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Scientific American's departing editor and the politicization of science

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Re: Scientific American's departing editor and the politicization of science

#211

Post by pessimizer »

everforward wrote: post #172
rayiner wrote: post #151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 n…

I trust you’ll maintain that view if and/or when you become a marginalized group, and the dominant group shifts the meta-rules of society and its institutions in ways you don’t like? This view usually strikes me as hypocritical because it’s almost always paired with a paranoia of becoming a marginalized group and a belief that maintaining majority status for their group is “right” in some way. It’s easy to quote Spoc…

"Marginalized" groups have not been helped in any way by any of this. Lumping everyone together into a group who is not a white straight man diminishes everyone's individual material problems into a generic "marginalization," and unfairly centralizes white straight men. It's something that wealthy powerful people do in order not to have to discuss their wealth and power, and the fact that they all grew up in sundown towns.

This wave of wealthy white people screaming "bigot" at other white people without health care hasn't raised the condition of the descendants of slaves at all. Instead it's been an expansion of welfare for well-off white women and affluent immigrants. Everybody has been oppressed like black people except for the descendants of slaves, and everybody has been stuck in a caste system except for Dalits.

"Marginalized" people want to be addressed as individual humans with material problems like other humans. Instead a bunch of people so wealthy and comfortable that they are almost completely detached from the material world and have never missed a meal treat everyone like symbols and try to read the world like literary critics.

> It’s easy to quote Spock when you make sure that you’re always part of “the many” and never part of “the few”.

Assuming that everyone you're talking to is "the many" is not good. Your argument should work no matter who you happen to be talking to.

Re: Scientific American's departing editor and the politicization of science

#212

Post by tiahura »

giraffe_lady wrote: post #116
blessede wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

What is the group demanding that is "over" what you would consider appropriate? How do their demands restrict your behavior? Personally I've never noticed trans people and their push for rights & recognition having any impact on my life whatsoever. And I say this as a devout member of a rigorous and conservative religious tradition.

Does your daughter play competitive sports? Has she been knocked down by a boy playing on a girl’s team?

Re: Scientific American's departing editor and the politicization of science

#213

Post by Clubber »

thrance wrote: post #147

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…

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?

Re: Scientific American's departing editor and the politicization of science

#215

Post by ourmandave »

tzs wrote: post #45
red016 wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> Remember Scientific American already endorsed Biden last election which was a wtf moment. In his first term the Trump administration tried to massively cut scientific and medical research, tried to change the rules for the board of outside scientists that review EPA decisions for scientific soundness to not allow academic scientists so that it would only consist of scientists working for the industries that the EPA…

I'm sure I'm forgetting several more.

Like putting a climate science denier in charge of NOAA as he was reluctantly heading out the door.

https://www.npr.org/2020/09/12/912301325/longtime-climate-sc...

So he could publish a piece under the official NOAA logo to try and gain legitimacy.

Looking at all the latest insane picks, can't wait to see what toon he install this go around.

Re: Scientific American's departing editor and the politicization of science

#216

Post by Clubber »

insane_dreamer wrote: post #38

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.

>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.

Re: Scientific American's departing editor and the politicization of science

#217

Post by thunfischtoast »

thaw24612107 wrote: post #191
error_logic wrote: post #150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's similar to how if you think heterosexuality or homosexuality are choices due to your own experience, that's not everyone's experience, and you're probably bisexual...congratulations. Even though there are only two sex chromosomes, issues with them can cause people who are physically intersex. Then there's all the complexity of the sense of self. Some people could feel they have the 'wrong' body and be fine with…

Affirming a delusion was never the correct response to treating mental illness. We should stop pretending their delusions are real, if we really want to help them. It is completely different if it is a physical disorder, but this is not the case in vast majority of cases.

What are the delusions that you speak of? Because it seems to me that you are mixing up identity and illness.

Also: if a identity or an emotion is real to me, does it not become real through that act itself?

Re: Scientific American's departing editor and the politicization of science

#218

Post by pessimizer »

tomgp wrote: post #142
KaiserPro wrote: post #106

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 h…

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.

Re: Scientific American's departing editor and the politicization of science

#219

Post by llm_trw »

thrance wrote: post #147

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…

>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.

Re: Scientific American's departing editor and the politicization of science

#220

Post by jl6 »

gadders wrote: post #98
tptacek wrote: post #74

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…

>>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.
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