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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

#761

Post by rurp »

GMoromisato wrote: post #578

I'm conflicted about all of this because I gave up reading Scientific American when I felt it had become too political. But of course, you can't remove politics from science. Scientists are human and humans are political. When a scientist chooses an area to investigate, it is influenced by their politics. You can ask scientists to be factual, but you can't ask them to be non-political. It's not SciAm's fault that sci…

It's one thing to have liberal beliefs that influence your work in subtle ways, and a whole other thing to actively manipulate research to promote those social causes. Research on gender affirming care for minors should not be published or buried simply based on which side it supports, but that is exactly what has happened in that field.

Given how anti-science and anti-education the republican party has become I doubt we'll see a swing in political beliefs among researchers any time soon, but they absolutely can and should be as diligent as possible about maintaining their intellectual honesty.

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

#762

Post by [deleted] »

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…

[deleted]

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

#763

Post by cogman10 »

roenxi wrote: post #698
cromwellian wrote: post #657

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…

> He also pushed ivermectin which studies show has no statistically significant effect on COVID. Studies showed that it had a statistically significant effect on COVID. The problem is that with hindsight it is obvious any sufficiently powerful study will show it has a statistically significant effect so the existence of that effect isn't particularly interesting evidence. There will be people who have both COVID and…

> Studies showed that it had a statistically significant effect on COVID. The problem is that with hindsight it is obvious any sufficiently powerful study will show it has a statistically significant effect so the existence of that effect isn't particularly interesting evidence.

Preliminary studies with small n showed a statistically significant effect. Follow up studies with larger n showed no such effect. Meta studies also concluded no effect.

> Any study that doesn't find that effect is just underpowered

I'm sorry, but no, in fact the opposite is true. The underpowered studies are the only ones showing an effect. [1].

What has happened with Ivermectin is the "anchoring effect". [2] Early studies showed promise which has caused people to think there is promise there. After that, grifters and conspiracy peddlers started out publishing the actual research on the benefits.

[1] https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC9308124/

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anchoring_effect

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

#764

Post by archagon »

anglosaxony wrote: post #754
disentanglement wrote: post #588

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Or perhaps the republican party has developed such an astonishing anti-science attitude that hardly any reasonable scientist can support them? Imagine doing research on vaccines and hearing the soon to be secretary of health speak on that topic. As long as these kind of people count as "conservatives" in the US, how could you be a conservative scientist?

[flagged]

“Newspeak”? Is there any point in engaging with this comment?

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

#766

Post by cogman10 »

TimTheTinker wrote: post #712
cromwellian wrote: post #657

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…

> 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 alcohol.

My point being that prod is already littered with bugs and the most responsible thing to do is continuing research on what is being consumed to figure out if it is or is not problematic.

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

#767

Post by alexey-salmin »

mrandish wrote: post #553
grecy wrote: post #545

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And this is exactly the problem we face now in so many aspects of life. If cell phones or microwaves or a hundred other things were harmful we would not find out, because of all the lobbying and armies of scientists paid to find and publish a very narrow version of truth

> If cell phones or microwaves or a hundred other things were harmful we would not find out While I agree that there may be things which have subtle but cumulatively harmful effects over time, the two specifics that you cited (cell phones and microwaves) are very poor examples because they've been deployed so broadly for so long, the chances there is some significant medical harm still undetected is vanishingly small…

> the chances there is some significant medical harm still undetected is vanishingly small

I don't think this statement is true.

Long-term effects can only be observed over the, well, long term which makes it hard to compare with the baseline. It was measured differently and with very different external factors. Then even if we do by chance manage to observe the harm today it could be very hard to identify the reason — we would see the factual result but neither the process nor the cause.

Take any unexplained health issue we have today, e.g. decline in male fertility estimated at 50% in western counties since 1970s, a dramatic change. Could it be microwaves? Well possibly, can't be ruled out at this point, among many other candidates. Furthermore, with the new research saying that 1) microwaving food in "microwave-safe" plastic containers releases huge number of microplastic particles into the food and 2) microplastic accumulates in testicles — it's not even a fringe science anymore but a normal theory to be studied and be proven or disproven.

Do we have any other health issues that increased over the past 50 years? Yes. What caused them, is it something recent that became popular in the past 50 years? Very likely, yes. Do we know it? Not yet.

It took us a very long time to figure out cigarettes. Or leaded fuel, even though we knew in advance that lead is poisonous.

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

#768

Post by jahewson »

charlescearl wrote: post #705

Here is a list of Soviet nobel prize laureates, courtesy of Wikipedia https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Russian_Nobel_laurea... . There are several in the sciences up to the year 1978. I’m sure that many were committed Communists, Bolsheviks, perhaps Marxist-Leninists until their last breath. Perhaps there were “Tankies” and Trotskyists among the bunch. Perhaps there were many who recited the right thing, or lo…

After Stalin had all the scientists he didn’t like executed, he allowed the ones who were useful for developing weapons to live. Truly inspiring.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Repression_of_science_in_the...

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

#769

Post by anglosaxony »

archagon wrote: post #764
anglosaxony wrote: post #754

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

“Newspeak”? Is there any point in engaging with this comment?

Merriam-Webster changed their definition of "vaccine" in 2021. They did this so the COVID shots could still be called "vaccines" despite not preventing infection, not preventing transmission, and providing only a moderate therapeutic benefit. In doing so they cannibalized and damaged public trust in "vaccines" which the medical community had built for so many years, and at such great expense.

As is often the case, the problem was not a dumb public "losing trust in [thing]" but managers playing sleight-of-hand with the meanings of words. See also: racism.

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

#770

Post by llm_trw »

thrance wrote: post #291
llm_trw wrote: post #219

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>But denial of evolution is linked to white supremacy. Acceptance of evolution also leads to white supremacy. One only need to read what Victorian Eugenicists had to say about colored people. So if both accepting and rejecting evolution are linked to white supremacy it stands to reason that neither is the causal factor.

Of course they are white supremacists that believe in evolution... Here is a big, international meta-analysis that finds a link between both views: https://psycnet.apa.org/doiLanding?doi=10.1037%2Fpspi0000391

What an odd study to support the idea of white sumrpemacy when 2/3rds of the population sampled isn't Western or white according to white supremacists.
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