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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

#621

Post by unethical_ban »

NeutralCrane wrote: post #389
tasty_freeze wrote: post #237

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Like climate change? Like support of masking up when COVID was killing more than a 1000 people a day? Like believing "conversion therapy" doesn't work and is actually harmful? Like understanding sex and gender and two things even though we use the same words to describe both? Like voter fraud is minimal (pop question: after the 2016 election Trump claimed there were more than 3 million illegal votes cast. As presiden…

> Like believing "conversion therapy" doesn't work and is actually harmful? Like understanding sex and gender and two things even though we use the same words to describe both? Like believing puberty blockers are an effective treatment for gender dysphoria despite historical evidence being extremely weak, ignoring or condemning more modern, rigorous studies [0], and refusing to publish your own studies when they don'…

Were you to read the comments of that article about the unpublished research, You could see that many people who I am sure identify as liberals agree that the scientists took the wrong action.

Though I admit that I understand why a researcher would hesitate, knowing that bigoted politicians and Evangelicals would use it as a cudgel against trans rights and trans people themselves.

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

#622

Post by genewitch »

ben7799 wrote: post #513
FredPret wrote: post #434

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

I think most of the Anti-Rogan sentiment is mostly people attributing things to him that he does not actually do or say. People from the far left are so opposed to listening to him their opinion of him is almost completely formed by hearsay and taking small snippets of what he or his guests say out of context. I fell victim to this. After the recent talk about just how important his show was in the election I listene…

See also Limbaugh[0] et al on AM. IF you actually listen to their (not rogan) shows they follow the art bell and phil hendry style of broadcasting. Repeat something inflammatory, maybe add a bit of opinion, go to commercial, wait for the calls to come in, then let the callers go off. Their mechanism for entertainment is common man.

Rogan has uncommon men (afaik), NdgT, etc. I don't like long-form content in general so i catch clips and replays of sections but i don't care enough about long-form to ever listen. i don't have anything against the guy, personally.

[0] limbaugh was replaced by other people and i can't remember their names because i only listen to AM during the day when i am somewhere without cell coverage and i'm out of USB stick tunes - the last time was 2018 or so and maybe it was hannity or something? Also the word "repeat" as i used it was explicit in "repeating what someone else said" - not repeating to belabor. I could give examples, maybe. Further, Alex Jones isn't this type of broadcaster, either. He is outside the diagram i've already drawn between our comments.

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

#623

Post by [deleted] »

slopeloaf wrote: post #582
ben7799 wrote: post #513

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think most of the Anti-Rogan sentiment is mostly people attributing things to him that he does not actually do or say. People from the far left are so opposed to listening to him their opinion of him is almost completely formed by hearsay and taking small snippets of what he or his guests say out of context. I fell victim to this. After the recent talk about just how important his show was in the election I listene…

I was an early fan from 2016-2018 (stopped listening as regularly after 2018 and dropped off entirely after 2020). I agree he is not far right Rogan definitely shifted right during this time though. Enough so that I and many others close to me found it off putting to continue. A shame because I’ve never found a replacement show. Calling him far right is incorrect, but I believe the criticism has always been about the…

[deleted]

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

#624

Post by 23B1 »

Supermancho wrote: post #612
23B1 wrote: post #563

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're not thinking deeply enough about the problem, which is annoying because I'm addressing the main thrust of the original article. Staff/editors/leadership cannot be trusted to label correctly if they are serving their own agendas. This is a real problem when we're looking to science to guide sociopolitical decision making, e.g. during a pandemic, or in childcare, or with the environment.

> You're not thinking deeply enough about the problem, > Staff/editors/leadership cannot be trusted to label correctly if they are serving their own agendas. This is a real problem when we're looking to science to guide sociopolitical decision making, ...or you know, you could have stated what you meant instead of asking questions you didn't care about for your own reasons. None of what you say applies to a publicati…

I do care about my questions which are germane to the point of the article. I'm not being philosophical or obtuse; "who watches the watchers" is a common consideration in dealing with accountability and truth, and is indeed a core value of the scientific method.

Scientific publications don't get to free themselves from that obligation if they want to be regarded as either.

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

#625

Post by contagiousflow »

dahfizz wrote: post #415
tpm wrote: post #324

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> There is absolutely nothing political about studying the mating patterns of beetles or the composition of rocks. Well, what about studying the mating patterns of humans, studying the decisions to abort, studying the decisions to change gender? Still not at all political in your country? Then, who decides if a study gets funding, who decides if it is ethical, who decides if the results can get published? It's all po…

Scientific research is apolitical. Even the act of studying abortion or transgenderism is not inherently political. Just because scientists have to occasionally interact with political institutions does not make Science itself a political institution. Science is fundamentally apolitical.

I don't believe anyone here believes that scientific research is political. But how a society funds, publishes, and integrates scientific research is deeply political.

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

#626

Post by unethical_ban »

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?

So?

Should it be impossible to have a rigorous scientific method for reporting and peer review in the news section, while advocating for certain actions or perspectives in the opinion page?

If someone sends me a Wall Street Journal news article that reports on facts, I can trust it, even if their opinion page is intellectually bankrupt.

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

#627

Post by anonfordays »

tylersmith wrote: post #606
anonfordays wrote: post #487

Does the following phenomenon have a name? Open an article about the detrimental politicization of something, click to the social media profile of the offender and you know with high certainty the exact kind of poster they are and posts they make/repost.

Yes, it's called bias.

It's accurate, so by definition it cannot be bias.

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

#628

Post by GoblinSlayer »

suzzer99 wrote: post #480
GoblinSlayer wrote: post #373

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>What might have come before the Big Bang? Singularity.

'Singularity' is just a placeholder for 'we have no idea what's going on here'.

Huh? AFAIK singularity is a dense object of zero size.

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

#629

Post by genewitch »

lazyeye wrote: post #601
Crayfish3348 wrote: post #523

A book came out in August 2024 called "Soda Science: Making the World Safe for Coca-Cola," by Susan Greenhalgh. She's a professor (emeritus) at Harvard. The book is a history. It shows how the Coca-Cola Company turned to "science" when the company was beset by the obesity crisis of the 1990s and health advocates were calling for, among other things, soda taxes. Coca-Cola "mobilized allies in academia to create a soda…

I wonder how much of this same kind of manipulation/distortion is going on when we are told to "trust the science" with regard to climate change? The pressure to ignore or minimise inconvenient facts would be overwhelming (career at stake situation).

what's the bellwether for climate change? Rising temperatures, rising CO2 concentrations?

There's strong evidence there actually isn't warming going on. The "warming trend" may be due to the temperature sensor locations. Originally the sensors were put in remote, rural, unpopulated and unused locations (ideally!). As communities grew... you understand that the sensors now are no longer rural, remote, unpopulated areas. What happens to the air in a city? If you're unsure, "urban heat island". This is extremely localized "weather" - the sort of thing that i've been yelled at "IS NOT CLIMATE".

I'm only going to link 1 thing here, because doing this sort of thing on my lifelong handle has never done me any favors:

> Research in Astronomy and Astrophysics, 23:105015 (20pp), 2023 October

> Challenges in the Detection and Attribution of Northern Hemisphere Surface Temperature Trends Since 1850

> https://doi.org/10.1088/1674-4527/acf18

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

#630

Post by genewitch »

CamperBob2 wrote: post #590
mrandish wrote: post #553

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If cell phones or microwaves or a hundred other things were harmful we would not find out While I agree that there may be things which have subtle but cumulatively harmful effects over time, the two specifics that you cited (cell phones and microwaves) are very poor examples because they've been deployed so broadly for so long, the chances there is some significant medical harm still undetected is vanishingly small…

Also, trial lawyers would rapidly become the wealthiest people on Earth if genuine, reproducible evidence of harm from non-ionizing radiation could be found. If you thought the tobacco and silicone breast implant settlements were impressive...

just jump on the two examples instead of actually considering the point being made, i guess.

Think "leaded gasoline" if you need a concrete example

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