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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

#261

Post by nemomarx »

jl6 wrote: post #220
gadders wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>>It's one thing for Singal to have culturally heterodox† views on unsettled trans science and policy issues†† I think his views are culturally orthodox, outside of liberal-left members of the laptop class.

Red tribe orthodoxy has a lot of disdain for people with trans identities. Blue tribe orthodoxy has maximal dain for those people. But both tribes are willing to promote pseudoscience to achieve their goals. Singal occupies a narrow sliver of the political possibility space where sympathy for those identities can exist at the same time as supporting evidence-based medicine.

Before I started transition I read through the available literature (this would be back in 2010-2015 ish, before it was quite so hot button) and the general consensus wasn't with Singals position then. I don't think skepticism ought to be ruled out or anything, but hormone therapy is better studied than the use of most antidepressants at this point. (although it could still use better study on particular dosage and effects - no one seems to have done anything comprehensive on progestin treatment, for instance, even though it's clearly associated with the rest.)

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

#262

Post by derbOac »

standardUser wrote: post #133

I sympathize with her. There's a big movement in this country that defines itself largely by opposing what its perceived enemies support. When science (or culture) makes a reasonably sound assertion, and it's met with an opposition that wields rhetoric like a weapon with no regard for rationality, it's tempting to fight fire with fire. And when the victims of that opposition are among the most marginalized in society…

The problem, to me, is that today at least in the US there are a lot of areas where there are truths to criticisms, but then the response to it is gratuitous and equally problematic.

This article struck me sort of similarly. Reason is an outlet I have a certain amount of respect for in general, but this article came across to me as more politically over the top in a way that the outgoing EIC's writing ever did. They would have done more good by simply highlighting the actual state of medical gender intervention research and leaving at that (it sounds like they have done this in fact, but they would have been better off as such). Even then it's complicated — I have friends who work in the field, and when faced with things like the Cass report basically point out that evidence of intervention effect or absence of an effect isn't the same thing as what decision will reduce harm the most in individual cases, and there's a lot of misconceptions about what's actually involved in gender-focused interventions. What's lost in these discussions is that medical care is not the same as science per se, it's about optimizing utility functions or something for individuals.

At some level this sort of critique over the Scientific American editor covering political topics seems a little precious and disingenuous. As others have pointed out, science has and always will be political, whether people want to admit those leanings or not. Pretending that it's somehow "above" politics is disingenuous and narcissistic, and leads to exactly the sorts of problems the author claims to care about. These more political topics have also become mainstream in science in general, and it would be a bit weird for an EIC at someplace like Scientific American to just pretend the discussions aren't happening. Is she guilty of bad writing? Maybe, but it is meant to be a popular science publication, and rants like this hardly seem like an appropriate response to bad writing.

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

#263

Post by _aavaa_ »

codocod wrote: post #159

[flagged]

There are 2 sets of male-female pairs of the species which have different chromosomes. I am not sure what about her characterization is complete nonsense.

https://www.audubon.org/news/the-fascinating-and-complicated...

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

#264

Post by nradov »

sofixa wrote: post #185
blessede wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

[flagged]

You can find a list of trans athletes in women's sports here. I can't vouch for the site's accuracy or completeness, just providing a source for those who want to do further research.

https://www.shewon.org/

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

#265

Post by partomniscient »

tomgp wrote: post #140
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…

It's true! Britain has no bears so we like any refrence to them to be removed from our books ensuring we never have to think about them.

Strangely enough, I read about a bear that was lurking around at Paddington Station.

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

#266

Post by spamizbad »

tiahura wrote: post #212
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.

Does your daughter play competitive sports? Has she been knocked down by a boy playing on a girl’s team?

as a parent of a child athlete this is always a silly argument. Kids in sports get knocked down all the time! Sometimes pretty hard! I feel like people who clutch their pearls on this stuff either don’t have kids, don’t have kids in sports, or aren’t the parent who actually shows up to the games.

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

#267

Post by UncleMeat »

underseacables wrote: post #16

I grew up believing that science was the search for truth and fact, and that it should be constantly challenged to further that. What has happened I think, is that there has been a great polarization of science as government and groups have used and twisted it to fit a political agenda. Which essentially stops that search for truth. Challenging scientific conclusions should be encouraged not cancelled.

Science is a search for truth and fact but it is performed and funded by humans and institutions.

We could spin up a theorem generator that just starts from mathematical axioms and exhaustively recombines them to create theorem after theorem. This would create facts, but the process would be almost entirely useless. A pure undirected "search for truth and fact" does very little for us.

Researchers decide what problems to tackle. Funding organizations decide what research to fund. Researchers make choices about how to tackle these problems. Research labs are staffed depending on things like admission decisions and immigration decisions. Journals decide what papers to publish, not just on validity but on impact and novelty. Journals then charge money to access this research as part of a profit-driven business model.

All of these human elements bend the "search for truth" and a failure to recognize these institutions and their many historical analogues just means that you miss out on some rather important understanding when interacting with the literature.

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

#268

Post by drawkward »

tlogan wrote: post #222

The issue isn’t that Scientific American leans “pro-Democrat” and it is political. It always has, and that’s understandable. The real problem is that the modern Democratic Party increasingly aligns with postmodernism, which is inherently anti-science (Postmodernism challenges the objectivity and universality of scientific knowledge, framing it as a social construct shaped by culture, power, and historical context, ra…

Now talk about the crowd size at Trump's first inauguration, and the birth of the term "alternative facts".

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

#269

Post by everforward »

pessimizer wrote: post #211
everforward wrote: post #172

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I trust you’ll maintain that view if and/or when you become a marginalized group, and the dominant group shifts the meta-rules of society and its institutions in ways you don’t like? This view usually strikes me as hypocritical because it’s almost always paired with a paranoia of becoming a marginalized group and a belief that maintaining majority status for their group is “right” in some way. It’s easy to quote Spoc…

"Marginalized" groups have not been helped in any way by any of this. Lumping everyone together into a group who is not a white straight man diminishes everyone's individual material problems into a generic "marginalization," and unfairly centralizes white straight men. It's something that wealthy powerful people do in order not to have to discuss their wealth and power, and the fact that they all grew up in sundown…

Refusing to address the shared material hardships diffuses responsibility to the point where the hardships can be dismissed. There are too many branches on that tree to address, which makes it very easy to just do nothing. No one but celebrities get their individual hardships addressed, it just doesn’t scale to this size of a country.

> Assuming that everyone you're talking to is "the many" is not good. Your argument should work no matter who you happen to be talking to.

I don’t think it’s a wild presumption that most people in the few aren’t terribly excited about being asked to pay the cost for the many again. “Please lock us in another generation of poverty” is not a political slogan I hear very often. If that’s what you want to stand on, go ahead I suppose, it’s a free country.

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

#270

Post by BadHumans »

Philorandroid wrote: post #229
wolfram74 wrote: post #223

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We have such low standards for republicans, it's amazing. We complain that democrats are increasingly acknowleding that science is done by humans and humans will tend to ask questions based on what phenomena they've encountered and what explanations they've been given in their lives up til then, but totally give the republicans a pass on catering to groups that deny global warming, evolution or even that the world is…

Tu quoque; Republicans harboring fringe beliefs in some cases isn't a response to Democrats' mainstream acceptance of beliefs that the scientific method doesn't accurately reflect reality.

I think it is fair to say that through the nomination process, whoever is voted to run as the Republican nominee for president is considered to be the best representative for the party. Looking at the president-elect and all of the leaders of the party, saying they have "fringe beliefs in some cases" is severely downplaying it.
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