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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

#721

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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…

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At the very least it was such an obvious connection that ruling it out should have been an early step; when the PRC clammed up, and stopped letting any data out that should have been seen as the attempt at a cover-up that it likely was.

Maybe it didn't come from the lab. Maybe it didn't come from China at all. But maybe we should have checked that? Maybe we should know if some senior coronavirus researchers at that lab got sick with weird illnesses in the later part of 2019? Maybe we should have confirmed their virus handling procedures were up to snuff, and that a lab leak was unlikely because they were such upstanding and responsible scientists?

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

#722

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> Like believing "conversion therapy" doesn't work and is actually harmful? Like understanding sex and gender and two things even though we use the same words to describe both? Like believing puberty blockers are an effective treatment for gender dysphoria despite historical evidence being extremely weak, ignoring or condemning more modern, rigorous studies [0], and refusing to publish your own studies when they don'…

The science of puberty blockers is clear to me: they prevent the unwanted development of secondary sex characteristics in adolescents and have a number of side effects that may or may not be tolerable for any particular individual. What would you suggest is the proper treatment for trans children suffering gender dysphoria if they are denied puberty blockers and/or hormone replacement therapy? Do you think that forci…

Many adults desist and detransition so why wouldn't children, if left to develop normally? The problem with blocking these dysphoric childrens' puberty, putting them on cross-sex hormones and, in some cases, surgically removing body parts, is that they're never given a chance to explore how they would feel as fully developed adults.

Even referring to them as "trans children" comes with the assumption that this is some inherent and unchanging quality rather than a temporary state. Why assume this without evidence?

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

#723

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It's accurate, so by definition it cannot be bias.

It's a cognitive bias, since we remember the events that match our expectations and don't keep track of experiment over time.

This is a rather large assumption. I have had plenty of times when I thought I had noticed a trend of some sort and turned out to be mistaken, and so stopped relying on the heuristic. Insisting that everyone is biased (as opposed to observing that anyone can be) is a good way to filter out unexpected and perhaps unwelcome observations.

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

#724

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The author of this article very (in)famously re-launched his career as a writer (prior to GNC youth he wrote mostly culture pieces) by misinterpreting a scientific paper on the subject he now claims to be an expert on. I don’t think he did this maliciously, but I do think, like many writers, he struggles to digest scientific literature accurately.

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)

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

#725
post #720

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> Like what the skin color has to do with how good your physician is? Nothing. Unfortunately, this is not the case. Malpractice and disciplinary rates among Black and Latin physicians are higher: https://www.library.ca.gov/wp-content/uploads/2021/08/Medica... > After controlling for a number of other variables, Latino/a and Black physicians were both more likely to receive complaints and more likely to see those comp…

Now do it outside the country, and I anticipate the results don't replicate, meaning your cited study probably fails replication.

I'm not sure what you mean by this. Let's imagine MCAT scores directly determine malpractice rates. If one country practices race based affirmative action in medical school applications, and another country does not the we should expect the former to see a disparity but not the latter.

Why would we expect this trend to replicate across countries which have different medical training systems?

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

#726

A lot of criticism of SA seems to be from those who don't read the magazine. It is still mostly just thorough coverage of developments in physics, biology, engineering, and other pretty uncontroversial science topics and this coverage has not 'gone downhill'. It is a lot of work to do good reporting of an area of science by talking to a range of experts in that area and SA still does good work here. Some topics are p…

The downhill slide was already underway by the 1990s. Readership was in a slow decline and the publishers turned to various marketing gimmicks to maintain solvency. More pictorial articles, more po-sci articles, cover wrappers suggesting that it was worth subscribing even if you didn't read the whole magazine etc. I stopped reading around 2000, when I bought an issue and noticed I had read the whole thing in under 4…

I distinctly remember an article in the late 1990s (guessing 1998) which I read, but which I now can't find. It was about Y2K, and the bottom line was, we need more work to prevent disaster, but no matter how much is done, it will still be pretty awful.

I thought at the time he was exaggerating, and that Y2K was unlikely to be a big event. As everyone knows, a lot was done to fix the problem, and January 1, 2000 indeed turned out to be a non-event.

I cannot find the article now. I know I didn't dream it up, and I'm pretty certain it was in SciAm--I remember it had the usual sorts of graphs, illustrations, layout etc. as all SciAm articles did back then. If anyone can find it, I'd appreciate knowing. It was a turning point in my own reading of SciAm--I mostly gave it up after that, despite having devoured it up until 1980 or so.

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

#727
post #715

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I have yet to see a convincing motivation for doing something like that. There's more money to be made in denying climate change it seems, so what's the driving factor then?

Since climate change is a very popular topic, so popular that a person's belief or non belief in it will cause people on the other side to strike them down without hesitation... There's power, community, and social acceptance to drive people. The downvotes to the above comment's parent comment prove my point.

That's completely correct and valid but also in order to see this as a problem one has to presume that that the belief in it, or anything else you might care to put in it's place, is itself flawed. I don't believe in climate change because it's beneficial or not beneficial: I have read numerous things on the subject, all of which paint a consistent, reproducible, and relatable-to-my-life situation which happens to be about a decades-long propaganda campaign on the part of the fossil fuel industry to downplay the harms their products were doing to our atmosphere since the goddamn 1950's, one that, as the parent says, happens to make them shitloads of money. Just like leaded gasoline did. Just like cigarettes did, which led the tobacco industry to do similar things previously until they were outlawed in the developed world, which has caused them to simply shift focus to developing countries where they're now poisoning a whole new generation of people.

I'm highly skeptical of folks who take issue with something like "trust the science" because, while I fully cosign that as a slogan it's lacking and one doesn't "trust" science so much as learn about it and see if it holds up, the sort of people who say things like that invariably follow up with something like questioning climate change, or questioning the handling of the COVID pandemic. And that's not to say that there weren't mistakes made, we made a shitload of them, but too many bad actors in that space will take legitimate problems with the response to COVID and use that to launch into things like saying vaccines cause autism or are a plot on the part of China to kill all the white people, or other such ridiculous fuckin nonsense.

And maybe that's wrong of me to assume, but also if you consistently find yourself on the same side of a debate as the worst people imaginable, maybe that's something you should sit with and figure out how you feel about it, and if it points to you possibly being skeptical about the wrong things.

I would also put forward that something I've observed as we've gotten further and further into the social media age is the conflation between skepticism and ignorance, which are different things, and people who are doing the second thing will reliably say they are doing the former. To be skeptical is not a bad thing, even an uninformed skeptic like a member of the general public is fully capable of being at least somewhat informed, vetting sources, and coming to reasonably accurate conclusions without a formal education, however, it is also extremely, trivially easy for a layman to find stuff that corroborates whatever they think is already the truth, stated in professional-looking formats, that looks like science but just isn't credible or worthy of being taken seriously, and then go "look, see, I found this thing. I'm right!" If you find one, single academic, who has an entire rest-of-their-discipline shouting at them about how wrong they are, which is more likely: that you found one truth teller in a sea of liars, or that you found one liar?

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

#728

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, he’s pretty much against them and makes a new excuse each time. He would claim that no vaccine ever has gone through enough testing. He also denied HIV causes AIDS, days it’s Poppers or lifestyle. He also pushed ivermectin which studies show has no statistically significant effect on COVID. He also pushed raw milk when prior to pasteurization, milk was the cause of 25% of all communicable diseases (it’s a great m…

I'll also say that this is not unique to him, it's how conspiracy minded people operate. You'll see exactly this playbook playout with flat earthers. "We can't know the earth is round because it's not been tested." or "It's actually industry captured" or "The US government prevents people from doing real tests to see if the earth is flat". You see, if you asked them "what would it take for you to abandon this theory"…

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

#729
post #512

I feel like rational communication requires an overlap in perspective - not the same point of view, but some amount of overlap. Science relies on rational communication between people who disagree, because we can fool ourselves, and we can fool our in-group. The narrative fallacy doesn't just affect weak minds; by yourself, you won't outsmart your own filters. To learn about the world, you have to accept the world, a…

This comment started off really well with the need for successful communication requiring at least a partial overlap of of worldviews but then goes into the weeds with the comment about Trump. No one is denying that Trump won the election. But a huge percentage of Republicans believe that Trump actually won the last election. This is a real example of how worldviews on the right and left differ radically. The drag sh…

Those are examples of things that are hard for some to accept as bare facts.

Person Y won the election

Person Y won the election and that is BAD

Person Y won the election and that is GOOD

It is not a matter of denial, it is a matter of what story is made to accept the event.

If you have not had to fight about the topic, you can just make the first bare assertion. The event happened.

If you have fought about the topic and your central nervous system gets activated when you think about it, then the assertion will likely include moral judgement. The event didn't just happened, it happened for a good or bad reason.

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

#730

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wonder how much of this same kind of manipulation/distortion is going on when we are told to "trust the science" with regard to climate change? The pressure to ignore or minimise inconvenient facts would be overwhelming (career at stake situation).

I have yet to see a convincing motivation for doing something like that. There's more money to be made in denying climate change it seems, so what's the driving factor then?

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.

Maybe the Nobel Committee is in on… no, that'd only affect whether they awarded the prize, not whether people expect them to. They must be suppressing the evidence at the source: the instruments themselves. … No, they'd have to alter everything, and there's no way they got to my weather station. Maybe there's some way to remotely manipulate all the weather station reading at once? Think, what do all the weather stations have in common?

I've got it! They're doing something to the atmosphere, to make it seem like there's anthropogenic climate change, and trick all the scientists into publishing studies showing that it's real and happening, but actually it's just people altering the chemical composition of the atmosphere en-masse for unspecified nefarious reasons, likely personal profit. Or, maybe it's a byproduct of some industrial process, that they don't want us to know about. I bet that's what chemtrails are.

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