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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

#711

Post by bitcurious »

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.

Until a few years ago, if my physician was educated in the United States and were Asian American they had to have a measurably better academic track record to overcome anti-Asian bias in university admissions. Does that mean they are a better physician? Probably not - in my experience the difference between good and bad in a medical context is patience and care, not knowledge. However it’s not absurd to make the opposite claim.

Similarly, there is a body of scholarship that suggests that black physicians trust black patients more than white physicians trust black patients. If I am black, does the color of my physician matter when I talk about something hurting? The evidence suggests that it might.

The fundamental flaw in basing your moral philosophy in measurable metrics is that metrics are noisy and that noise will often undermine your point. Instead, you should be making a purely moral point: my doctor’s skin color shouldn't matter and I will act to make the world I live in more similar to this ideal. That moral point is the driving force behind the civil rights progress that has been made.

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

#712

Post by TimTheTinker »

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…

> the real reason for US health decline is too much sugars/carbs, too little exercise, and addiction to opioids and nicotine.

I think a more fundamental root cause is that US regulation has failed to adequately keep up with the playbooks of large companies that stand to profit from various products that result in compromised health.

Take a look at what's being heavily advertised/marketed. If it contains ingredients people haven't been consuming for thousands of years, I think it's suspect and should be subject to intense scrutiny. (Same goes for widely used B2B products that affect what people consume.)

Unfortunately, there's too much "we only test in prod" going on, so it's hard to isolate widespread problems to a single source. That's why (in my opinion) the FDA should require clinical trials and use an allowlist-based approach to food additives. Currently it's a denylist, which amounts to testing in prod.

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

#713

Post by agentultra »

I can't really speak to the author's credentials but they link to two of their own articles and seem to be sour that SciAm didn't publish their work under this out-going editor's direction.

In general though, it seems like publications such as SciAm are under a lot of pressure in this political environment. Maybe more than ever. I'm sure they've no doubt faced criticism from scientists that wanted to publish climate-denialist "science," over the last 40-some-odd years.

It seems like the folks clamouring for "neutrality," in science are those that were most often marginalized for their unscientific writing and claims. This whole environment of "both sides," and pseudo-scientific conspiracy theories, and alternative-facts must be absolutely exhausting for editors.

I hope SciAm manages to stay progressive and continue to publish good stuff.

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

#714

Post by UltraSane »

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…

This comment started off really well with the need for successful communication requiring at least a partial overlap of of worldviews but then goes into the weeds with the comment about Trump. No one is denying that Trump won the election. But a huge percentage of Republicans believe that Trump actually won the last election. This is a real example of how worldviews on the right and left differ radically. The drag show is also a terrible example.

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

#715

Post by eezurr »

y-c-o-m-b wrote: post #696
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).

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?

Since climate change is a very popular topic, so popular that a person's belief or non belief in it will cause people on the other side to strike them down without hesitation... There's power, community, and social acceptance to drive people.

The downvotes to the above comment's parent comment prove my point.

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

#716

Post by anigbrowl »

toshredsyousay wrote: post #208

A lot of criticism of SA seems to be from those who don't read the magazine. It is still mostly just thorough coverage of developments in physics, biology, engineering, and other pretty uncontroversial science topics and this coverage has not 'gone downhill'. It is a lot of work to do good reporting of an area of science by talking to a range of experts in that area and SA still does good work here. Some topics are p…

The downhill slide was already underway by the 1990s. Readership was in a slow decline and the publishers turned to various marketing gimmicks to maintain solvency. More pictorial articles, more po-sci articles, cover wrappers suggesting that it was worth subscribing even if you didn't read the whole magazine etc. I stopped reading around 2000, when I bought an issue and noticed I had read the whole thing in under 4 hours rather than the usual 5-6. A comparison indicated they had changed the font size and line spacing slightly, so as to maintain the same page count but with about 15% less content.

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

#717

Post by cdot2 »

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…

You think FDR was the right wing candidate?

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

#718

Post by mrandish »

sangnoir wrote: post #636
jjk166 wrote: post #591

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> the biggest factor when the editor-in-charge of a publication is biased The editor-in-charge, and indeed every human being, is always biased. There will always be articles that don't make the cut and there is always going to be some criterion by which a decision is made. Some biases are more disruptive than others. Publicly acknowledged biases can be easily accounted for. You don't want an unbiased editor-in-charge…

> The editor-in-charge, and indeed every human being, is always biased > You don't want an unbiased editor-in-charge, they're really just a person whose biases you don't recognize. These 2 truths are hard for some to digest, and they also diffuse the next step they want to implement: thumbing the scales to "Fix the political bias in science" by installing 'neutral' (to them ) individuals to swing science rightwards.…

> it's about using science as a new front in the culture wars.

Indeed. The sad thing is I suspect a large number of those contributing to the 'culture war' biases often do so unknowingly (which doesn't make it any less wrong).

Mainstream science reporting is somewhat different in that poor reporting typically falls into two groups: culture war adjacent topics and "everything else." The problems on the culture war side are pretty well-understood but the "everything else" side, while less 'bad' on a per instance basis, still has a big impact because it's so pervasive. I include in this the near-universal tendency of mainstream media to either bury, under-report or ignore nuance, error bars and virtually all other kinds of uncertainty in science reporting. I'm sure the reporters and their editors feel all that uncertainty makes the story less exciting (and less newsworthy) while explaining nuance makes it 'boring'. Unfortunately, not including those things often makes the story misleading.

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

#719

Post by gopher_space »

codocod wrote: post #100
gopher_space wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Most importantly, [the article] falsely claimed that there is solid evidence youth gender medicine ameliorates adolescent suicidality, when we absolutely do not know that to any degree of certainty. There's solid evidence youth gender medicine ameliorates suicidality. Cherry picking from a single study is dishonest.

> There's solid evidence youth gender medicine ameliorates suicidality. Not at all true, there is no solid evidence of this. That's why it's so controversial, because ideologues are pushing for these pharmaceutical and surgical interventions on children despite the paucity of evidence.

It's mainly the parents pushing for medical intervention. Keep in mind that the impetus is generally a suicide attempt or self-mutilation by their 10 year old.

There's nothing fun or trendy or exciting about this for child or family. Deeply embarrassing, far worse than getting your first hernia check if your memory goes back that far.

The one thing we absolutely did. not. need. through all of this were politicians and the peanut gallery weighing in on a private medical situation while ignoring the point of our effort.

Nothing in this article, and none of the comments here mention the life of the child in question. Too busy scoring points to think about reality or humanity in any way. What do you think that looks like from my perspective?

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

#720

Post by tomrod »

Manuel_D wrote: post #690
henearkr wrote: post #608

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 comp…

Now do it outside the country, and I anticipate the results don't replicate, meaning your cited study probably fails replication.
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