301–310 of 1001 posts
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Yes, a portion of Democratic Party leadership has appeared to move away from science and reason in some cases. One example that frustrated me as a taxpayer and parent with kids in school: here in California, it was Democratic policymakers who removed Algebra from high school curricula, arguing that it would help address disparities among minority students.
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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.
"Everything is political" is such a boring tautology. Everything exists within the political climate of modern society. Institutions are forced to navigate the political landscape in which they exist. But that does not make the institutions political in nature. There is absolutely nothing political about studying the mating patterns of beetles or the composition of rocks. When people say that SA is being political, t…
1. The comment above didn’t say “Everything is political”.
2. "Everything is political" isn’t true. One might say that many things are influenced by politics; that’s fine, but downstream influence is neither pure single-factor causality nor equality.
3. "Everything is political" isn’t a tautology either.
Support for #2 and #3: There are things in the universe that existed prior to (and independent of) politics, like the Earth. There are phenomena influenced by politics but not inherently political, such as the phenomena of global warming or measuring the level of inflation. What to do about global warming or inflation is political, if you are lucky, meaning you have some persuasive influence at all (not the case in a dictatorship) and/or don’t have to resort to violence.
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You can't make people rational after their education, that's the whole insanity of all this: education is the key, critical thought, not creating gullible fools. But religion and many political ideologies depend upon gullible people or they would not exist, so the powerful members of those tribes impel society (for the children!) to denigrate education to produce morons. The United States is filled with them, they ma…
I agree that there seems to be, on the whole, a downward trend of educated, critically thinking populace. The statistics and anecdotes align to make this clear. But I struggle to pick the cause. Certainly I don’t buy into the idea that there are rooms of politicians and school board members discussing how to keep the population uneducated. Behind every outcome is an incentive. So what do you think is the incentive th…
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Test scores accurately measure learning. That’s one of the most robustly supported facts in all of education, and something virtually nobody in Asia or Europe disagrees with.
Which is why reorganizing all school systems around teaching the standardized test and judging teachers by these results has been such an overwhelming success that "virtually nobody [..] disagrees with".
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, ra…
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
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Nah that isn’t the problem. If that happened to my kid they would get back up and shove the other kid over. The problem is maintaining the integrity of sports and competition. Only an uneducated person would ever try to argue that “the best women’s college basketball team would beat the best men’s college basketball team” even 1 out of 100 times.
my kid they would get back up and shove the other kid over. Therein lies the rub. Some sure do, but most 13 year old girls don’t.
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.
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Before I started transition I read through the available literature (this would be back in 2010-2015 ish, before it was quite so hot button) and the general consensus wasn't with Singals position then. I don't think skepticism ought to be ruled out or anything, but hormone therapy is better studied than the use of most antidepressants at this point. (although it could still use better study on particular dosage and e…
The Cass report in the UK was pretty clear that there isn't enough evidence to base decisions on https://cass.independent-review.uk/home/publications/final-r... >>> While a considerable amount of research has been published in this field, systematic evidence reviews demonstrated the poor quality of the published studies, meaning there is not a reliable evidence base upon which to make clinical decisions, or for child…
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Before I started transition I read through the available literature (this would be back in 2010-2015 ish, before it was quite so hot button) and the general consensus wasn't with Singals position then. I don't think skepticism ought to be ruled out or anything, but hormone therapy is better studied than the use of most antidepressants at this point. (although it could still use better study on particular dosage and e…
The Cass report in the UK was pretty clear that there isn't enough evidence to base decisions on https://cass.independent-review.uk/home/publications/final-r... >>> While a considerable amount of research has been published in this field, systematic evidence reviews demonstrated the poor quality of the published studies, meaning there is not a reliable evidence base upon which to make clinical decisions, or for child…
And that criticism has come from medical boards in the UK and globally, I believe?
Anyway, that's also only for children, which feels politically like a wedge issue. The NHS is very slow at providing HRT and I rather doubt they're treating more than a hundred children for gender dysphoria in any way rn.
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 p…