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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

#571

Post by GoblinSlayer »

consteval wrote: post #391
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,…

>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.

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

#572

Post by kenjackson »

rayiner wrote: post #7
refurb wrote: post #4

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 proces…

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 wh…

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..."

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

#573

Post by anon291 »

Bhilai wrote: post #546
FredPret wrote: post #434

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

Scientific American's challenge to certain political beliefs doesn't undermine its commitment to scientific awareness. I find their articles more informative than arbitrary podcasts. No one claims SciAM is the sole source of truth, but it's a valuable resource. You're free to ignore it, just as I ignore most podcasters. If you rely on Joe Rogan for science and claim it be truer than SciAm, there's little to discuss h…

SciAm is not really a journal. However, scientific publications like Nature and the Lancet have removed articles due to political ramifications.

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

#574

Post by [deleted] »

gandalfgeek wrote: post #547

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.

[deleted]

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

#576

Post by smt88 »

gandalfgeek wrote: post #547

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.

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

#577

Post by [deleted] »

PaulHoule wrote: post #565

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 bou…

[deleted]

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

#578

Post by GMoromisato »

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.

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

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

#579

Post by dekhn »

Levitz wrote: post #457
dekhn wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

>I don't expect public health officials to have a utilitarian function that maximizes global health considering second order effects. Why not? It sounds to me that is the ideal scenario. If I go to the doctor I want them to maximize for health, it's up to me to make health concessions In the same way, we have an entire political class who should be able to look at the health of the population and gauge which measures…

Ideally, i guess, in some mental models, we'd love to have some sort of super powerful system that can compute a global utility function that considers second (and third, etc) order effects accurately enough to plan out actions that maximize the global utility (without violating ethical norms) until we are immortal and have unlimited energy resources and ability to manipulate matter.

In practice, we instead have centers that focus on first-order effects and who advocate for their position (from an authority based on scientific knowledge, and preparation for emergencies) which are then evaluated and mixed with other centers by political leaders to incorporate the best attempt at considering second and further effects.

Everybody has a different utilitarian model and we don't have enough data or algorithms to predict second or third order effects (we usually fall back on "wisdom" from prior experience).

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

#580

Post by smt88 »

someuser2345 wrote: post #337
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.

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?

Major news orgs publish op-eds they disagree with all the time. They label them as opinion.

It's actually unfortunate if publications decide only to publish things they agree with because that fails to acknowledge they could be wrong.

Evolution and creationism are settled wars (as far as science is concerned) and wouldn't be interesting to readers. It would be interesting to read a serious assessment of, say, the Covid lab leak theory.

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