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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

#701

Post by tomrod »

genewitch wrote: post #669
czzr wrote: post #642

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I looked at the paper you referenced. Interestingly, it does not say that the warming trend is not happening, rather they argue that the evidence is insufficient to say for sure if the warming is caused by human-driven causes or natural ones (e.g. volcanic activity or solar changes). They mention the heat island effect as one of the issues that may complicate the attribution of the contribution of different factors t…

okay, and whats your point? The point is "97%" or "99%" of "climate scientists agree" that "anthropogenic causes" are the reason for climate change. But this study questions the foundations (and i mentioned i am only linking one, that i downloaded a few weeks ago to save, there are of course other papers that each chip away at the political and media narrative about the whole field). Please refer to the GP: > I wonde…

You're not sufficiently parsing causality versus predictivity. The global warming hypothesis matches the projections. So it's a food enough model. The causal attribution does take time, but recall we can estimate the global greenhouse emissions with reasonable accuracy and can compare to benchmarks in history.

Push all we want against the sun, it continues to shine regardless of our efforts.

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

#702

Post by InsideOutSanta »

CrimsonCape wrote: post #660
InsideOutSanta wrote: post #448

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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. Fin…

I don't think I'm adding any nuance, I'm explaining the context in which the quoted sentence was originally written. The nuance was already there, I just pointed it out, because it got lost when people selectively quoted that one sentence.

I agree that there are people who take any idea to its absurd extreme. I do not think the author of that article is one of those people.

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

#703

Post by staunton »

sitkack wrote: post #598
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…

This is how propaganda works, you don't spread falsities and untruths, but change the mix of what signals get amplified.

This is how propaganda can still work. However, if a propagandist can get away with falsehoods, they will use those just as well.

The interesting/newer things start when propagandists have multiple outlets and can distribute a number of mutually incompatible falsehoods to different audiences.

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

#704

Post by ok_computer »

ok_computer wrote: post #694
genewitch wrote: post #664

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 misu…

Edit I shouldn’t have used word geological bit meant ‘worldwide’

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

#705

Post by charlescearl »

Here is a list of Soviet nobel prize laureates, courtesy of Wikipedia https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Russian_Nobel_laurea.... There are several in the sciences up to the year 1978.

I’m sure that many were committed Communists, Bolsheviks, perhaps Marxist-Leninists until their last breath. Perhaps there were “Tankies” and Trotskyists among the bunch. Perhaps there were many who recited the right thing, or longed for the restoration of Tsarist rule, perhaps some who ended up ended by colleagues who thought they’d subverted revolution. I haven’t read all the biographies.

Perhaps science can be conducted by people across a political spectrum, and perhaps that might be a good thing.

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

#706

Post by mvdtnz »

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?

Until 2020 the anti-vax movement was dominated by the left wing, so maybe you should take a step down from your high horse.

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

#707

Post by UltraSane »

treflop wrote: post #682
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 incorr…

I think of Critical Thinking as a closed loop process that aligns a person's mental model of the world with reality. It is just using the scientific method to analyze information in daily life. When done correctly and consistently it is like a really good spam filter against lies and bullshit.

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

#708

Post by jmward01 »

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 grown grumpier as the last decade has gone on and it is probably me just getting older but there is a point where you say enough is enough. You are starting with the premise that researchers are manipulating things and ignoring things so you have already 'won' by bringing doubt where there isn't any. 'I wonder how much of horrible terrible evil conspiratorial thing x is happening...' isn't a discussion opener, it is a statement that a thing is happening and now we just need to find out how much of that thing is happening. This is a terrible 'discussion' point and it needs to be called out, and stopped.

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

#709

Post by thefaux »

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'…

The science of puberty blockers is clear to me: they prevent the unwanted development of secondary sex characteristics in adolescents and have a number of side effects that may or may not be tolerable for any particular individual.

What would you suggest is the proper treatment for trans children suffering gender dysphoria if they are denied puberty blockers and/or hormone replacement therapy? Do you think that forcing them to develop unwanted secondary sex characteristics is going to reduce their dysphoria? Do you think that you should be responsible for telling another a parent what they should or should not allow their child to do? By what criteria should you or the state be able to overrule a parent? Should a child be allowed any agency at all over their own body? And if not children, should adults?

I don't think that science can even begin to answer these questions and that it is a red herring to frame this debate in utilitarian scientific terms (e.g. science shows that puberty blockers don't statistically improve mental health and therefore should be banned). With this kind of science, we lose the unique individual human being which for me is the loss of everything that truly matters.

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

#710

Post by Manuel_D »

notahacker wrote: post #631
jl6 wrote: post #524

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is certainly not factual to claim that a drug which is safe in treatment X (precocious puberty) is also safe in treatment Y (gender dysphoria). The article conflates both as “puberty delaying treatments”, as if the learning from one is completely transferable to the other. It is not. The differences I mentioned are material. The “side” (scare quotes, for there are multiple positions available, not just those that…

The differences may well be material, but as I mentioned in the post above it's simply false to claim SA conflate the two when they link (multiple times) to an article looking at trans people specifically and also mention that they are healthy and safe when prescribed to other young people for other reasons. An article which links to an article discussing outcomes of a drug in young people that also mentions below th…

It absolutely does offer that evidence. Blockers are indeed irreversible, they can lead to infertility and inability to orgasm depending on the length of time they're taken. Even shorter periods of puberty blockers will change height, muscle, and skeletal development.

Evidence based medicine doesn't mean that we simply give people treatments unless they're proven to be harmful. It means we don't give treatments unless we know that the effects are positive.

The UK is far from alone in pausing medicalization of gender dysphoric children. This is the case throughout pretty much all of the European continent at this point, prescription of puberty blockers and cross sex hormones is either banned or exclusively permitted as part of clinical trials - which means patients are explicitly told that this is experimental treatment, and the outcomes of patients needs to be tracked and published.

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