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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

#691

Post by cogman10 »

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…

I'll also say that this is not unique to him, it's how conspiracy minded people operate.

You'll see exactly this playbook playout with flat earthers. "We can't know the earth is round because it's not been tested." or "It's actually industry captured" or "The US government prevents people from doing real tests to see if the earth is flat".

You see, if you asked them "what would it take for you to abandon this theory" their honest answer is "nothing" because any counter evidence to the theory will just get wrapped up in more conspiracy.

What would it take for me to abandon my belief in evolution? Evidence that explains why things appear to evolve and shows what actually happens instead.

What will make me abandon my support of vaccination? Evidence that shows vaccines are more dangerous than the diseases they protect against.

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

#692

Post by drewrv »

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…

[flagged]

There is a virus lab in Wuhan because a lot of coronaviruses originate in that region. Its existence/location is not evidence of a lab leak.

If anything, the lab leak “theory” has received too much media attention when the primary evidence (location of a lab) is easily explained by other factors.

Imagine a virus was spread from penguins to humans. It would not be surprising if research on the virus were conducted in Antarctica!

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

#693

Post by jmward01 »

genewitch wrote: post #629
lazyeye wrote: post #601

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 area…

This is cherry-picking. There is a raft of solid science from a large number of independent researchers looking at many different indicators that corroborate well with each other. The evidence is overwhelming, global warming is happening. Picking one thing that says we haven't always gotten it 100% right doesn't mean it isn't happening.

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

#694

Post by ok_computer »

genewitch wrote: post #664
ok_computer wrote: post #647

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ok, arctic sea ice. Ice exists at temperature below 0C or 32F at 1atm AND at system energy levels below the enthalpy of melting for liquid water, or latent heat for this first order phase change. Thermodynamics uses temperature and pressure to explain system energy of molecules for liquid vapor solid phase systems. Latent heat is the esoteric part of this phenomenon because it requires a scientific education to under…

you mean the sea ice, that had the highest extent in 20 years this year? Or a different sea ice, perhaps the one they always trot out around January? you know, when it's summer in the southern hemisphere? The sea ice data isn't 1:1 with the seasons, so "data scientists" and "climate scientists" pick the cutoff date that makes the best headline. Even this year they were saying the ice was lower than average, but they…

I admit data collection is imperfect, especially looking back 200 years. But to attack a fairly sound hypothesis that is multi factorially demonstrated in physical geological behavior, I wholeheartedly disagree with.

Just because US weather stations in the 70’s were more rural than urban does not in itself gives credence to the idea that climate change/warming/ greenhouse gases is a nonissue or somehow a totally misunderstood non-warming phenomenon. Even a climate that tended to one mean value zero standard deviation throughout the year would be devastating coming from our current temporal and geographical distribution.

Your point about weather stations is a technical detail in data collection while there are several other corroborating methods indicating a warming ocean and atmosphere, albeit not geographically uniformly distributed. But you have this gotcha fact about weather stations ambient baseline temp vs some platonic ideal temp that reflects what’s going on in the abstract notion of a climate.

The sea ice has satellite photo analysis (area) dating to 70’s or 80’s with daily or weekly granularity.

I cannot convince a climate change denier or skeptic but am leaving that comment and this one hoping that observers don’t just take your initial counter-fact to be a valid falsifying argument.

As everyone says weather is not the climate, spurious yearly data do not nullify long form trends, and I’d just look at low pass filtered or line fit or yearly average of granular image data to argue that there is a time localize trend since the 80’s consistent with a warming ocean.

I disagree with you I think you used logical fallacies to misdirect and cause skepticism about something that is fairly corroborated and the debate needs to focus on mitigation or investment or policy changes.

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

#695

Post by InsideOutSanta »

dahfizz wrote: post #272
tpm wrote: post #224

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are no apolitical institutions. You would see that more clearly when visiting (or god forbid living in) a dictatorship or totalitarian regime, where all institutions are either brought in line with the regime or abolished. And I do mean all including gardening clubs. Enjoy institutions having the freedom to express political opinions, it is not guaranteed to last.

"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…

"There is absolutely nothing political about studying the mating patterns of beetles"

It will be used as an example of how we are wasting tax money by politicians. It will be used as an example of how homosexuality is natural by one side, and then it will be used as an example of how science is used to "groom" children by the other. There will be fights about whether it should be in school books, and then some states will ban all school books that mention that research, and then publishers will be forced to remove it to still have enough of a market for their books. The authors will be called out on Twitter and receive death threats, their university will cut their funding to avoid the controversy, some students will complain about it, and then that will be used to show how universities indoctrinate our kids.

And so on.

That's what "everything is political" means. When people say things like "get politics out of x," they really mean "make x match my politics", because there's no such thing as "no politics."

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

#696

Post by y-c-o-m-b »

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).

I have yet to see a convincing motivation for doing something like that. There's more money to be made in denying climate change it seems, so what's the driving factor then?

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

#697

Post by cogman10 »

bitcurious wrote: post #685
cromwellian wrote: post #657

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Europe also has higher standards for animal husbandry and food products.

In most of Europe you can sell unrefrigerated chicken eggs. Why? Because chickens in the EU are vaccinated against salmonella, so the eggs don't need to be washed (and consequently it's also safer to eat poultry in the EU).

I'd be happy to sell raw milk on the market if there's a requirement that raw milk be tested for common pathogens to milk (Like listeria, for example).

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

#698

Post by roenxi »

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

Studies showed that it had a statistically significant effect on COVID. The problem is that with hindsight it is obvious any sufficiently powerful study will show it has a statistically significant effect so the existence of that effect isn't particularly interesting evidence.

There will be people who have both COVID and parasites. If you give them Ivermectin around the time they catch COVID, they will get better outcomes. Statistics will pick that up, it is a real effect. AND it has real world policy implications, there are a lot of people in the world who should immediately be given Ivermectin if they catch COVID (or, indeed, any disease). The more important political issue was when people noticed that (very real) effect without understanding the cause they were attacked rather than someone explaining what was happening.

It is a good case study of evidence being misleading, but the statistical significance of that evidence is indisputable. Any study that doesn't find that effect is just underpowered - it is there. In fact as a baseline it turns out we would expect any effective drug will have a statistically significant positive effect on COVID outcomes.

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

#699

Post by 0xcde4c3db »

genewitch wrote: post #664
ok_computer wrote: post #647

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ok, arctic sea ice. Ice exists at temperature below 0C or 32F at 1atm AND at system energy levels below the enthalpy of melting for liquid water, or latent heat for this first order phase change. Thermodynamics uses temperature and pressure to explain system energy of molecules for liquid vapor solid phase systems. Latent heat is the esoteric part of this phenomenon because it requires a scientific education to under…

you mean the sea ice, that had the highest extent in 20 years this year? Or a different sea ice, perhaps the one they always trot out around January? you know, when it's summer in the southern hemisphere? The sea ice data isn't 1:1 with the seasons, so "data scientists" and "climate scientists" pick the cutoff date that makes the best headline. Even this year they were saying the ice was lower than average, but they…

> you mean the sea ice, that had the highest extent in 20 years this year?

Your link says it's "the seventh highest recorded since 2006 when this metric from IMS was first tracked consistently". Where are you getting "highest extent in 20 years"?

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

#700

Post by downrightmike »

sangnoir wrote: post #605
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…

> In the 80s, 35% of university employees (administrators+faculty) donated to Republicans The Republican party used to be the leftwing party, right up until the 1960s - which is the right timeframe for the staff to have grown up in a "Republican family" without being conserve themselves. AFAICT academia, in any country, since the 18th century, has leaned more towards being progressive than conservative, which is why…

Barry Goldwater's Presidential campaign ran on "I'm the only one that matters. Me me me." Party. I'm not wrong, he was a piece of shit
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