what kinds of drugs have what effects on humans in certain conditions - i.e. it fits perfectly into the definition of "searching for truth and facts".

How you apply that knowledge science gives you to solve problems that affect society is called policy - and policy, while can be analysed using the scientific method, is normally not itself science. It's hard to use the scientific method to study policy, though, because there are far too many factors involved in anything to do with large groups of people, and far too little room to do experiments on them.

> that there has been a great polarization of science as government and groups have used and twisted it to fit a political agenda

This does match any reality I know of. What political agenda has government twisted science to?

The government is quite responsive to the science, and generates science, but the NCI and other bodies have little partisan politics, thigh of course the arguments in science get political just like any other group of people. It's just not Republican/Democrat politics.

> Challenging scientific conclusions should be encouraged not cancelled.

Scientific conclusions are challenged all the time. It is highly encouraged. Entire research programs get challenged to justify their existence. Should we really be running all these SNP chips for GWAS? Turns out that it wasn't a great investment, but it seemed promising at the time...

Too often people are doing two things, one good such as challenging science conclusions, and one bad such as lying or being dishonest or arguing in bad faith. And when they get critiqued for the bad one, they retreat to treating it as criticism of the good thing they were doing. I see it all the time.

Multiple problems here:

1. Science has always been political, this isn't new. Some of the first major experiments were performed in Nazi camps. Cancer treatment began with torturing Black Americans. The entire idea of ethics is political in nature.

2. Science is still the search of truth. If it doesn't match your truth, then that doesn't mean the science is wrong.

3. Challenging scientific conclusions IS encouraged, but there is also a danger to it. Look at Covid. In the US alone, 500,000 Americans died from Covid. Challenging social distancing, masks, and vaccinations costs lives. I mean literally costs lives. The people challenging this were doing it for political purposes, i.e. most of them had absolutely no idea what the science said or how it might be wrong.

>I mean literally costs lives

We have overpopulation anyway. And we don't have shortage of normies by any measure. In fact some social problems like monopolies are due to overabundance of normies.

> Challenging scientific conclusions should be encouraged not cancelled.

Vaccines are on the docket for cancellation, which to be fair, will last only as long as a swath of the population sees their kids incapacitated by some completely preventable virus infection. But do we really have to go through an epidemic (again!) to understand that the science of vaccines is solid?

There is such a thing as settled science.

There is also such a thing as people too uneducated and non-expert to understand what science is settled.

There should be such a thing as not listening to non-experts about settled science.

The science on vaccines is solid, but there are potential side effects (that's also solid science). So when it comes to, for example, giving kids the vaccines, we have to balance the likelihood of serious side effects with the necessity of preventing the disease. In the case of COVID, the disease's risk to kids is extremely low, but they are still vaccinated. That is a political decision, and it is perfectly reasonable to dispute it.

That's a particularly clear cut example. There are many more complex scenarios where "trust the scientific experts" is dubious because science has a limited domain of applicability. When you pretend that non-scientific decisions must be made on a scientific basis, people see through it and become sceptical.

You do realize the criticism of the Scientific American editor is mostly by people who don't read it, and believe the earth is 6000 years old.

It used to be all the science-y people on one side and Bible thumpers on the other... decades ago.

There has been something of a sea change.

People double down as part of human psychology. Some grasp their own biases much better than others. We should try to train people to be more self reflective and less biased politically. It does not correlate with education level so something is clearly broken in higher ed..

It's difficult for me to believe that higher education levels don't correlate to being more rational. Do you have any source on that?

I sense this has to do with personality, namely high conscientiousness and low neuroticism. That’s not something that can be taught.

How do you know it doesn't correlate with education level? I'm not saying it does, but it certainly could. I was definitely exposed to more ideas, even conflicting ideas through formal education. That said, I've never been one with strongly held opinions.

You need autism to be more self reflective. Ar you sure it can be trained?

The basic purpose of Reason magazine, since their early days supporting Holocaust denial and Apartheid, through to modern climate change denial is exactly the politicization of science. So this is massively hypocritical.

Here is a list of Soviet nobel prize laureates, courtesy of Wikipedia https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Russian_Nobel_laurea.... There are several in the sciences up to the year 1978.

I’m sure that many were committed Communists, Bolsheviks, perhaps Marxist-Leninists until their last breath. Perhaps there were “Tankies” and Trotskyists among the bunch. Perhaps there were many who recited the right thing, or longed for the restoration of Tsarist rule, perhaps some who ended up ended by colleagues who thought they’d subverted revolution. I haven’t read all the biographies.

Perhaps science can be conducted by people across a political spectrum, and perhaps that might be a good thing.

After Stalin had all the scientists he didn’t like executed, he allowed the ones who were useful for developing weapons to live. Truly inspiring.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Repression_of_science_in_the...

“Leave them in peace. We can always shoot them later.”

https://cerncourier.com/a/reviews-2/

I can't really speak to the author's credentials but they link to two of their own articles and seem to be sour that SciAm didn't publish their work under this out-going editor's direction.

In general though, it seems like publications such as SciAm are under a lot of pressure in this political environment. Maybe more than ever. I'm sure they've no doubt faced criticism from scientists that wanted to publish climate-denialist "science," over the last 40-some-odd years.

It seems like the folks clamouring for "neutrality," in science are those that were most often marginalized for their unscientific writing and claims. This whole environment of "both sides," and pseudo-scientific conspiracy theories, and alternative-facts must be absolutely exhausting for editors.

I hope SciAm manages to stay progressive and continue to publish good stuff.

I'm a bit baffled by this comment, so much so that I find it difficult to believe we've read the same article. I don't see any indication in the article that the author ever submitted any work to SciAm, let alone that he's sore about not being published. None of the examples he cites have anything to do with climate denialism, nor is he defending any pseudo-scientific conspiracy theories. How is any of this responding to the article you're commenting on?

No, you're right. I was referring to the pandering of credentials the author mentioned by citing the articles they published in other magazines and the book they're writing. No mention of their PhD in Medicine and specialization in the field though. Was that omitted?

> I've written articles about it for major outlets like The Atlantic and The Economist, and am working on a book. I found SciAm's coverage to not just be stupid (JEDI) or insulting or uncharitable (the Wilson story), but actually a little bit dangerous.

You're right, it doesn't sound like they're sour about not being published in SciAm. They're unhappy with the topics SciAm report on and the content of them.

Looking a bit deeper, the author is a co-host of the Blocked and Reported podcast and has been criticized for having an anti-trans bias in his writing [0].

It doesn't seem that he's a doctor of any sort, a scientist of any kind.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jesse_Singal

I feel like you missed a big chunk of the article. The author points out a number of cases where SciAm published outright false or misleading information, which always echoed progressive activist talking points. This has nothing to do with publishing climate denialism or other pseudoscience, it's about not publishing poor information just because it aligns with a particular world view.

SciAm is hardly an isolated example of this. It is wild to me how many organizations have twisted themselves around to promote various trendy progressive social causes that have no connection to their actual mission over the past decade or so. Mozilla is the poster child for this in tech.

I used to shake my head at this stuff, finding it mildly annoying but not all that consequential. After seeing the results of the last election and what voters have been telling pollsters for years, it's clear that this sort of activism is a massive albatross weighing on every single liberal politician and cause.

Turns out the author has no scientific credentials of any kind. They've been criticized for having an anti-trans bias in their writing [0].

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jesse_Singal

Science has _always_ been political. On the front page a few days ago was the story of a bunch of physicists bitching at each other over what happened in WWI

I have a book from Scientific American from the 1960s that has a whole section removed for the british audience because it contained instructions on how to run experiments on bears. That is a political act.

But, seeing as how administrations of various colours have differing approaches to funding science, its pretty hard for "science" to be a-political. Trump has expressed "policy" for completely removing NOAA, which provides massive datasets for wider research. His track record isn't great on funding wider science either. So its probably legitimate to lobby for more funding, no? (did the editor actually lobby effectively, is a different question)

Now, should the editor of SA also take on other causes, probably not. But "science" has been doing that for year (just look at psychology)

>I have a book from Scientific American from the 1960s that has a whole section removed for the british audience because it contained instructions on how to run experiments on bears. That is a political act.

I think you'd need a bit more evidence for that being "political". A far more plausible reason for the removal is that Britain doesn't have bears to any degree (there have been isolated sightings but most think they've been extinct there for over 1000 years).

It's true! Britain has no bears so we like any refrence to them to be removed from our books ensuring we never have to think about them.

I need to find it again but it said something along the lines of:

"this chapter has been removed as it describes experimentation on live bears."

it then goes on to apologise and has a lovely passive aggressive:

"we would hope that British readers would not like to carry out such experiments on live animals"

Galileo. Oppenheimer.

I think those two examples are already enough to show that science has been political for 400 years.

Yeah, scanning through the recently published articles it seems "Reason" has no problem with the politicisation of science if it means the slashing of govenment funding.

Reason is an explicitly political magazine that advocates for Libertarian ideas of small government.

A lot of criticism of SA seems to be from those who don't read the magazine. It is still mostly just thorough coverage of developments in physics, biology, engineering, and other pretty uncontroversial science topics and this coverage has not 'gone downhill'. It is a lot of work to do good reporting of an area of science by talking to a range of experts in that area and SA still does good work here. Some topics are politicized, but that doesn't mean you just don't report on the science in those areas. Almost everyone who thinks 'SA used to be good now it is woke' are either revealing they don't read it or just don't seem to like how the consensus in an area of research might now conflict with their worldview.

They do have an opinion section, like many journalism outlets, which sort of by definition have to be 'hot takes' (e.g. you don't publish opinion pieces that 99% of people will already agree with). Out of thousands it is seems hard to avoid having some bad ones (all major outlets seem to have opinion pieces that are dumb). Most of the flack they get seems to be from these dumb pieces, and it is sad that the entire brand gets tarred with it. You could argue that SA just shouldn't have opinion pieces at all, but ultimately opinion pieces are pretty good at drawing readers and SA is not a non-profit. Additionally, while there are some that overstep the research and are 'click-baity', some opinion pieces are thought-provoking in a valuable way. Nonetheless, perhaps it would be better to get rid of the opinions just to avoid hurting the reputation of the rest of the magazine, but running a journalism magazine is a tough business and it is easy for commenters on the internet to pop in and say stuff like this who don't actually have to run a magazine. I would rather they exist with occasional bad opinion pieces than not exist at all, as their coverage in general is still great.

This guy seems to really not like their coverage of science around gender non-conforming individuals, though I don't see why I should trust his representation of the research over theirs as he seems to have an agenda as well. He then cherry-picks a few examples of some bad opinion pieces not written by their journalists that overstepped the research and then paints the entire outlet with it, and that is frustrating because most of the science coverage reporting is still excellent.

The author of this article very (in)famously re-launched his career as a writer (prior to GNC youth he wrote mostly culture pieces) by misinterpreting a scientific paper on the subject he now claims to be an expert on. I don’t think he did this maliciously, but I do think, like many writers, he struggles to digest scientific literature accurately.

Which article and how did he misinterpret it?

I’m a casual, occasional listener to his podcast (Blocked and Reported) but don’t really know his origin story and am curious to learn more.

Looking at https://www.scientificamerican.com/ I see the following front page topics and articles:

- Nutrition: It’s Actually Healthier to Enjoy Holiday Foods without the Anxiety

- Climate Change: Climate Change Is Altering Animals' Colors

- Climate Change: An Off Day in Brooklyn—And on Uranus

- Cats: Miaou! Curly Tails Give Cats an ‘Accent’

- Games: Spellement

- Opinion: We Can Live without Fossil Fuels

- Games: Science Jigsaw

- Arts: Poem: ‘The First Bite’

Don't know if it's representative, but it doesn't surprise me at all and is exactly why I don't subscribe.

The titles are clickbaity, but based on a quick skim of the content of those articles it doesn't feel too removed from reading the print issue ~15 years ago. Especially if you look at the featured articles from the most recent online issue [1]

[1] https://www.scientificamerican.com/issue/sa/2024/12-01/

I know that I and many others switched to American Scientist years ago. SA has definitely gone downhill since the 80's. I would describe it as as bit softer/popular when I made the switch. I have no experience in the last few years.

The downhill slide was already underway by the 1990s. Readership was in a slow decline and the publishers turned to various marketing gimmicks to maintain solvency. More pictorial articles, more po-sci articles, cover wrappers suggesting that it was worth subscribing even if you didn't read the whole magazine etc. I stopped reading around 2000, when I bought an issue and noticed I had read the whole thing in under 4 hours rather than the usual 5-6. A comparison indicated they had changed the font size and line spacing slightly, so as to maintain the same page count but with about 15% less content.

I distinctly remember an article in the late 1990s (guessing 1998) which I read, but which I now can't find. It was about Y2K, and the bottom line was, we need more work to prevent disaster, but no matter how much is done, it will still be pretty awful.

I thought at the time he was exaggerating, and that Y2K was unlikely to be a big event. As everyone knows, a lot was done to fix the problem, and January 1, 2000 indeed turned out to be a non-event.

I cannot find the article now. I know I didn't dream it up, and I'm pretty certain it was in SciAm--I remember it had the usual sorts of graphs, illustrations, layout etc. as all SciAm articles did back then. If anyone can find it, I'd appreciate knowing. It was a turning point in my own reading of SciAm--I mostly gave it up after that, despite having devoured it up until 1980 or so.

The issue isn’t that Scientific American leans “pro-Democrat” and it is political. It always has, and that’s understandable.

The real problem is that the modern Democratic Party increasingly aligns with postmodernism, which is inherently anti-science (Postmodernism challenges the objectivity and universality of scientific knowledge, framing it as a social construct shaped by culture, power, and historical context, rather than an evidence-based pursuit of truth).

We have such low standards for republicans, it's amazing. We complain that democrats are increasingly acknowleding that science is done by humans and humans will tend to ask questions based on what phenomena they've encountered and what explanations they've been given in their lives up til then, but totally give the republicans a pass on catering to groups that deny global warming, evolution or even that the world is more than 6000 years old.

Postmodernism isn't anti-science, it's anti-modernism. Postmodernism doesn't care about science aside from the fact that it happens to make claims to objectivity, which postmodernism disdains. This is sort of like arguing that relativity is anti-science because it denies the existence of a privileged "objective" or "universal" reference frame.

To put it another way: if modernism was actually true and science was an inherently objective process that produced universal truths, then why do we have persistent and ongoing replication crisises in multiple scientific disciplines? Our answer has to come from postmodernism: the current scientific establishment values the production of papers as a way to fill magazines, and people with agendas to push (e.g. the American sugar lobby) will fund the production of scientific papers that produce the answer they want. If that makes sense to you, then you're a postmodernist.

It's reasonable to criticize people that take the ideas and concepts from postmodernism too far into nonsensical corners.

But postmodernism, as a philosophical and larger historical/analytical approach, is not some evil boogieman. Lots of things have been done based on purported science knowledge that was, with historical context and with a proper critical eye, complete nonsense at best, and evil at worst. It was quite easy to make phrenology look like science. Postmodernism studies how it is possible to make something look like science. It's a complicated topic with consequences for the framing and development of scientific knowledge. There's no reason to discredit scientific endeavor in totality because of that though, and, to be honest, those people are far more fringe in academia, for instance, than people realize. And just as well, properly framed, there is no reason to wholesale discredit the critiques made by postmodernism of the uses and abuses of scientific knowledge by scientific institutions, governments, individuals, and the ways that arose out of culture and historical context.

Like climate change? Like support of masking up when COVID was killing more than a 1000 people a day? Like believing "conversion therapy" doesn't work and is actually harmful? Like understanding sex and gender and two things even though we use the same words to describe both? Like voter fraud is minimal (pop question: after the 2016 election Trump claimed there were more than 3 million illegal votes cast. As president he had all the resources in the world to investigate it, had a personal reason to identify it, had the duty as president to root it out. He formed a commission ... and nothing. Was was because he was negligent in his duties, tried but was incompetent, or was simply lying?)

??? Postmodernism does not deny the Germ Theory of Disease or Newtonian physics. You have some very flawed, Jordan Peterson-tainted ideas of what Postmodern theory is, especially in regard to physical sciences.

Sure, social sciences like anthropology and economics in which human actors are in play will have their "objectivity" challenged.

The modern Democratic party doesn't believe that. Sure, there are movements in the party that probably believe that, but it's very much a minority view. Lets avoid trying to frame minority or fringe views as the mainline belief of either party.

Let's be real here, if there's one side that has an anti-science stance it's the republicans. They are pandering to (when they are not themselves) climate change deniers, evolution deniers, flat earthers, qanons... Those people don't vote democrat.

As for postmodernism, it is far from mainstream in academia, and you seem to have a very narrow idea of what it is. I can only recommend the following video (by an actual scientist!): https://youtu.be/ESEFUaEA7kk

I agree that postmodernism, or at least your definition of it, is so much nonsense (in the realm of hard sciences, at least - soft science unfortunately does suffer from human contextual bias issues).

I don't read SciAm (maybe that's an issue), but I'm a bit suspicious that this could be a political hit piece.

That being said, if any of the claims in the article are true (e.g. calling statistic normal distribution curves an affront to humanity), that would indeed be a travesty (that such makes it through editing).

I think a less impassioned, more objective take would also present e.g. the number of times a needlessly conservatively minded piece made it through editing.

I.e. is it that SciAm is suddenly biased unscientific drivel or is it that society representatively has become more extreme?

Can you give an example of an evidence-based pursuit of truth that was not in any way shaped by culture, power, or historical context?

Now talk about the crowd size at Trump's first inauguration, and the birth of the term "alternative facts".

I wouldn't describe it as "pro-Democrat" - that would imply it embraces the Democrat governing agenda. For example, embracing more federal power compared to the Republican ideology of more state power. Which has nothing to do with science.

It's more so caught up in the liberal cultural agenda. Which Democrats align with. A square is a rectangle but a rectangle is not always a square.

I think _both_ conservatives and liberals have turned to postmodernist questioning of science. Just as conservatives question climate change science, liberals question biological sex science.

Both are detriments to society and show how we're not exactly moving forward culturally. But it seems the liberals, who tend to embrace a panpolitical ideology (where everything is political) are actively hurting established science. Thus Scientific American would be a much more useful and enduring resource - especially in the social media age - if it kept to science and didn't cross into politics.

[flagged]

I loved Scientific American as it was in the 1970s-80s, and was saddened to see what happened to it after around 2000(?), but I can see how having an editor like Helmuth would be a rational choice for the owners. The purpose of a commercial magazine is to generate income, and as Fox/CNN/NYT/Guardian realized, being objectively informative is a sub-optimal approach. I do wonder how we can ever again have something like the old Scientific American.

My mom had subscribed to Scientific American for more than twenty years (maybe 30), but for this very reason stopped her subscription a few years ago. It had turned from informing its readers about science to political posturing. She was sad that she's lost a previously intellectually valuable resource.

I suspect we'll eventually get something like a Substack for Science author (editor) on a subscription model that will do long form pieces and invite SMEs to talk about their stuff.

Relish the memory, it is gone and the civilization that supports such things is gone too. What we have today is a sad, sensationalist farce. We're entering a new Dark Age, and it is riding in on fascism.

To the "everything is political" crowd:

The complaint is not that SciAm writes about politics. It's that they write SCIENTIFIC NONSENSE when arguing for political causes.

Exhibit A: "the so-called normal distribution of statistics assumes that there are default humans who serve as the standard that the rest of us can be accurately measured against."

If you read the whole paragraph, it's obvious what the writer intended to convey: that health research often assumes that there is one average, representative person, and everybody else is clustered around that person in a normal distribution. The author asserts that this is wrong, because people are dissimilar in more complex ways, and instead often fall into different clusters, rather than one bell curve.

In my opinion, the author's assertion is correct; we've seen in the past that research failed to find how medication affects women in specific ways, because that research was based on the premise that people are largely the same, and thus failed to specifically test the effects on each gender individually.

The sentence people quote out of context is, by itself, confusing and weird, and thus should not have been written that way. But in context, it's obvious what the writer intended to convey, and the intent is in no way anti-scientific.

Is that nonsense? Isn't it just saying that normal distributions are misleading when multimodal distributions would be more accurate? The indignant tone is unnecessary but it's not wrong to say complex systems cannot be modeled with a simple normal distribution.

Popular science has always promulgated culture.

If you're only complaining now, it's just because you don't like the culture SA is promulgating today.

I don't disagree that SA has a lot of nonsense in it, but that's a long trailing symptom. We've been in a time for a while now where easily observable facts are untrue and manufactured fictions are true, as long as it follows a self-serving narrative.

Helmuth became editor in chief of SA in 2020 -- well after reality stopped mattering pretty much anywhere.

No doubt a publisher trying to keep a traditional publication afloat in the internet age noticed. (And no doubt the publisher has noticed it's now time to flip the politics the other way, hence Helmuth is out.)

The funniest part was when she claimed the posts "do not reflect my beliefs". Her allies seem to know that isn't true. On BS there are plenty of congratulations for her willingness to say what so many others are thinking, etc.

1: https://www.npr.org/2024/11/15/nx-s1-5193258/scientific-amer...

I clicked on the links of the articles linked to by the author as "egregious" examples of Helmuth's editorial bias, and they're both clearly labeled _OPINION_. (Opinion articles are not scientific articles because they are __opinion__.)

May need to choose some better examples if the author wants to support his point.

Why does a scientific magazine have an Opinion section in the first place? Has it always? I would guess the number of Opinion pieces has gone up dramatically in the last decade.

"Editorial bias" and "opinion article" aren't mutually exclusive.

Is there bias in what opinions SciAm chooses to print?

>they're both clearly labeled _OPINION_. (Opinion articles are not scientific articles because they are __opinion__.)

People who supported Fox News during it's heyday used the same argument.

I really don't care if she went on a political rant on BlueSky. What I do care about is that SA has become a click-baity site without much depth. I don't know if she's responsible for that, though (I doubt that she alone made that happen).

If anyone is interested, there's some discussion of this piece on the subreddit of the Blocked and Reported podcast (which is co-hosted by Jesse Singal, the author of this article):

https://old.reddit.com/r/BlockedAndReported/comments/1gult0b...

https://www.reddit.com/r/BlockedAndReported/comments/1gult0b...

Oh boy, after 30 years we're finally getting a resurgence of the Science Wars!

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Science_wars

Edit: Also be sure to read the prequel

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lysenkoism

  Did you know that [...] the normal distribution—a vital and basic statistical concept—is inherently suspect? [...] That author also explained that "the so-called normal distribution of statistics assumes that there are default humans who serve as the standard that the rest of us can be accurately measured against." But the normal distribution doesn't make any such value judgments, and only someone lacking in basic education about stats—someone who definitely shouldn't be writing about the subject for a top magazine—could make such a claim.

This is Jesse Singal (Reason) throwing shade at Laura Helmuth (SciAm) for publishing a piece in which Monica McLemore allegedly claims that scientists shouldn't judge humans against a normal distribution. Singal thinks only morons would make that mistake.

This is why SciAm was "really bad" under Helmuth, not just "bad".

Does the author not understand the concept of "opinion piece"? Every "article" he takes issue with is NOT a scientific article, but an opinion piece.

Scientific American isn't a social media platform; by publishing these opinion pieces, they implicitly support them. Would you be ok if they published an opinion piece bashing evolution and defending creationism?

A lot of people really don't understand the difference between science and opinion, and that's exactly what's gotten us into the trouble we're in today.

If you include enough opinion pieces on highly controversial subjects and always from the same perspective your readers will start noticing. Just because they are opinions it doesn't mean that people can't deem them ridiculous.

In a different context, HN tends to have the same feelings about Scientific American, see: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29741171

I think there's an argument to be made that Scientific American shouldn't have opinion pieces that readers will misinterpret as scientific fact.

Opinion pieces in scientific magazine should be based on the facts, and not just on opinions.

Do you not understand the opinion pieces are part of the problem too ?

There was one slogan that was repeated during COVID that perfectly encapsulates the degeneration and capture of science: "Follow the science".

That's not how science works. Religions are "followed". Science is based on questioning and skepticism and falsifiability.

People saying that didn't mean it as "obey the science," they meant, "follow the science to the conclusions it leads you to."

For example, people would ask public health officials what they thought about things, and the data wouldn't be sufficient to say with certainty. So they said they'd follow the science, meaning "we'll make a decision based on data."

You can criticize a lot of unscientific decisions that people made after saying that, but you've misinterpreted the phrase.

True, but practically speaking: on the flip-side, basically nobody affected by the pandemic had the resources to execute on hypothesis-testing during the pandemic. There wasn't anything else they could do but decide what sources they trusted and follow them.

Vaccine denial's conclusions are so woefully unscientific that one can excuse the lack of technical precision in the synthesis of a pro-vaccination slogan.

Every piece called out here is clearly labeled "opinion" - did they even read the normal news and analysis sections? Countless newspapers and outlets and actual scientific journals have opinion/editorial sections that are generally very well firewalled from the factual content. You could collect the worst hot takes from a few years of nearly any site with a dedicated opinion page and pretend that it has gone downhill. But that this the whole point of having a separate opinion section — so opinions have a place to go, and are not slipped into factual reporting. And many opinion pieces are submitted by others or solicited as a way to show a view that the newsroom doesn't or can't espouse.

Whether the EIC of SciAm overstepped with her own editorializing is probably not something we as outsiders can really say, given the complexities of running a newsroom. I would caution people against taking this superficial judgment too seriously.

The examples given in the article are quite egregious, and the authors of those pieces are not notable.

SciAm nonetheless made the decision that those particular opinions should be published under their banner, and it’s not clear on what basis that decision was made other than editorial discretion.

Informed opinion, clearly labeled so, on interesting but non-controversial non-ideological topics can be great instigators of curiosity.

What might have come before the Big Bang?

Do quantum superpositions really collapse somehow based on some as yet uncharacterized law, or does our universe produce a web of alternate futures, still connected but where straightforward links are quickly statistically and irreversible obscured?

There is a science friendly basis for interesting opinions of particular experts, in areas of disagreement or inconclusive answers, when clearly labeled as opinion, whose opinion, and why that experts opinion is of special interest.

Also, opinion on the state of science education, funding or other science relevant non-scientific topics, with all due modesty of certainty makes good sense.

But injecting ideological opinions, and poorly or selectively reasoned ones, or unestablished conjectures falsely posed as scientific truth, into a format that claims to be representative of science based information, is a tragedy level disservice.

Not to mention, with respect to Scientific American in particular, a betrayal of many decades of higher standards, work and reputation.

If an editor of a science magazine chose to publish op-eds about how 5G causes cancer and then went on a Twitter rant along those lines that impugns her credibility and judgment as a whole. Similarly here.

Not true, this is not labeled anywhere I can see as opinion, but does include an editors note to a suicide helpline, and a correction...

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/what-are-puberty-...

Why do opinions need a place to go? Why can't we just demonize professionals who lack the ability to report factual content without mixing in their opinions as unfit to be writing?

Should a publication with science in its name publish opinions with obviously (to a scientifically skeptical mind) incorrect factual statements?

When we see opinions leaning very consistently one way at a publication it invariably turns out their non opinion pieces have some of that bias.

That bias always includes ignoring scientific accuracy in favor of political ideals.

You re making it sound as if every opinion is valid to go in there. For the same reason why they wouldn't publish eugenicist opinions, they should shy away from obvious cringebait.

Afaik science has not yet ran out of much more interesting opinions than the ones mentioned

The opinion pieces in pretty much every major newspaper are mixed in with the “factual” content, so for the average person reading, there is no difference. See for example “top links” sections, which include both.

We also maybe have to deal with the common misconception that a fact proceeds somehow from an absolute objective perspective. But as far as humans are concerned, there are only human points of views grounded in human cognition and human interests. Some human points of views might try to encompass more than the direct individual own experience might otherwise limit to, sure, but that is still human endeavor.

Fact and factitious have a common Latin root for a reason.

Even the carefully engineered autonomous probe will only gather data according to some human conceptions of what matter to be recorded or dismissed, what should be considered signal rather than noise.

Opinion: Astrology should be seriously considered...

That label doesn't give carte blanche to publish non-scientific nonsense. Does it?

I'm unsure that helps things? Maybe if some of the excerpts were jokes? The criticism of JEDI is particularly laughable. If sad. I say that as someone that finds the acronym cringe worthy.

So, yeah, I agree that the standards are lower in these sections. I question if they are non existent.

> Every piece called out here is clearly labeled "opinion"

True if one stopped reading half-way through.

The linked article itself is an opinion piece.

Reason does interesting stuff, sure, but no mistake it has a bias and that is a right centre libertarian view that loads factual content toward a predetermined conconclusion that individual free thinkers trump all.

As such they take part in a current conservative habit of demonising "Science" to undermine results that bear on, say, environmental health, climate change, on so on that might result in slowing down a libertarian vision of industry.

I still read their copy, I'm a broad ingestor of content, but no one should be blind to their lean either.

> For example, did you know that "Denial of Evolution Is a Form of White Supremacy"?

Yes, because I read Inherit the Wind in middle school.

Inherit the Wind uses the historical case of the Scopes Monkey Trial to discuss the contemporary McCarthyism, neither of which is particularly closely tied to white supremacy?

Pretty sure "scientific racism" owes more to pop versions of evolutionary theory than it does to a near-Eastern religion that endows all people with immortal souls, spreads the faith in all languages following Pentacost, tells parables about Samaritans, and makes a point of adding Galatians to its sacred book.

Ugh. I'm sorry, but could you please explain yourself? I also read Inherit the Wind in middle school, and my understanding is that it fictionalized the (true) story of the "Scopes/Monkey Trial", which was an ideological conflict between science and religion. It's been over 50 years, and maybe I'm so pure that I disregarded any racial context, but I don't remember any.

How does "White Supremacy" come into the story, or the denial of evolution as a whole?

Thank you for some historical context.

Hilarious!

The while message of the article is to trash talk the departing editor accusing her of political left bias... which in it self (the trash talking) is a political statement from the conservative side.

To the author of the article: you are no better than her...

Can you reconcile that view with the paragraph at the end?

>That doesn't mean the editor needs to be apolitical or that there's no role for SciAm to chime in on social justice issues in an informed manner, with the requisite level of humility and caution. It simply means that Scientific American needs to get back to its roots—explaining the universe's wonders to its readers, not lecturing them about how society should be ordered or distorting politically inconvenient findings.

He explicitly states he is ok with bias.

To be honest, even 18 years ago, long before this editor in chief, I found Scientific American rather ideological. Maybe it got more obvious over time, but I don’t see its recent tone categorically different.

Any examples? I'm in the same boat as you, and while I agree with the premise, I don't recall anything as egregious as the examples from the article:

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/denial-of-evoluti...

https://archive.is/H8hJw

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/why-the-term-jedi...

https://archive.is/oMzz7

I agree. This editor may well have been a current-day culmination of a trend that started some time ago. I stopped my own print subscription to SciAm once the articles started to ostensibly push certain sociopolitical viewpoints in the guise of science journalism. This was well before the editor being discussed was editor enough so I never knew this person existed.

While this editor may have crossed some redlines, I am doubtful this change in represents a genuine philosophical shift at the magazine.

SciAm was transformative to my life, I think. My father brought home a stack of them, maybe a couple year's worth, for me when I was twelve or so. I read them over and over again during my teens, slowly puzzling understanding out of the articles that were initially so far beyond me. Learned more from that stack of magazines than some years of high school.

But that was in the 80s. For the last couple of decades, Scientific American just makes me sad. Crap I wouldn't bother reading.

The problem is >40 years old. I was a subscriber in the early 1980's (when SciAm was still quite good), and recall them publishing one of Carl Sagan's articles on the dangers of nuclear winter.

Whatever the correctness of Carl's science, he was an astronomer. Not a subject-matter expert. And the the article was very clearly ideological. In an era when the political winds in Washington were blowing hard in the other direction.

I was rather younger then, but still recall thinking that SciAm's approach had thrown away any chance of appealing to the Washington decision-makers, controlling the nuclear weapons, for the feel-good (& maybe profit) of appealing to the left. Which seemed hard to reconcile with them actually believing the results they published, saying that humanity could be wiped out.

True. SciAm has been broken for a long time. The same can be said for most magazines, but SciAm being broken probably just hurts more for our crowd.

I sympathize with her. There's a big movement in this country that defines itself largely by opposing what its perceived enemies support. When science (or culture) makes a reasonably sound assertion, and it's met with an opposition that wields rhetoric like a weapon with no regard for rationality, it's tempting to fight fire with fire. And when the victims of that opposition are among the most marginalized in society, it's easy to feel like you have the moral high ground.

Maybe in culture it's ok to fight dirty and stretch some truths in order to force newer perspectives into the zeitgeist. Maybe it's even neccesary when the opposition is willing to lie outright, and loudly, as a first resort. But that doesn't work with science. Even if the motivations are pure, it's destined to backfire. It should backfire. Science itself is under assault and losing its ability to hold together some semblance of a shared reality. If people start to believe that science is just as corruptible as journalism because of shitty science journalists, we're fucked.

It’s misguided and toxic to center your worldview around the “most marginalized” or to think that focusing on them somehow gives you the moral high ground or frees you from the obligation to play by the meta-rules of society and its institutions. Or to think that your worldview somehow has a monopoly on helping marginalized people. You invoke “rationality” but as Spock would say, “the needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few.”

> Maybe in culture it's ok to fight dirty and stretch some truths in order to force newer perspectives into the zeitgeist. Maybe it's even neccesary when the opposition is willing to lie outright, and loudly, as a first resort. But that doesn't work with science. Even if the motivations are pure, it's destined to backfire. It should backfire. Science itself is under assault and losing its ability to hold together some semblance of a shared reality.

The number of times one contradicts oneself in just a few words here, with such a lack of self-awareness, is amazing.

The magazine in question is a science-aligned publication. Given the current public discourse, it's no surprise that science-aligned opinions will be attacked. The current public discourse is (gleefully, tribalistically) misinformed, misguided, and hell-bent on social fragmentation.

Watch the bonds between citizens and reality dissolve in real time.

> movement in this country that defines itself largely by opposing what its perceived enemies support

I think that some of the more devious politicians realized that a "partitioning" of beliefs creates populations of in-groups and out-groups which are then manipulated against each other. Many "basic" facts are getting challenged just to create the controversy. Controversy reinforces tribalism, which in turn makes people more controllable.

The problem, to me, is that today at least in the US there are a lot of areas where there are truths to criticisms, but then the response to it is gratuitous and equally problematic.

This article struck me sort of similarly. Reason is an outlet I have a certain amount of respect for in general, but this article came across to me as more politically over the top in a way that the outgoing EIC's writing ever did. They would have done more good by simply highlighting the actual state of medical gender intervention research and leaving at that (it sounds like they have done this in fact, but they would have been better off as such). Even then it's complicated — I have friends who work in the field, and when faced with things like the Cass report basically point out that evidence of intervention effect or absence of an effect isn't the same thing as what decision will reduce harm the most in individual cases, and there's a lot of misconceptions about what's actually involved in gender-focused interventions. What's lost in these discussions is that medical care is not the same as science per se, it's about optimizing utility functions or something for individuals.

At some level this sort of critique over the Scientific American editor covering political topics seems a little precious and disingenuous. As others have pointed out, science has and always will be political, whether people want to admit those leanings or not. Pretending that it's somehow "above" politics is disingenuous and narcissistic, and leads to exactly the sorts of problems the author claims to care about. These more political topics have also become mainstream in science in general, and it would be a bit weird for an EIC at someplace like Scientific American to just pretend the discussions aren't happening. Is she guilty of bad writing? Maybe, but it is meant to be a popular science publication, and rants like this hardly seem like an appropriate response to bad writing.

It's interesting how we see positions we agree with as just common sense while the positions we strongly disagree with as "overtly political".

I grew up in the 1980s reading SciAm and still getting old issues out of the library so I remember the legendary monthly columnists such Martin Gardener and C.L. Strong and his illustrator Roger Haywood. They tried the likes of Jearl Walker and Richard Hofstader but they never found anyone who could fill those shoes.

They went from a beautiful spot color printing to the same process color everybody else used. Got bought by a German publishing conglomerate. Looking back I can already see the signs of physics "jumping the shark" because of the articles that came out in the early 1980s that conflated inflation and the Higgs field because... I guess you could in the early 1980s.

I did my PhD and then got settled in the software business and did not pay a lot of attention to SciAm, especially because they never had a particularly porous paywall. I did notice the stupid "woke" editorials a few years before the right-wing trolls noticed them. I had lost interest long before then.

Susa Faludi wrote a book about the "backlash" to the feminist movement which had actually accomplished something. Unfortunately there are a lot of people today who believe in struggle for the sake of struggle and will fall behind a standard that will maximize their experience of backlash without doing anything to help their situation (e.g. bloomberg businessweek runs gushing articles about Bernard Arnault and $3000 a night hotel rooms and $600 bottles of wine but you know they're on the right side of the barricades because they always write "black" with a capital b)

It is a selfish meme though and very much likes the backlash because the existence of the backlash confirms their world view.

I read Scientific American from time to time. It's not what the Reason author claims it is. It's a popular, non-specialist science magazine that reaches out to the public (mostly through Dentist's office waiting rooms). It's OK for it to have a political point of view.

I see this a lot lately. Someone takes issue with something(s) in a magazine or journal and tries to burn them to a crisp because of it. Even on here, folks periodically roast Quanta magazine for something that's not exactly right from a subject matter expert perspective. It's a perfectly good magazine, also for the general public (perhaps a little more high-brow than Sci-Am).

The Reason article takes a very rigid and persnickety point of view, which is common in libertarian arguments. It's like the kind of rhetoric you hear from insufferable debate-club enthusiasts in high-school and college.

I agree. You're right.

On science reporting, Scientific American has been on par with Wired or Technology Review for more than a decade. SciAm wasn't mutated/destroyed by a few recent opinion pieces. (Whether those pieces were unhinged or not. I can't force myself to go and check, because see above.)

It's not even what's "published in the magazine" as such, they take issue with opinion pieces saying stuff like "the complicated legacy of E.O. Wilson". It's news to me that disagreeing with part of the work of someone in behavioural psychology (of all things) is "setting aflame the edifice of science", but here we are...

I wish my dentist had Sci-Am in the waiting room.

But seriously, those rants quoted in the article about normal distributions and the use of the acronym "JEDI" are really, really, pathetic. A science magazine needs to be science first and politics second. Anyone who wants to reverse that should work for a different rag.

> It's not what the Reason author claims it is.

The article literally describes Scientific American as "the leading popular science magazine". What exactly did the author mis-claim?

> It's OK for it to have a political point of view.

Not if that political point of view is anti-science, as others have elsewhere described in this comment page (post-modernism).

> The Reason article takes a very rigid and persnickety point of view, which is common in libertarian arguments.

I'm not a libertarian, But I also have no idea what you're talking about with the "rigid" and "persnickety" descriptions.

> It's like the kind of rhetoric you hear from insufferable debate-club enthusiasts in high-school and college.

I think it's a real problem when a popular science magazine doesn't just get the detailed facts wrong, but takes on a point of view that is hostile to objective scientific inquiry in general, and also attempts to inject poisonous identity politics into subjects as banal as the normal distribution or Star Wars.

Trust in institutions is at an all time low. The last thing we need is for these institutions to veer away from their goals to push a political agenda. Good riddance to her.

There are no apolitical institutions. You would see that more clearly when visiting (or god forbid living in) a dictatorship or totalitarian regime, where all institutions are either brought in line with the regime or abolished. And I do mean all including gardening clubs.

Enjoy institutions having the freedom to express political opinions, it is not guaranteed to last.

I believe we are living in an interesting time (yeah, that kind of 'interesting time"). Decades from now, given a historical context, I suspect a lot of the headlines like this one will be viewed very differently.

I used to love Popular Science but these magazines all died 20 years ago. Science reporting was the first type of journalism to go, much easier to write clickbait about current events. Remember Scientific American already endorsed Biden last election which was a wtf moment.

Interestingly the only people who are not supposed to “push a political agenda” are usually accused of being “woke” in one of the next sentences. “Keeping politics out” brought the US - and the world - Trump, two times. Most things in life are political.

But denial of evolution is linked to white supremacy. A rejection of the biological links between white people and colored people helps to justify discrimination based on skin color. And non-believers in evolution often share other backwards views.

As for the the bell curve, I'd encourage you to read her article first, befire forming an opinion from disingenuous caricature of what was said in it. She doesn't deny the usefulness of the concept, just points to some harmful and pseudoscientific ways it is/was used. Think phrenology for example.

Reason is a heavily biased right-wing website, as you can see on the articles on the front page. This doesn't necessarily invalidate everything coming from them, but take it with a grain of salt at least, and go form your own opinion based on her articles, instead of the mockery they wrote to make a point about "the woke political agenda controlling academia".

>But denial of evolution is linked to white supremacy.

Acceptance of evolution also leads to white supremacy. One only need to read what Victorian Eugenicists had to say about colored people.

So if both accepting and rejecting evolution are linked to white supremacy it stands to reason that neither is the causal factor.

I've always understood denial of evolution's primary reason is that it contradicts scripture. I've never heard it associated with white supremacy until today.

>But denial of evolution is linked to white supremacy. A rejection of the biological links between white people and colored people helps to justify discrimination based on skin color. And non-believers in evolution often share other backwards views.

How do you know this?

And the invention of the keyboard is linked to online bullying.

There is a point in which the relation is so far-fetched and non-causal that it doesn't make any sense to mention it, and the link between evolution denial and white supremacy absolutely crosses that line.

White supremacy is also linked to the sun rising up each morning, detergent and open borders. None of them relevant.

I'm sorry, but reason magazine has personally made my life difficult by participating in medical gaslighting. There may be something to some of this, but I'm not inclined to trust them at face value.

Is there any particular basis for this statement, or do you prefer to leave it unsubstantiated?

The Reason article blurs the distinction between SciAm's opinion pieces and its factual (or putatively factual) reporting. That's disconcerting. "Opinion piece" objectively means "free bullshit zone". Reason is usually much more responsible than this.

SciAm has of course fallen into terrible disrepair. But that happened long ago and the cause wasn't BS in the editorials. Who even reads editorials in a science magazine?

I was a Young Libertarian in my day and I recognize the urge to blame lunatics who disagree with my politics for everything wrong in the world. But this particular case isn't convincing. It died and then the loonies moved in, not the other way around.

> blurs the distinction between SciAm's opinion pieces and its factual (or putatively factual) reporting.

To me, based on the content and context, the main quote written by the departing editor the article cited was clearly an opinion (or editor's column) piece and not part of SciAm's science reporting.

While this article didn't focus on it, the biggest factor when the editor-in-charge of a publication is biased isn't what is written but rather what never appears at all. An editor's curation and broad editorial guidance is subtle day-to-day yet has enormous impact over time. I've read accounts of newsroom reporters talking about editorial bias and it's remarkable how each individual biased decision is almost undetectable and, in fact, in some cases the biased editor may not even realize their bias is cumulatively shifting coverage.

Most of the Reason article's criticism is of its factual reporting. The JEDI thing is indeed an opinion piece (and it's legitimate to criticize a magazine for its opinion pieces being stupid), but the puberty blocker stuff (not linked directly from the article, but it's at https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/what-are-puberty-... ) was an article, not an opinion piece.

I've seen some of their science articles veer into political assertions.

> "Opinion piece" objectively means "free bullshit zone".

I'm not a fan of Michael Shermer, but he claims SciAm demanded a complete revision of a column, and then later rejected one of his columns, right before getting rid of him entirely. So there's at least some rules about what opinions they're willing to publish, and that was under the previous editor-in-chief (as in the one before the one the article is about). The opinions that make it to press are curated, so if there's something off about them, the editors should be held responsible, and the op-eds don't have a different editor-in-chief than the main articles.

> Who even reads editorials in a science magazine?

I see no reason not to consider them as a significant part of the magazine's image. If the articles were all the same but the editorials were all written by, e.g. young earth creationists about their views, wouldn't what they put in that "free bullshit zone" shape your perception of the whole?

> I was a Young Libertarian in my day and I recognize the urge to blame lunatics who disagree with my politics

Reason is obviously a libertarian magazine, but the author is certainly not a libertarian.

> The Reason article blurs the distinction between SciAm's opinion pieces and its factual (or putatively factual) reporting.

How are readers to know the difference?

The comment section under the article on Reason’s website explains a lot of what drives their own editorial choices, this article included. It made a few perfectly valid points while twisting backwards to arrive at its very preconceived conclusions, and gave their readers a much-desired hit of satisfaction that they could point to something and claim there personal perspectives had been proven out as a systemic reality. As per usual, the truth is buried somewhere in the lacking nuance.

Don't be mistaken, Science and politics are intertwined and have been for a long time. Talk to any lead scientist who has to secure funding for their project and they ll tell you how its all political. So I dont see a problem with science magazine editors taking a political stance.

The Right tends to harp on this purist view from time to time while ignoring their own house of glass. For them, it's ok for for example, WSJ to be a completely biased in one direction. They dont complain about skewed viewpoints then. They will also defend famous podcasters for providing a platform pseudo science people with agendas. But as soon as a science magazine editor takes a stand, they flip out.

only a problem when it leads to publishing obviously false statements and never correcting them, such as the "The so-called normal distribution of statistics assumes that there are default humans who serve as the standard that the rest of us can be accurately measured".

Does the following phenomenon have a name?

Open an article about the detrimental politicization of something, click to the social media profile of the offender and you know with high certainty the exact kind of poster they are and posts they make/repost.

This sounds like what you would expect to see if everything subject to politicisation is politicised in a direction opposed by the same "kind of poster". I imagine you could observe the same sort of predictability if you looked at the social media profiles of anyone writing an article that politicization of something is actually unproblematic or good.

When it is this easy to delineate and stereotype those for and those against a measure, the appropriate word is polarisation.

Yes, it's called bias.

This whole debate is surrealist.

Bigotry and intolerance are fundamentally irrational and illogical, so the so-called "left-bias" of science is just science being itself.

Now the comments in this HN page and the reason.com article are completely ignoring that, and only considering everything through a political filter.

I don't think this applies to the particular problems being discussed. Certainly it's irrational to discriminate (as you say in a related comment), but the examples discussed in the article are not cases of Scientific American simply declaring that principle, but rather making other errors, or proclaiming a rather different political point of view.

(If you think the "social justice" movement is simply about -- or even supports -- the nondiscrimination principle you mention in a related comment, you are mistaken! And if you support it because you support that principle, I recommend looking more into what the SJers actually believe, because you may find that you're not in as close agreement with them as you assumed you were...)

Is "intolerance" objectively defined?

>Bigotry and intolerance are fundamentally irrational and illogical, so the so-called "left-bias" of science is just science being itself.

TIL science ignores sex differences in body strength and endurance, racial differences in average IQ, the Putnam study on diversity and social capital, racial differences in aggression and their link to violent crime, and studies on the effects (irreversible) puberty blockers have on kids, among other things.

You can dislike these results, you can tell me I'm a bigot for even bringing them up, but you cannot correctly dispute them on the grounds of scientific inquiry. The fact that Scientific American would even try, as they have now for years, tells you all you need to know about their attachment to reality.

"In the process, SciAm played a small but important role in the self-immolation of scientific authority—a terrible event whose fallout we'll be living with for a long time."

Which is it - small or important? All that seems like a bit much.

For want of a nail the shoe was lost. For want of a shoe the horse was lost. For want of a horse the rider was lost. For want of a rider the message was lost. For want of a message the battle was lost. For want of a battle the kingdom was lost.

Was the nail small or important?

have you ever heard of a lynchpin? They're small and usually extremely important. For example, lynchpins hold the backhoe on to the back of my tractor.

In fact, lynchpins are so small and important that the term is used when there's something that is small but so important that missing it would ruin a project, because the lynchpin ties it all together into a cohesive whole.

Also the replies to my sibling have me confused if i am even awake... who hasn't heard "for want of a nail"?

you can be small role yet still provide significant contributions. Or are you just upset about the content of the article?

What a strange bit of pedantry. 'Small but powerful' is a very common phrase that I don't really see any problem with.

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