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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

#781

Post by rurp »

giraffe_lady wrote: post #116
blessede wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> And I thought I recognized the name. I really do not understand how trans debate has come to dominate some online discourse. Much of it is pushback against widespread ideological capture, and in particular the authoritarian idea that everyone else has to change and restrict their behavior to accommodate increasingly absurd and harmful requests from an overly demanding identity group.

What is the group demanding that is "over" what you would consider appropriate? How do their demands restrict your behavior? Personally I've never noticed trans people and their push for rights & recognition having any impact on my life whatsoever. And I say this as a devout member of a rigorous and conservative religious tradition.

Speaking for myself, in terms of policy this issue wouldn't even crack my top 100. But in terms of electoral politics? I think the evidence is pretty good that it had a lot of salience in the last election. Many swing voters who broke for Trump have said that gender and/or trans issues were a big factor for them. Something like a third of Trump's closing ads were about this topic and Kamala's campaign checking a box that they were in favor of sex change operations for criminals became a huge talking point.

As someone who cares deeply about a lot of separate issues that Trump will be terrible on, I wish progressives would STFU on this topic and stop stabbing their party in the back. Treating trans people with dignity and respect should go without saying, but some of the left wing rhetoric on this issues goes too far like when they deny that there is any biological difference between men and women. A lot of the efforts on the left look more like virtue signaling and fighting for the sake of it, rather than trying to achieve better real world outcomes.

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

#782

Post by anglosaxony »

archagon wrote: post #780
anglosaxony wrote: post #769

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Merriam-Webster changed their definition of "vaccine" in 2021. They did this so the COVID shots could still be called "vaccines" despite not preventing infection, not preventing transmission, and providing only a moderate therapeutic benefit. In doing so they cannibalized and damaged public trust in "vaccines" which the medical community had built for so many years, and at such great expense. As is often the case, th…

Dictionaries are descriptive, not prescriptive. And nobody treats them as an authority on labeling. This makes absolutely no sense.

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

#783

Post by wyager »

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?

Thinking this is about science per se betrays a very naïve understanding of the political dynamics involved. It's quite easy to come up with examples where the official progressive position is nonscientific; Lysenkoism, for example, is as popular in left-leaning politics as ever (in the context of human biology). I can come up with plenty of other examples, although stating them here is guaranteed to draw some administrative ire.

In reality, institutional political alignment is just a natural equilibrium outcome of a political process with pork-barrelling as a feature (which is almost all of them).

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

#784

Post by agentultra »

fjh wrote: post #755
agentultra wrote: post #713

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-…

I'm a bit baffled by this comment, so much so that I find it difficult to believe we've read the same article. I don't see any indication in the article that the author ever submitted any work to SciAm, let alone that he's sore about not being published. None of the examples he cites have anything to do with climate denialism, nor is he defending any pseudo-scientific conspiracy theories. How is any of this respondin…

No, you're right. I was referring to the pandering of credentials the author mentioned by citing the articles they published in other magazines and the book they're writing. No mention of their PhD in Medicine and specialization in the field though. Was that omitted?

> I've written articles about it for major outlets like The Atlantic and The Economist, and am working on a book. I found SciAm's coverage to not just be stupid (JEDI) or insulting or uncharitable (the Wilson story), but actually a little bit dangerous.

You're right, it doesn't sound like they're sour about not being published in SciAm. They're unhappy with the topics SciAm report on and the content of them.

Looking a bit deeper, the author is a co-host of the Blocked and Reported podcast and has been criticized for having an anti-trans bias in his writing [0].

It doesn't seem that he's a doctor of any sort, a scientist of any kind.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jesse_Singal

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

#785

Post by jkhdigital »

drewrv wrote: post #692
tokinonagare wrote: post #635

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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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…

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

#786

Post by agentultra »

hamolton wrote: post #777

The author's critiques seem nit-picky to me. I'd like to hear from somebody that follows this, scrolling through SciAm articles published in the past few years, it seems like the bulk of content is still normal popular science. While it does publish a large chunk of partisan opinions now, a lot of them are pretty normal party-line defenses of democrats and their causes with respect to science, health, and whatnot. Wh…

Make of it what you will, but the author's wikipedia page seems to put this article in perspective: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jesse_Singal

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

#787

Post by sunshowers »

ryandv wrote: post #425
giraffe_lady wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What is the group demanding that is "over" what you would consider appropriate? How do their demands restrict your behavior? Personally I've never noticed trans people and their push for rights & recognition having any impact on my life whatsoever. And I say this as a devout member of a rigorous and conservative religious tradition.

On a personal level, linguistic imperialism. For all the rhetoric spewed regarding the impacts of colonialism and cultural imperialism and fervent calls to decolonize various aspects of society, the whites spewing that very same rhetoric have found a way to launder their own modern brand of imperialism into gender diversity and inclusivity by inventing and then imposing new language on that of other ethnic minorities…

I believe both "Latinx" and "Filipinx" were introduced by queer people of the respective ethnicities, not white Anglos. Basically every culture on earth has deep seated views on gender that don't match reality, and a strong reactionary response when that's interrogated from within the community.

Philosophy as a field has very little to contribute to basic object-level facts -- this is the whole reason science ("natural philosophy") split from traditional philosophy back in the early Renaissance. This isn't something you can reason out within your brain, this is entirely evidence-driven. There is a tremendous amount of evidence for transgender people and next to none for "transracialism".

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

#788

Post by jkhdigital »

WillPostForFood wrote: post #759
hn_throwaway_99 wrote: post #659

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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,…

I agree with #1 and #3, but in trying to be overly fair, you're leaving out some important details in #2. people went to a lab leak (intentional or not) theory very quickly with no evidence It was known at the time that the Wuhan lab was studying coronavirus, and known they had both safety and security lapses. That is far from proof, but it is evidence. Also, the incentive was to blame China was mixed. At the time, X…

The lab wasn’t just studying coronaviruses. The director had intimate knowledge of gain-of-function techniques, with publications and grant proposals to document this. Some of the research was published during her tenure at the lab, so it can be assumed that the research was performed there.

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

#789

Post by pvaldes »

anglosaxony wrote: post #754
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?

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Not needed. The definition is in every dictionary.

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

#790

Post by mtlynch »

chrisbrandow wrote: post #671

I remember when that article wildly mis-describing the normal distribution came out and I was so sad. It was just so embarrassing. The author was in no way qualified, yet the burden rests on the editors of a publication with the reputation to catch this incredible incorrect statement to come out. I usually think woke/antiwoke complaints go too far, but that was such a failure.

Reference for the curious: https://scottaaronson.blog/?p=6202
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