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Scientific American's departing editor and the politicization of science

reason.com

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

#311

Post by thrance »

tlogan wrote: post #243
felixgallo wrote: post #227

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

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.

Don't worry, you won't have to worry about what they teach your children in school anymore - Republicans are going to destroy the department of education.

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

#312

Post by xpe »

miltonlost wrote: post #307
alistairSH wrote: post #292

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.

[flagged]

Can you point to some more detail on this?

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

#313

Post by scarmig »

Calavar wrote: post #297
scarmig wrote: post #283

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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: Sci…

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 grant that the horse one looks pretty solid and interesting.

But it's the choice of topics. SciAm has an extremely narrow view of what science is worth publicizing, one that aligns very closely with online causes du jour. Looking at the recent technology topic articles, I see: AI causes e-waste; turning a car into a guitar; AI uses too much water; misinformation is an epidemic; voting is secure; zoetropes; another e-waste story; UN should study effects of nuclear war; bird going extinct; another misinformation story; AI and fungus; AI and (yet again) misinformation.

I guess there's a market for this stuff, but I'm not in it.

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

#314

Post by trosi »

alistairSH wrote: post #292

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.

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.

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

#315

Post by gjm11 »

wtcactus wrote: post #257
giraffe_lady wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> Personally I've never noticed trans people and their push for rights & recognition having any impact on my life whatsoever. Do you have young children? I don’t live in the USA, I live in Europe, but I have a very small baby and I already did. The daycare, just this year announced they aren’t going to be celebrating Mother and Father’s Day anymore. Instead we will have to celebrate a Parents day. This is just a smal…

Do you actually know that switching from "Mother's Day" and "Father's Day" to "Parents' Day" has anything to do with trans people? Without the context of your comment I would have guessed it was more about (1) trying not to upset children who have lost a parent, (2) trying not to upset or confuse children who've never had two parents around, and/or (3) trying not to upset or confuse children brought up by same-sex couples.

Of course you might consider any or all of those to be Stupid Woke Nonsense, but whether right or wrong, sensible or stupid, they're not about trans people.

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

#316

Post by degrees57 »

wrp wrote: post #34

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 lik…

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.

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

#317

Post by blindriver »

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.

[flagged]

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

#318

Post by vundercind »

dijksterhuis wrote: post #90
tumnus wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 lo…

I figured your link would be this one:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JTfhYyTuT44

(Folding Ideas, "In Search of a Flat Earth")

He takes a couple of their claims seriously about what one will see when attempting particular experiments involving a very large lake, attempts them, sees the results one would expect if the Earth were curved, and reports this to some flat earth community forum, refining the experiment as they suggest ways he may have screwed it up, and continuing to find curvature (obviously).

The real story is how they react to contrary evidence delivered entirely on their terms, and where that community was heading four years ago (beware—I guess—that part also becomes necessarily "political").

[EDIT] I guess I buried the lede for this site's interest, which is that the video devotes a fair bit of time to how the Youtube "algorithm" took a little success for Flat Earth videos as a cue to aggressively promote them to people it identified as maybe liking them (those inclined to fall down that particular rabbit hole—which involves a lot more than just the specific belief that the earth is flat), but now flat earth is in decline, because that and other "algorithms" started sending the same folks to... Q-anon content instead.

Incidentally, there was a somewhat-big documentary on Flat Earth some years ago that included some folks from a flat earth convention trying some experiments very similar to the ones depicted in this video (involving visibility of objects across a large lake), with predictable outcomes.

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

#319

Post by Cpoll »

alistairSH wrote: post #292

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.

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.

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

#320

Post by miltonlost »

tlogan wrote: post #222

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…

??? 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.

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