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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

#911
post #851

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I believe both "Latinx" and "Filipinx" were introduced by queer people of the respective ethnicities, not white Anglos. This kind of cultural ignorance is highly insensitive. I would suggest that you refrain from making assertions, without corroborating evidence, about other cultures and matters that you have no experience with. My lived experience, as a Pinoy, speaking with other Pinoys, both here in the west and…

I said queer people of the respective ethnicities, not residents of the Philippines. I am aware that this comes from mostly queer people in the diaspora, but that doesn't take their ethnicities away. Saying "Filipino" or "Latino" is gender neutral is similar to saying that "he" in English writing is gender neutral. It is not an unreasonable stance from a purely descriptive standpoint, but the amount of sensitivity th…

> why is the default descriptor not "Filipina"? Why is it not "Latina"? Why is the gender neutral term the same as the male term? The answer is quite obviously the patriarchy.

It's easy to blame patriarchy, but is it the responsible? According to linguists, the answer resides in how gender was introduced in European languages from the Proto Indo European [1, 2]. The feminine genus, in grammatical sense, was introduced later as a specialization of the general "animated" category. Therefore, what later became masculine was used for all "general humans", and was left the default form when gender was not indicated. Example even in English (and other proto-German languages) where nouns are (mostly) not gendered: you have the word of "woman" as a specialization of "man", which does not indicate the male, but it originally indicated the "human being" [3]. We are talking about the dawn of European languages, so take these as educated hypotheses, but blaming patriarchy is a very modern (and unsubstantiated) view.

The need to use a gender (either masculine or feminine) as the default gender is a need in the lack of a neutral gender for humans. Other languages in the world, like Maasai, use the feminine as the "default" gender, others have a proper neutral-animated gender.

Having a neutral gender in Spanish would be great, because it removes ambiguity in many cases where the sex is unknown, but introducing it, especially in languages like Spanish or Italian where all nouns are gendered, is a _massive_ undertaking, which would shake the foundations of those languages and would require a lot of energy by all its speakers. Theoretically possible, sure (we can make up any language we like), but I don't see a minority of agendered people being able to move so much inertia.

So how to go about it? The "x" or other non-standard symbols are pointless because unpronounceable. The "e" can work in Spanish (won't in Italian), and only for some cases, example above all: "españoles" is masculine. Choosing masculine and feminine randomly doesn't work either, it causes confusion and can even sound sexist in certain contexts (I've tried it and found myself in that situation).

My personal take is to stick to the rule: "default" gender is masculine. It's just a choice, as it would have been if we chose feminine (also remembering that the grammatical gender has -in most cases- nothing to do with sex). However, I also try to avoid ambiguities, even at the cost of redundancy, and try to introduce variation as much as possible, still within the constraints of the rules.

[1] https://allegatifac.unipv.it/silvialuraghi/Gender%20FoL.pdf [2] https://benjamins.com/catalog/cilt.305.04lur [3] https://www.etymonline.com/word/woman

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

#912

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can't "defuse" a wedge issue, you can only decline to be manipulated. That is an individual act. There is no "side" to a wedge issue, it is a false dichotomy crafted to create maximal division. They are focus group tested and refined to do so. The "War on Christmas" effects a greater sense of persecution while framing it as a nonexistent conflict. There is no War on Christmas. I can say Merry Christmas or not, an…

I agree with most of what you're saying except for the contention that the dichotomy is false. It's a good wedge issue precisely because it's a true dichotomy. Even when attempting to dismiss the debate as fabricated and pointless, you end up taking a side on accident, flatly stating that there's no War on Christmas and that it doesn't really matter whether you say Merry Christmas to others. On the other side of the…

Everybody likes to think their religion is more important than everybody else's, I get it. But there are a lot of holidays around mid-winter, and I wouldn't try to guess which ones another person might celebrate. People maybe should worry about their own immortal souls rather than mine, if that is their concern.

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

#913

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

> Would you be willing to defuse it by instituting a policy of always saying "merry Christmas" instead of "happy holidays"? I'm an atheist and this is my approach. I think their religion is complete nonsense but Christmas is a wholly inoffensive Holiday, which is celebrated in a fashion by many secular people anyway. I think the "Happy Holidays" thing is needlessly antagonist. In principle it should be fine but a lot…

You aren't worried about folks of other religions that don't celebrate Christmas? Only about those that do? Is this some sort of Christian privilege thing?

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

#914

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 em…

I just chose one example from the early years of science, and one modern case. Anyone can fill in countless cases of science being highly politicized in the intervening centuries.

> 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.

No, science is generally objective, but its results have political implications. To take the pandemic as an example. Virology and epidemiology came to a clear, objective, true conclusion: social distancing and vaccination would drastically reduce the death toll of the pandemic. However, because there are people who reject social distancing (e.g., people who run businesses) and vaccination (anti-vaxxers and opportunistic politicians who see that as an issue they can push), virology and epidemiology have become politically controversial. It's also politically convenient in the United States to distract from the government's own failure to effectively respond to the pandemic by pushing conspiracy theories about the virus coming from a lab in a scary foreign country (and if you don't accept that this is a conspiracy theory, I'm sorry, but you've fallen victim to the widespread propaganda on this issue in American media over the last few years, which is 100% at odds with the conclusions that the scientific community has reached). The problem isn't with virology or epidemiology themselves. The problem is with how the society and political system respond to science.

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

#915
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…

Much of the piece leans on the right's habit of "refuting" leftist academia by merely repeating its summed-up headline form in a sneering voice, without offering a real counterargument.

This is not to say that I don't think there should be a rebuttal of any social sciencey claim, but that it should - and can - be done socratically.

it's like any topic you think is simple until you research even a bit of it and go 'oh'

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

#916

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…

"Trust the science" was also a propaganda campaign.

What they meant was "Don't question our data or our decisions".

Science isn't trusted, it's understood and practiced. Not everyone has enough scientific literacy to understand the difference between being data driven and hypothesis driven, even if they intuit parts of it on a daily basis.

We can easily be misled by data, but when we make decisions by evaluating the probability that any hypothesis is true conditioned on evidence supported by openly collected and evaluated data, we're much closer to doing science.

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

#917

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Which is why reorganizing all school systems around teaching the standardized test and judging teachers by these results has been such an overwhelming success that "virtually nobody [..] disagrees with".

The US has probably the least test-focused education system in the developed world (you don’t need to take any exam to graduate high school except in some cases an extremely easy one as a formality). Would you claim the US education system is better than the UK, France or Germany?

> The US has probably the least test-focused education system in the developed world

And there I was, in American schools being told test scores were 80% of my grade with homework accounting for 10% and class projects another 10%. Both high school and university. Fucking liars.

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

#918

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 s…

I am saying that the statement “facts don’t care about your feelings” is a useless statement and it doesn’t make people who say it seem smart. People who say the slogan seemingly universally seem to think it makes them very smart. It doesn’t convey any information to anyone, all it is used for is for morons like Ben Shapiro to automatically dismiss people for being emotional. You’re right, I don’t like conservatives…

It didn’t take much prodding to make you show your entire hand. Might be time to look inwards.

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

#919
post #677

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

Your treating the lab leak hypothesis as near fact is exactly the kind of bullshit we need less of. There are not "a few (orders of) magnitude" in probability between these hypotheses. That would at least need to be 1% vs. 99% and that's being charitable. What we need is an education system that teaches people to simultaneously entertain conflicting hypotheses and update the belief in them as information becomes avai…

This. You might argue given only the information that the pandemic exists and the city of origin of the first cases, it's reasonable to prefer the lab leak hypothesis, but there's a lot more evidence around than that, and most of it favors the zoonotic origin. Lab leak isn't completely ruled out (especially versions of the theory where it was a zoonotic virus that was released, as opposed to a modified one), but it's far from the obvious favourite given the evidence.

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

#920

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are few slogans I hate more than "trust the science", primarily because it aligns scientific results with faith, which is exactly what science is not about. Science is fundamentally about skepticism , not trust. Now, obviously that skepticism can be misused by some rando with no qualifications or even time spent researching telling you to be "skeptical" of people who have spent decades trying to figure shit out…

[flagged]

My favorite post of all time that I can no longer find:

>Thesis: China is a backward country where basic hygiene is not followed and any animal will be eaten live and raw.

>Antithesis: China is more advanced than many first world countries, with state of the art biological research pushing boundaries beyond what current protocols can handle.

>Synthesis: An infected bat escaped from the Wu Han institute of virology and was promptly eaten.

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