Scientific American's departing editor and the politicization of science

I read Scientific American from time to time. It's not what the Reason author claims it is. It's a popular, non-specialist science magazine that reaches out to the public (mostly through Dentist's office waiting rooms). It's OK for it to have a political point of view.

I see this a lot lately. Someone takes issue with something(s) in a magazine or journal and tries to burn them to a crisp because of it. Even on here, folks periodically roast Quanta magazine for something that's not exactly right from a subject matter expert perspective. It's a perfectly good magazine, also for the general public (perhaps a little more high-brow than Sci-Am).

The Reason article takes a very rigid and persnickety point of view, which is common in libertarian arguments. It's like the kind of rhetoric you hear from insufferable debate-club enthusiasts in high-school and college.

> It's not what the Reason author claims it is.

The article literally describes Scientific American as "the leading popular science magazine". What exactly did the author mis-claim?

> It's OK for it to have a political point of view.

Not if that political point of view is anti-science, as others have elsewhere described in this comment page (post-modernism).

> The Reason article takes a very rigid and persnickety point of view, which is common in libertarian arguments.

I'm not a libertarian, But I also have no idea what you're talking about with the "rigid" and "persnickety" descriptions.

> It's like the kind of rhetoric you hear from insufferable debate-club enthusiasts in high-school and college.

I think it's a real problem when a popular science magazine doesn't just get the detailed facts wrong, but takes on a point of view that is hostile to objective scientific inquiry in general, and also attempts to inject poisonous identity politics into subjects as banal as the normal distribution or Star Wars.

I agree. You're right.

On science reporting, Scientific American has been on par with Wired or Technology Review for more than a decade. SciAm wasn't mutated/destroyed by a few recent opinion pieces. (Whether those pieces were unhinged or not. I can't force myself to go and check, because see above.)

I wish my dentist had Sci-Am in the waiting room.

But seriously, those rants quoted in the article about normal distributions and the use of the acronym "JEDI" are really, really, pathetic. A science magazine needs to be science first and politics second. Anyone who wants to reverse that should work for a different rag.

It's not even what's "published in the magazine" as such, they take issue with opinion pieces saying stuff like "the complicated legacy of E.O. Wilson". It's news to me that disagreeing with part of the work of someone in behavioural psychology (of all things) is "setting aflame the edifice of science", but here we are...

I mean, the normal distribution point is fairly compelling.

If you actually read the piece, it's pretty clear that modeling medicine/health with a normal distribution is generally not great. It's not complaining about normal distributions, it's complaining about their application in health sciences.

And in that context... it's a compelling and reasonable argument, and a lot of negative health outcomes result from applying "average" results to a specific person.

I mean, the US Air Force figured this out 80 years ago...

https://www.thestar.com/news/insight/when-u-s-air-force-disc...

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No comment on the "JEDI" thing. I haven't read the article so no idea if it's as unreasonable as it sounds.

I would suggest that this piece as written by Reason is ultimately garbage, though. Which should surprise very few folks.

The instructions for opinion and analysis articles used to say:

“We look for fact-based arguments. Therefore, if you are making scientific claims—aside from those that are essentially universally accepted (e.g., evolution by natural selection explains the diversity of life on Earth; vaccines do not cause autism; the Earth is about 93 million miles from the Sun) we ask you to link to original scientific research in reputable journals or assertions from reputable science-oriented institutions. Using secondary sources such as news reports or advocacy organizations that do not do actual research is not sufficient.”

Now it says just “You should back up claims with evidence.” but opinion doesn’t mean anything goes.

https://www.scientificamerican.com/page/submission-instructi...