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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

#801

Post by jbstjohn »

chrisbrandow wrote: post #679
refurb wrote: post #4

Yikes, quite the scathing article and example of a the politicization of science. “Trust the science” has always bothered me for two reasons: 1) science is frequently not black and white and anyone who has done hard science research knows there are plenty of competing opinions among scientists and 2) while scientific facts are facts, we still need to decide on how to act on those facts and that decision making proces…

all of the "Trust/Believe X" statements would be profoundly improved by substituting "Take X seriously". It makes the same point without posing the obvious problems with trust and believe

But that wouldn't capture how it tends to be meant -- an instruction to take things on faith without any questioning, even if it contradicts other known facts or your direct experience.

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

#802

Post by BadHumans »

bongoman42 wrote: post #738
BadHumans wrote: post #377

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> it speaks quite poorly for the Democrats appointing Harris despite Biden winning the vote of his party, no? Yes it does. I agree fully. > the DNC's _explicit_ support of racial identitarianism, benevolent racism, and biological denialism run in direct opposition to this supposed moral high ground they tacitly hold. I don't think benevolent racism means what you think it means and no one is denying biology. Trans pe…

umm.. Scientific American said that differences in athletic ability of men and women are not based in Biology.

I am definitely not the person to write a dissertation in support of trans people but the logic being used as I understand it is that male and female are not the same as man and woman. Whether I or anyone else agree with that is up in the air.

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

#803

Post by complianceowl »

tombert wrote: post #741
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 kind of why I get annoyed at the "facts don't care about your feelings!!!" crowd. Sure, the raw facts don't care about your feelings, but the way that these facts are interpreted and presented absolutely do care. Two people can look at the exact same data and draw widely different but comparably accurate conclusions out of it. Using your Coke example, the raw fact that "exercise is good for reducing obesity"…

Why is it that people can't wrap their head around the "Facts don't care about your feelings." slogan? I don't agree with everything that movement says, but that slogan means exactly what it's saying; the problem is what everyone like yourself adds to it. What you are adding has originated and lives in your mind, and you project it onto something that has nothing to do with your thought that you are projecting.

The slogan is directed at fragile liberals who would rather yell like a toddler at a town hall meeting than have an informed discussion centered around facts. You can try and broaden that statement all you want to pull in other topics, but that slogan says nothing about having a disregard for how facts are interpreted OR presented.

It goes without saying that facts can be subject to multiple interpretations. I think people need to be more honest about what you're really saying: you don't like conservatives and you distorted a basic phrase as you gaslit a group of people and accused that group of doing what you yourself just did.

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

#804

Post by kgwgk »

jahewson wrote: post #768
charlescearl wrote: post #705

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 lo…

After Stalin had all the scientists he didn’t like executed, he allowed the ones who were useful for developing weapons to live. Truly inspiring. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Repression_of_science_in_the...

“Leave them in peace. We can always shoot them later.”

https://cerncourier.com/a/reviews-2/

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

#805

Post by Manuel_D »

giraffe_lady wrote: post #343
blindriver wrote: post #317

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

What's the gender of someone born with XX chromosomes, two ovaries, a penis, and develops male secondary sex characteristics like a beard? Intersex variants are 1% of the population, it's as common as red hair. The strict gender binary is the anti-science view I'm sorry to say. And again I say this as someone who is a member of a rigorous religious tradition that does not have any real flexibility about this. Nonethe…

Intersex are not 1% of the population. That figure comes from a study that included women with Turner Syndrome and PCOS, as well as men with Klinefelter Syndrome as intersex. Even a layperson would have zero trouble classifying the sex of said people if they saw their body.

Intersex as defined by genuine ambiguity of someone's sex is around 0.02% of the population: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intersex

> Leonard Sax, in response to Fausto-Sterling, estimated that the prevalence of intersex was about 0.018% of the world's population,[4] discounting several conditions included in Fausto-Sterling's estimate that included LOCAH, Klinefelter syndrome (47,XXY), Turner syndrome (45,X), the chromosomal variants of 47,XYY and 47,XXX, and vaginal agenesis. Sax reasons that in these conditions chromosomal sex is consistent with phenotypic sex and phenotype is classifiable as either male or female.[4]

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

#806

Post by nataliste »

jkhdigital wrote: post #796
nataliste wrote: post #749

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>If you publish new evidence in favour of a popular theory, your paper gets published – sometimes in a prestigious journal. Whereas if you demonstrate compelling evidence overturning a high-profile scientific dogma of international import, you… checks notes win the Nobel Prize in Physics. Hm. The last time a Nobel Prize was awarded to someone overturning a long-held charged dogma was in 2005 when Barry J. Marshall an…

Here, let me drop this mic for you

And a fun addendum: In the mid-1990s the patents expired on the vast majority of acid-reducing drugs which were, as you can probably guess, the first line "treatment" for PUD over antibiotics.

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

#807

Post by jbstjohn »

DiogenesKynikos wrote: post #535
jhbadger wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>I have a book from Scientific American from the 1960s that has a whole section removed for the british audience because it contained instructions on how to run experiments on bears. That is a political act. I think you'd need a bit more evidence for that being "political". A far more plausible reason for the removal is that Britain doesn't have bears to any degree (there have been isolated sightings but most think t…

Galileo. Oppenheimer. I think those two examples are already enough to show that science has been political for 400 years.

In all seriousness, no, it shows that there were at least two cases of political science in the last 400 years, not that all science is.

I think there have been more, and it plays a role, but I don't buy that you can just dismiss the criticism of political science with the claim that it always is.

There are matters of degrees, and it's almost universally acknowledged to be bad, because it usually means results and emphasis have been distorted because of the politics.

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

#808

Post by Xcelerate »

unethical_ban wrote: post #617
Xcelerate wrote: post #392

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I always found that quote kind of funny. So the scientists who have views on political issues that are the extreme opposite of yours (because there are many such people)... what then exactly?

Your sentence has grammatical issues. I assume you're implying that people who advocate for cultural support of science are hyper liberal and would be hostile to any science conducted by a hyper conservative. I reject this assertion. "Trust the science" means that peer reviewed science and scientific consensus should carry weight, and too many people are anti-intellectual.

> I assume you're implying that people who [...]

Nope.

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

#809

Post by jounker »

jkhdigital wrote: post #785
drewrv wrote: post #692

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

[flagged]

Coronaviruses are a big family of viruses.

The particular viruses they were working with were only distantly related to covid. Related in the same way that house cats are related to tigers.

In addition they were not doing “gain of function research”, unless you want to say that they were also doing “loss of function research”. What they were doing was seeing how point mutation affected infectivity both positively and negatively.

We know what they were working with, and it wasn’t the virus that gave rise to covid. There are much closer matches than in other species.

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

#810

Post by Manuel_D »

seltzered_ wrote: post #724
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.

There's a list of resources critical of Jesse Singal here: https://www.patreon.com/posts/20353892 (found via https://bsky.app/profile/quatoria.bsky.social/post/3layjy6zb... ) (Sharing because I've been trying to do my personal learning on this topic)

> Singal has argued repeatedly that Zucker was fired without cause due to a witch hunt by trans activists (this will come up again)

And Singal was right in that regard. Zucker was awarded over half a million dollars in a defamation suit: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kenneth_Zucker#Settlement

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