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Scientific American's departing editor and the politicization of science

reason.com

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

#481

Post by GoblinSlayer »

smaudet wrote: post #230
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…

I agree that postmodernism, or at least your definition of it, is so much nonsense (in the realm of hard sciences, at least - soft science unfortunately does suffer from human contextual bias issues). I don't read SciAm (maybe that's an issue), but I'm a bit suspicious that this could be a political hit piece. That being said, if any of the claims in the article are true (e.g. calling statistic normal distribution cu…

Postmodernism has a bit of relevance for hard sciences, because relativity is known to be counterintuitive, and as a consequence theories will have absolutist bias. Consider Roger Penrose's Andromeda argument, where he tries to reason about synchronism in the context of special theory of relativity, but ends up assuming Galilean absolute synchronism, because Lorentz synchronism is counterintuitive.

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

#482

Post by sixstringtheory »

SolarNet wrote: post #466
bee_rider wrote: post #446

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If a tiny problem can cascade like that, it seems that there’s a systemic logistics issue going on here, the problem wasn’t the nail it was some high-level problem in the overall organization. One nail is small and unimportant but the general problem of getting enough nails is a big important one. And anyway, the messenger also could have been shot, the horse could also have tripped on a rock, the battle could have b…

I think the argument the poster is making is as root cause analysis. The root cause of the messenger failing was the missing nail. Sure it could have been many other things, but in this case it was the nail. And if it was a pitched battle that was narrowly lost by one message, sure, they could have won or lost because of a dozen other factors, but in this case it was the missing message. There are likely many other i…

If you look at the problem as a swiss cheese model and not just a teleological propagation from one root cause, then there are many things that need fixing, not just a cobbler being short one nail.

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

#483

Post by gamerdonkey »

nradov wrote: post #385
jhedwards wrote: post #254

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The point (as I understand it) was not to protect the kids themselves from covid, but that kids are active vectors of illness: they get sick easily and rapidly spread it to everyone around them. Sending kids to school during a pandemic is basically asking to fast-track that sickness to everyone in the community.

There was never any scientific basis for that belief. It was just made up without conducting experiments. And if fact we saw that some countries like Sweden kept primary schools open throughout the pandemic (without mask mandates) and it was fine.

> There was never any scientific basis for that belief.

This is an incorrect statement that can be fixed with minutes of research.

https://www.pnas.org/doi/abs/10.1073/pnas.0610941104 https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S00916...

One might argue about the quality of the research or point out contradicting studies, but saying there was zero basis is flat-out false.

Adding that the idea was "made up" is a great example of bending the idea of science to prop up a point.

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

#484

Post by jamessb »

iwontberude wrote: post #453
Swizec wrote: post #438

Earlier quoted context omitted.

“for want of” in this context means “because of not having” or “for lack of” It’s an older way of writing English. But not like super old. Basically the kingdom was lost because of 1 missing nail.

It’s so contrived and yet needs so many leaps of abstraction that I don’t think it makes its point well at all. “Bro my controller totally didn’t work that time! We would’ve won the match otherwise I promise.” Do you really think it was the controller that lost the match?

It is a well-known proverb that is centuries old [1]: it's essentially a canonical way of refering to the concept of something small having big consequences.

Proverbs are often contrived (e.g., "Those who live in glass houses should not throw stones" - who lives in a glass house?).

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/For_Want_of_a_Nail

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

#485

Post by TheBigSalad »

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…

I don't think people who say "Trust the science" are saying that science has it all figured out. It's telling people that they should weigh scientific data into their thought process. In reality many people make all of their decisions based on emotions and "feels".

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

#486

Post by knowitnone »

bithead wrote: post #364

"In the process, SciAm played a small but important role in the self-immolation of scientific authority—a terrible event whose fallout we'll be living with for a long time." Which is it - small or important? All that seems like a bit much.

you can be small role yet still provide significant contributions. Or are you just upset about the content of the article?

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

#487

Post by anonfordays »

Does the following phenomenon have a name?

Open an article about the detrimental politicization of something, click to the social media profile of the offender and you know with high certainty the exact kind of poster they are and posts they make/repost.

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

#488

Post by knowitnone »

nyeah wrote: post #423
23B1 wrote: post #418

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The Reason article blurs the distinction between SciAm's opinion pieces and its factual (or putatively factual) reporting. How are readers to know the difference?

Sorry, I can't tell whether this is sarcasm or not. If it's a genuine question, the articles are labelled.

So the articles themselves have no opinions? They don't make conclusions and use carefully chosen words to sway the reader?

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

#489

Post by jl6 »

gadders wrote: post #277
jl6 wrote: post #220

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Yes, I think there is a middle ground. Trans people are clearly going through something , and I think a bit more sympathy from the Right, particularly for adolescents wouldn't go amiss. Puberty in the age of social media, anxiety and other mental health challenges is rough. You can hate the policies/movement and still have sympathy for the individuals. However, I'm not sure that encouraging young people to make one-w…

Yes, this is the kind of nuanced take that has been squeezed out by ideological snap-to-grid from the warring tribes.

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

#490

Post by jayd16 »

jtbayly wrote: post #299
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…

What a minute, this sentence was literally in the SA piece: “First, the so-called normal distribution of statistics assumes that there are default humans who serve as the standard that the rest of us can be accurately measured against.” Is that not a denunciation of the normal distribution?

It's saying multi-modal data should not be crammed into a simple normal distribution.
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