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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

#651

Post by rayiner »

sofixa wrote: post #193
forgingahead wrote: post #169

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Did you vote for or do you support the "opposite team"? Because if your standard is "easy to accuse of 'ism' based on association", you might be in for a rude shock.

I'm not American nor do I live in the US. The mere fact that there are only two teams, and everything has to be the opposite (oh, you don't support X? you must be from party Z because they hate X, and if they hate it, I love it !) even if it's basic scientific facts is infuriating. And one of the teams is actively racist and sexist, has shown a blatant disregard for rules, norms laws and ethics, and now has full powe…

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

#652

Post by jpollock »

anonfordays wrote: post #627
tylersmith wrote: post #606

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, it's called bias.

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

It's a cognitive bias, since we remember the events that match our expectations and don't keep track of experiment over time.

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

#653

Post by FredPret »

sangnoir wrote: post #614
FredPret wrote: post #566

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's like we're talking past each other. SciAm and the media are held to a higher standard... by themselves. They claim a position of authority. So when they are biased or get something wrong, it's a problem because their brands have a halo of truth left over from olden days. Joe Rogan doesn't claim a position of authority. So when he is biased or gets something wrong, it's just what's to be expected from a bro with…

Your assumption is that there exists an "apolitical truth" that science should aspire to. There isn't. There are many truths that can be discovered through the scientific method. Those truths are inherently political (see elsewhere on this discussion about the truthful obesity research funded by Coca-Cola that focused on exercise rather than sugar intake)

The notion that there is no objective truth, that everything is a social construct, is intellectual poison.

Fundamental truths exist in physics and mathematics and other fields, completely orthogonal to politics.

People may have opinions about it, but it is what it is.

Anyway, I’m not talking about science at all. I’m talking about Scientific American and the broader media.

They claim impartiality; they wear a facade of objectivity; they sell themselves as neutral arbiters. But in reality they are apparatchiks.

Joe Rogan is popular not because he claims to be above it all or to be objective, but because there’s no facade at all.

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

#654

Post by some_furry »

anon291 wrote: post #570
some_furry wrote: post #560

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Vaccine denial's conclusions are so woefully unscientific that one can excuse the lack of technical precision in the synthesis of a pro-vaccination slogan.

There are legitimate reasons to be concerned over the COVID vaccines that have nothing to do with 'vaccine denial' [1]. What does 'vaccine denial' even mean? I've never met anyone who denies the existence of vaccines. [1] Such as the elevated cardio vascular risk for young men that exceeded their risk from COVID.

> What does 'vaccine denial' even mean?

It's a shorthand for "science denial" about vaccines.

See also: The belief that vaccines cause autism.

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

#655

Post by BurningFrog »

jayd16 wrote: post #441
BurningFrog wrote: post #409

To the "everything is political" crowd: The complaint is not that SciAm writes about politics. It's that they write SCIENTIFIC NONSENSE when arguing for political causes. Exhibit A: "the so-called normal distribution of statistics assumes that there are default humans who serve as the standard that the rest of us can be accurately measured against."

Is that nonsense? Isn't it just saying that normal distributions are misleading when multimodal distributions would be more accurate? The indignant tone is unnecessary but it's not wrong to say complex systems cannot be modeled with a simple normal distribution.

Perhaps something like that was the intention, but it's not what the written text says.

Normal Distribution is a mathematical concept used in probability theory and statistics. It has nothing to do with any concept of "default humans".

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Normal_distribution

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

#656

Post by lowkeyoptimist »

csours wrote: post #512

I feel like rational communication requires an overlap in perspective - not the same point of view, but some amount of overlap. Science relies on rational communication between people who disagree, because we can fool ourselves, and we can fool our in-group. The narrative fallacy doesn't just affect weak minds; by yourself, you won't outsmart your own filters. To learn about the world, you have to accept the world, a…

It is 100% virtue signaling because it is used as a means to feel and show moral superiority to others that do not hold those views or 'virtues'.

It is also a loyalty and comfort signal, but as we saw with Helmuth's reaction - it is impossible that Gen X saw fault with Harris' policies. It is only that they are bigoted, narrow minded, fascist loving, misogynist. If a 'virtue' is questioned, you are excommunicated from the 'liberal/ Democrat' party if you want to label it as such.

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

#657

Post by cromwellian »

TimTheTinker wrote: post #638
disentanglement wrote: post #588

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Or perhaps the republican party has developed such an astonishing anti-science attitude that hardly any reasonable scientist can support them? Imagine doing research on vaccines and hearing the soon to be secretary of health speak on that topic. As long as these kind of people count as "conservatives" in the US, how could you be a conservative scientist?

> Imagine doing research on vaccines and hearing the soon to be secretary of health speak on that topic. I hope I'm not entering a minefield here... but from what I've heard, it sounds like he's not against vaccines in principle, just ones that haven't undergone clinical trials equivalent to what the FDA requires for pharmaceuticals. (A sound byte I heard sums it up, where he said something like "no one called me ant…

No, he’s pretty much against them and makes a new excuse each time. He would claim that no vaccine ever has gone through enough testing.

He also denied HIV causes AIDS, days it’s Poppers or lifestyle.

He also pushed ivermectin which studies show has no statistically significant effect on COVID.

He also pushed raw milk when prior to pasteurization, milk was the cause of 25% of all communicable diseases (it’s a great medium for bacteria, it has avian flu viruses, parasites, etc). We invented pasteurization for a reason.

The guy latches on to whatever statistical outlier study he can find like an ambulance chasing lawyer and is a threat to public health that has been massively improved over the last century.

All of his attacks on dyes and seed oils won’t move the needle when the real reason for US health decline is too much sugars/carbs, too little exercise, and addiction to opioids and nicotine.

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

#658

Post by ALittleLight »

disentanglement wrote: post #588
GMoromisato wrote: post #578

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 sci…

Or perhaps the republican party has developed such an astonishing anti-science attitude that hardly any reasonable scientist can support them? Imagine doing research on vaccines and hearing the soon to be secretary of health speak on that topic. As long as these kind of people count as "conservatives" in the US, how could you be a conservative scientist?

If you look at political identification by academic discipline [1] you can see that the harder sciences tend to have smaller Democrat to Republican ratios relative to things like English Literature, Psychology, or Fine Arts.

To me, this implies there is an explanation other than partisan dislike for science that explains the large discrepancies in academic faculty. Whatever this reason is, perhaps it extends to other academic/scientific institutions.

1 - DOI:10.2202/1540-8884.1067 (this paper also discusses how Republican faculty tend to have better credentials controlling for the quality/rank of institutions they teach at)

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

#659

Post by hn_throwaway_99 »

tokinonagare wrote: post #635
hn_throwaway_99 wrote: post #620

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are few slogans I hate more than "trust the science", primarily because it aligns scientific results with faith, which is exactly what science is not about. Science is fundamentally about skepticism , not trust. Now, obviously that skepticism can be misused by some rando with no qualifications or even time spent researching telling you to be "skeptical" of people who have spent decades trying to figure shit out…

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I completely disagree with your characterization of this example, and on the contrary I think your example perfectly shows how "follow the incentives" gives you truer, clearer understanding of what happened:

1. If you dug in to the authors of the now infamous Lancet letter ( https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lancet_letter_(COVID-19) ), you could see how they had huge conflicts of interests.

2. Early on in the pandemic, you could see how some people went to a lab leak (intentional or not) theory very quickly with no evidence (e.g. "The China Virus"). On the flip side, though, I think you had a lot of people pushing against this who felt that any acknowledgement of a potential lab leak was playing into "conspiracy theories". So my point is that you have to trace incentives on both sides, and both sides had incentives that were actually against finding the actual truth.

3. I think the other thing that is extremely important is to realize that nearly all humans prefer some explanation to "I don't know". Even today you see people on both sides of the Covid origins debate who are adamant their position is right, when I think the real situation is more "Some lab leak or escaped zoonotic virus being studied by a lab is more likely than not". So early on in the pandemic, you had people confidently proclaiming their personal theories as facts that weren't backed up by evidence. And importantly, the truth nearly always eventually comes out. You say "that hypothesis was totally suppressed for the mainstream media for about 2 years". That timeline is wrong, there were lots of things being reported in early 2021 about a potential lab leak - this article that summarizes the state of reporting is from June 2021: https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/media/the-media-cal...

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

#660

Post by CrimsonCape »

InsideOutSanta wrote: post #448
BurningFrog wrote: post #409

To the "everything is political" crowd: The complaint is not that SciAm writes about politics. It's that they write SCIENTIFIC NONSENSE when arguing for political causes. Exhibit A: "the so-called normal distribution of statistics assumes that there are default humans who serve as the standard that the rest of us can be accurately measured against."

If you read the whole paragraph, it's obvious what the writer intended to convey: that health research often assumes that there is one average, representative person, and everybody else is clustered around that person in a normal distribution. The author asserts that this is wrong, because people are dissimilar in more complex ways, and instead often fall into different clusters, rather than one bell curve. In my opi…

You are adding nuance to the underlying concept and failing to see how the wielders of the concept don't have that nuance.

Take BMI; first, i've seen arguments against BMI using the "there is no baseline normal" argument just like the original statement you quoted. Second, i've seen arguments that BMI as a concept is just invalid and rationales / facts that lend credence to the concept of BMI are somehow invalid. Finally, there's the inevitable ad hominem: it must be bigots who use the phrase BMI.

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