Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Scientific American's departing editor and the politicization of science

reason.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

821–830 of 1001 posts

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

#821

Post by TimTheTinker »

cogman10 wrote: post #766
TimTheTinker wrote: post #712

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 p…

> 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. There are plenty of carcinogenic ingredients that have been consumed for thousands of years. There are plenty of additives that are effectively just refined versions of chemicals commonly/naturally consumed. A prime example of a commonly consumed cancerous ingredient is al…

I mean within reason. Of course the FDA can't and shouldn't ban alcohol.

I mean things like BHT, FD&C colors, and anything else artificial that hasn't passed clinical trials.

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

#822

Post by dang »

anglosaxony wrote: post #758
WarOnPrivacy wrote: post #619

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> being a "conservative" in America means has been grotesquely distorted into what it is today. I am a recovering conservative and agree with this. Today's right wing occupies a space that I find to be distressing and deeply concerning. From my perspective, conservatism has become thin-skinned, extremely malleable and hair-trigger reactive - the same complaints we lobbed at the left, 20y ago. From my perspective, the…

[flagged]

We've banned this account for using HN primarily for political battle. That's not what HN is for, and destroys what it is for, regardless of which side of whatever battle you're on.

Please don't create accounts to break HN's rules with.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

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

#823

Post by dang »

squigz wrote: post #813
anglosaxony wrote: post #758

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

The fact that you think we can just engineer our way out of climate change is half of the problem - to say nothing of the fact that, as far as I'm aware, the Republican party does not really accept the threat of climate change.

Please don't post political battle comments to HN, and also please remember this site guideline:

"Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize. Assume good faith."

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

(I'm not banning your account the way I banned the other account, because it doesn't look like you're using HN primarily for this purpose. Your account is still unfortunately on the wrong side of that line a lot of the time, though, so it would be good to correct this.)

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

#824

Post by foldr »

anonfordays wrote: post #552
_aavaa_ wrote: post #452

Earlier quoted context omitted.

From the actual paper [0]: "Our long-term genotypic analysis builds on previous work [6, 7] and, through extensive genotyping of thousands of individuals over more than two decades, confirms that white morphs are almost always heterozygous for alternative chromosome 2 alleles (2m/2). We find that 99.7% of white morphs are heterozygous (n = 1,014; Table S1) ... As a consequence of obligate disassortative mating the sp…

>The actual sex chromosomes of the birds, and hence they're gametes, have significant differences between the two colours. This is an incorrect understanding of gametes and supergenes [0]. There are still only two gametes (only two sexes), but the two morphs (white and tan supergenes[0]) can only effectively reproduce with the same morph of the opposite sex (again, only two sexes, only two gametes between the four mo…

It seems that you should take issue with the paper rather than with the journalist who reported what it says.

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

#825

Post by Manuel_D »

giraffe_lady wrote: post #815
Manuel_D wrote: post #805

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

So still like one or two orders of magnitude more common than trans athletes?

It highly depends on your definition of trans. Some estimates place the rate of trans people at ~1.2%. If 1 in 10 trans people are athletes, then that'd be about 6x more common than intersex.

https://usafacts.org/articles/what-percentage-of-the-us-popu...

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

#826

Post by tptacek »

slibhb wrote: post #549
rzwitserloot wrote: post #491

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Where on the line are we talking? It's one thing to say: "In my view, EO Wilson's association with Rushton is defensible and should not be considered a stain on his career". It's quite another to say: "That, and I believe it so much that I cannot take seriously anybody who disagrees with me on this, I shall call them and their viewpoints names such as 'surreal' and make grandiose claims that their opinion is so ridic…

I think your post is very reasonable. Singal may be exaggerating how bad SciAm is. Though my view is that the Wilson article is part of a pattern. I responded to this because I read a biography of EO Wilson recently. It's strange to say his association with Rushton was a stain on his career because his career was massive. He published an absurd number of papers, did lots of field work, discovered many new species, wr…

For what it's worth: I'm not saying Singal is exaggerating how bad SciAm is. I think I agree with him, and have complained about it elsewhere.

I do have a problem with him dipping his toes into defenses of scientific racism (which is what he's doing when he implicitly imputes wokeism to an editorial calling E.O. Wilson out for dabbling in scientific racism). This is a problem with the reflexive contrarian rationalist sphere Singal has allowed himself to be relegated to (listen to his podcast, it's even more obvious there).

A lot of stuff SciAm has written is real dumb and even destructive. But not everything that anti-woke people object to in SciAm is wrong; if you adopt that stance, you can launder all sorts of crazy things into the discourse. He did that here.

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

#827

Post by tptacek »

taeric wrote: post #88
tptacek wrote: post #74

I want to be sympathetic to Singal, whose writing always seems to generate shitstorms disproportionate to anything he's actually saying, and whose premise in this piece I tend to agree with (as someone whose politics largely line up with those of the outgoing editor in chief, I've found a lot of what SciAm has posted to be cringe-worthy and destructive). But what is he on about here? Or that the normal distribution—a…

Agreed fully on the JEDI stuff. I was somewhat hoping it was from an April first issue. That was bad. And I thought I recognized the name. I really do not understand how trans debate has come to dominate some online discourse. I thought the complaint on the normal distribution was supposed to be claims that many things are not normally distributed? Which, isn't wrong, but is a misguided reason to not use the distribu…

I read it as a contrarian think-piece, what people used to call a "Slate pitch" when Slate was still relevant. It lands with a big wet gross "thud" in the context of a lot of the rest of what SciAm has been running.

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

#828

Post by tptacek »

hnburnsy wrote: post #111
tptacek wrote: post #74

I want to be sympathetic to Singal, whose writing always seems to generate shitstorms disproportionate to anything he's actually saying, and whose premise in this piece I tend to agree with (as someone whose politics largely line up with those of the outgoing editor in chief, I've found a lot of what SciAm has posted to be cringe-worthy and destructive). But what is he on about here? Or that the normal distribution—a…

HN has a large discussion on the E.O. Wilson piece at the time... https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29990427

Note the source of that story.

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

#829

Post by pvaldes »

Levitz wrote: post #495
thrance wrote: post #147

But denial of evolution is linked to white supremacy. A rejection of the biological links between white people and colored people helps to justify discrimination based on skin color. And non-believers in evolution often share other backwards views. As for the the bell curve, I'd encourage you to read her article first, befire forming an opinion from disingenuous caricature of what was said in it. She doesn't deny the…

And the invention of the keyboard is linked to online bullying. There is a point in which the relation is so far-fetched and non-causal that it doesn't make any sense to mention it, and the link between evolution denial and white supremacy absolutely crosses that line. White supremacy is also linked to the sun rising up each morning, detergent and open borders. None of them relevant.

Both can be causes of an underlying problem, not necessarily origin and consequence.

Is not a surprise that stupid people is generally stupid in more than one field. Somebody believing white supremacy has a previous mental condition that makes him/her blind to obvious contradictions in that speech. Thus, will be probably less capable to grasp complex concepts like evolution (or will choose to ignore it by a different motivation, like greed).

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

#830

Post by cogman10 »

TimTheTinker wrote: post #821
cogman10 wrote: post #766

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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. There are plenty of carcinogenic ingredients that have been consumed for thousands of years. There are plenty of additives that are effectively just refined versions of chemicals commonly/naturally consumed. A prime example of a commonly consumed cancerous ingredient is al…

I mean within reason. Of course the FDA can't and shouldn't ban alcohol. I mean things like BHT, FD&C colors, and anything else artificial that hasn't passed clinical trials.

> I mean within reason. Of course the FDA can't and shouldn't ban alcohol.

Certainly, but we are now at a sticky point where "reason" can be different things to different people.

Both BHT and FD&C are far less toxic than alcohol is. BHT and FD&C have both been integrated into the food supply for decades. The question would be, what would we learn from a clinical trial that we wouldn't learn from the ongoing population study?

I'm certainly not advocating for deregulation or looser standards for food safety. I certainly support the FDA being fully funded and actively investigating ingredients to ensure public health isn't being torpedoed because it turns out too much salt actually causes cancer (I don't believe it does, this is just an example). But also, I'd say that ingredients that have already been in the food supply for a generation are probably not the danger their detractors claim. At this point, we need evidence to say these additives are dangerous as the current weight of evidence (a generation eating this junk) points to them not being a primary contributor to negative health outcomes.

All that said, I certainly support the idea of applying a very high level of scrutiny to new ingredients. How the current set of GRAS ingredients made it onto the market was reckless.

Post reply on HN