Scientific American's departing editor and the politicization of science

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, it's easy to feel like you have the moral high ground.

Maybe in culture it's ok to fight dirty and stretch some truths in order to force newer perspectives into the zeitgeist. Maybe it's even neccesary when the opposition is willing to lie outright, and loudly, as a first resort. But that doesn't work with science. Even if the motivations are pure, it's destined to backfire. It should backfire. Science itself is under assault and losing its ability to hold together some semblance of a shared reality. If people start to believe that science is just as corruptible as journalism because of shitty science journalists, we're fucked.

It’s misguided and toxic to center your worldview around the “most marginalized” or to think that focusing on them somehow gives you the moral high ground or frees you from the obligation to play by the meta-rules of society and its institutions. Or to think that your worldview somehow has a monopoly on helping marginalized people. You invoke “rationality” but as Spock would say, “the needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few.”

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 Spock when you make sure that you’re always part of “the many” and never part of “the few”.

Agreed and also it's rarely the case that the "most marginalized" who are elevated in public discourse genuinely are the most marginalized. More often it's just invoked to make some untrue political point. Kind of like how accusations of genocide are thrown around so freely these days. Typically it's rhetoric with very little substance.

> Maybe in culture it's ok to fight dirty and stretch some truths in order to force newer perspectives into the zeitgeist. Maybe it's even neccesary when the opposition is willing to lie outright, and loudly, as a first resort. But that doesn't work with science. Even if the motivations are pure, it's destined to backfire. It should backfire. Science itself is under assault and losing its ability to hold together some semblance of a shared reality.

The number of times one contradicts oneself in just a few words here, with such a lack of self-awareness, is amazing.

The magazine in question is a science-aligned publication. Given the current public discourse, it's no surprise that science-aligned opinions will be attacked. The current public discourse is (gleefully, tribalistically) misinformed, misguided, and hell-bent on social fragmentation.

Watch the bonds between citizens and reality dissolve in real time.

> Watch the bonds between citizens and reality dissolve in real time.

I've never thought our generations would need to fight this war again... Big brain and opposable thumbs are overrated.

>“the needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few.”

The brewer, the baker and the candle stick maker need a new kidney, liver and heart. Thank you for volunteering to be killed so we can harvest your organs and keep the many alive.

Alternatively don't base your world view on a TV show from the 1960s.

"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 towns.

This wave of wealthy white people screaming "bigot" at other white people without health care hasn't raised the condition of the descendants of slaves at all. Instead it's been an expansion of welfare for well-off white women and affluent immigrants. Everybody has been oppressed like black people except for the descendants of slaves, and everybody has been stuck in a caste system except for Dalits.

"Marginalized" people want to be addressed as individual humans with material problems like other humans. Instead a bunch of people so wealthy and comfortable that they are almost completely detached from the material world and have never missed a meal treat everyone like symbols and try to read the world like literary critics.

> It’s easy to quote Spock when you make sure that you’re always part of “the many” and never part of “the few”.

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.

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.

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.

That’s an invitation to think emotionally rather than rationally. (And not that it matters, but I recall white people literally crying back in 2016 that a certain president would put me and my kids in an internment camp. I’m glad I kept thinking rationally rather than emoting.)

Even in the movie's own terms, that's an ethical aphorism spoken by a character to justify his act of self sacrifice, and to comfort a great friend that he's coming to his unfortunate end on his own terms and for his own reasons and, in Spock's way, as an act of love, in a sense.

It's not, like, "go shit on minorities if it makes the majority's utility-units increase".

There was a story in Analog a few years ago called "Dibs" if I recall the title correctly about a world that worked like that.

Whenever someone could be saved by a transplant they would find possible donors and send them a notification that one of their organs could save someone. Usually after a few weeks the potential donor would get notification that the person who needed the organ has died. During the time between those two notifications the dying person was said to have dibs on the organ.

Occasionally someone would get a second notification about someone having dibs on another one of the organs while someone already had dibs on one of their organs. Again what usually is that those people would die soon and the person would go back to nobody having dibs on any of their organs.

Sometimes though a person with people having dibs on two of their organs would get notified that a third person now had dibs on one of their organs. That was enough that the needs of the many thing kicked in and they were required to give up those organs, which would usually be fatal.

Not to mention that Spock is consenting to his fate in taking on the role of "the few... or even the one." He's clearly rationalizing, not stating a universal constant.

That Spock quote is from Star Trek II, Wrath of Khan. Later, in Star Trek IV, The Voyage Home Chekov is in grave danger but to rescue him would put their mission at risk which would endanger many more people. This conversation occurs:

      UHURA'S VOICE
  They report his condition as critical;
  he is not expected to survive.
  
      BONES
  Jim, you've got to let me go in there!
  Don't leave him in the hands of
  Twentieth Century medicine.
  
      KIRK
  (already decided, but:)
  What do you think, Spock?
  
      SPOCK
  Admiral, may I suggest that Dr.
  McCoy is correct. We must help
  Chekov.
  
      KIRK
  (testing)
  Is that the logical thing to do,
  Spock...?
  
      SPOCK
  No, Admiral... But is the human
  thing to do.
  
      KIRK
  (takes a beat)
  Right.

Spock's entire character was the marriage of purely logical Vulcans and emotional humans and the necessity of having both. You fundamentally don't understand Star Trek's themes.

> movement in this country that defines itself largely by opposing what its perceived enemies support

I think that some of the more devious politicians realized that a "partitioning" of beliefs creates populations of in-groups and out-groups which are then manipulated against each other. Many "basic" facts are getting challenged just to create the controversy. Controversy reinforces tribalism, which in turn makes people more controllable.

Not to mention the fact that heterosexual, cis-gendered, christian, male is about a quarter of the US population[1], so categorizing it broadly as "many" vs "few" is already over-simplifying.

Intersectionality was intended to add nuance to discussions of discrimination (e.g. a black woman's experience is not reduced to "sexism" plus "racism"), but it seems to have popularly had the opposite effect of reducing everybody to a demographic venn-diagram.

1: If you exclude "male" and "christian" from the criteria, you do end up with a majority. If you switch "christian" to "protestant" then you make the minority even more stark, but anti-Catholic sentiment among protestants has significantly declined over the past few decades, so I don't think that historical division of categories makes sense anymore.