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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

#391

Post by consteval »

underseacables wrote: post #16

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.

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.

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

#392

Post by Xcelerate »

tivert wrote: post #246
underseacables wrote: post #16

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.

> 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?

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

#394

Post by aidenn0 »

tim333 wrote: post #330
UncleMeat wrote: post #267

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 proble…

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 s…

> > 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/

There are so many cases in which the interpretation of the data is difficult. There are many cases in which there are either experiments with seemingly conflicting data, and two different plausible interpretations of existing data. I consider myself highly intelligent and reasonably well informed and yet, were I the one setting policy, I would still need to rely on the opinions of experts in various fields to interpret what data we have on various issues.

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

#395

Post by FredPret »

Bhilai wrote: post #381

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,…

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

#396

Post by epistasis »

underseacables wrote: post #16

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.

> 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.

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

#397

Post by dahfizz »

xpe wrote: post #302
dahfizz wrote: post #272

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"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…

> "Everything is political" is such a boring tautology. 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 th…

I believe you're nit-picking instead of interacting with the content of my comment.

OP did not literally say "Everything is political", they said "There are no apolitical institutions". Which is functionally the same thing. "Everything is political" is a common phrase used to express a common school of thought, [1] for example. I was interacting with this school of thought directly in my comment.

I agree with you that "Everything is political" is not true. But tpm is arguing the opposite.

"Everything is political" is a trivially true statement when using tpm's definition of "political", which is the point I was trying to get across. tpm is claiming that any institution which interacts with the government in any way is political in nature. This means that even the rocks and trees and oceans are political, because they are at the mercy of government policy.

I am arguing against this definition of "political".

[1] https://daily.jstor.org/paul-krugman-everything-is-political...

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

#398

Post by dekhn »

felixgallo wrote: post #227
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…

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A subset of the progressive wing stretches science to meet its ideology. One of the opeds in SciAm is a good example of that. Centrists (both liberal and conservative) tend to be a bit more grounded in direct reality.

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

#399

Post by vonneumannstan »

bithead wrote: post #364

"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?

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

#400

Post by NeutralCrane »

UncleMeat wrote: post #260
tlogan wrote: post #243

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

This is a pedagogy and social policy decision, not a scientific one. You can disagree with it, but it isn't like we have scientific research that incontrovertibly provides education policy recommendations to address social disparities. Changing math curricula isn't denying math and reason itself.

How about insisting that puberty blockers are an effective treatment for gender dysphoria despite international reviews that fail to show a benefit? [0] And despite virtually every other first world nation no longer recommending the treatment? And refusing to publish NIH funded studies on puberty blockers when they fail to show they effectiveness you thought they would? Does that count as denying science and reason?

[0] https://www.nytimes.com/2024/05/13/health/hilary-cass-transg...

[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2024/10/23/science/puberty-blockers-...

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