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Scientific American's departing editor and the politicization of science

(reason.com)
473 points Bostonian | 3 comments | 18 Nov 24 22:04 UTC | HN request time: 0.438s | source
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standardUser ◴[19 Nov 24 11:32 UTC] No.42182314[source]▶
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.

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rayiner ◴[19 Nov 24 12:09 UTC] No.42182559[source]▶
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.”
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everforward ◴[19 Nov 24 12:54 UTC] No.42182895[source]▶
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”.

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1. pessimizer ◴[19 Nov 24 13:22 UTC] No.42183126[source]▶
"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.

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2. everforward ◴[19 Nov 24 14:15 UTC] No.42183654[source]▶
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.

3. aidenn0 ◴[19 Nov 24 16:21 UTC] No.42185156[source]▶
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.