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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

#681

Post by EVa5I7bHFq9mnYK »

brabel wrote: post #559
EVa5I7bHFq9mnYK wrote: post #411

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not just search for truth and fact, but use these truths and facts to develop ways that benefit people. The meaning of "benefit" is a philosophical/political consideration.

> Not just search for truth and fact, but use these truths and facts to develop ways that benefit people. Wait, when did "how to use these truths" become part of science?? How you use science to develop things that benefit people (or organizations) is normally called engineering! Science is normally concerned only with finding useful facts about the world. There are some exceptions, like when you're using the scienti…

Here you said it: "useful". The meaning of the word "useful" is a philosophical/political consideration.

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

#682

Post by treflop »

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 think this related to the “critical thinking” skill that all my teachers always stressed about growing up.

But I still don’t know how to put in useful words what “critical thinking” is because it’s not one thing.

It requires synthesizing a lot of information together in very specific and meticulous ways. And through feedback, collecting your previous thoughts and keeping track of how often you are correct or incorrect.

You can explain critical thinking in many ways but none of it will teach someone critical thinking.

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

#683

Post by Manuel_D »

spamizbad wrote: post #359
School-Cotton wrote: post #275

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Which article and how did he misinterpret it? I’m a casual, occasional listener to his podcast (Blocked and Reported) but don’t really know his origin story and am curious to learn more.

Back in 2016 he wrote an article in The Cut titled "What's Missing From the Conversation About Transgender Kids."[1] (which, incidentally, has since been silently corrected by The Cut's editors). It draws some pretty major conclusions from a single study [2] where he seems to overlook some pretty glaring issues that contradict his conclusion. [3] Signal, to his credit, admits the error, although he goes on to argue i…

You can read Singal's response to these criticisms here: https://jessesingal.substack.com/p/a-sorta-quick-response-to...

The criticisms of Singal's piece are pretty weak, and often resort to refuting things he never actually wrote. He explicitly notes that data is sparse - this is one of the most controversial research subjects - but it does indeed suggest a desistance rate of 50-60% absent medical intervention. Contrast that with the common claim that desistance in gender dysphoric children is a myth which is just totally contradicted by the available evidence.

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

#684

Post by Sniffnoy »

henearkr wrote: post #602

This whole debate is surrealist. Bigotry and intolerance are fundamentally irrational and illogical, so the so-called "left-bias" of science is just science being itself. Now the comments in this HN page and the reason.com article are completely ignoring that, and only considering everything through a political filter.

I don't think this applies to the particular problems being discussed. Certainly it's irrational to discriminate (as you say in a related comment), but the examples discussed in the article are not cases of Scientific American simply declaring that principle, but rather making other errors, or proclaiming a rather different political point of view.

(If you think the "social justice" movement is simply about -- or even supports -- the nondiscrimination principle you mention in a related comment, you are mistaken! And if you support it because you support that principle, I recommend looking more into what the SJers actually believe, because you may find that you're not in as close agreement with them as you assumed you were...)

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

#685

Post by bitcurious »

cromwellian wrote: post #657
TimTheTinker wrote: post #638

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 m…

> 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.

Raw milk is legal to sell in most of Europe and they still have overall better health outcomes, so at the very least it’s a triviality.

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

#686

Post by 5040 »

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?

Plenty of reasonable scientists support a political party which explicitly denies the existence of biological differences between groups of humans. In the final analysis, it seems scientists will align with organizations that hold unscientific tenets. It's probably not really a big deal.

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

#687

Post by Manuel_D »

Bhilai wrote: post #408
FredPret wrote: post #395

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

SciAm is allowed to be wrong and is allowed to be opinionated as well. The Bro however pretends to ignore proven science in order to have "interesting conversations." The dissonance here is astounding.

If SciAm is going to be opinionated like The Bro, then it has the same degree of intellectual authority (or lack thereof) as The Bro.

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

#688

Post by mike_hearn »

gamerdonkey wrote: post #483
nradov wrote: post #385

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There was never any scientific basis for that belief. It was just made up without conducting experiments. And if fact we saw that some countries like Sweden kept primary schools open throughout the pandemic (without mask mandates) and it was fine.

> There was never any scientific basis for that belief. This is an incorrect statement that can be fixed with minutes of research. https://www.pnas.org/doi/abs/10.1073/pnas.0610941104 https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S00916... One might argue about the quality of the research or point out contradicting studies, but saying there was zero basis is flat-out false. Adding that the idea was "made up"…

COVID is not the Spanish Flu or asthma. Rayiner's point was about SARS-CoV-2 and he is correct. You can read papers published in 2020 to see.

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

#689

Post by foxglacier »

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…

> don’t believe anything you read on the internet

That's many years beyond usefulness now that governments and companies communicate official information through the internet. You might as well say "don't believe anything ever" which makes the advice useless.

It's fine that people believe false things like flat earth. Why so much pressure to stop that? False beliefs are the default for most people, and they actually serve a purpose. We're mostly not emotionless truth-seeking Spocks. We can have religion and other beliefs that improve our quality of life by providing a sense of belonging or importance, an identity, or a community. You wouldn't go around telling Jews that no, God didn't give the 10 commandments to Moses, stop believing unscientific rubbish just because you read about it in some scroll.

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

#690

Post by Manuel_D »

henearkr wrote: post #608
TheBlight wrote: post #604

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is "intolerance" objectively defined?

Easy enough: make matter things that have no reason to matter. Like what the skin color has to do with how good your physician is? Nothing. Science is smart enough to propose the adequate metrics, in this case it does absolutely not include melanin.

> Like what the skin color has to do with how good your physician is? Nothing.

Unfortunately, this is not the case. Malpractice and disciplinary rates among Black and Latin physicians are higher: https://www.library.ca.gov/wp-content/uploads/2021/08/Medica...

> After controlling for a number of other variables, Latino/a and Black physicians were both more likely to receive complaints and more likely to see those complaints escalate to investigations. Latino/a physicians were also more likely to see those investigations result in disciplinary outcomes. On the other hand, some other minority physicians — in particular Asian physicians — actually saw reduced likelihoods of receiving complaints, or of those complaints escalating to investigations. These observations remained even after controlling for age, gender, board certification, and number of hours spent on patient care.

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