Scientific American's departing editor and the politicization of science

SciAm has of course fallen into terrible disrepair. But that happened long ago and the cause wasn't BS in the editorials. Who even reads editorials in a science magazine?

I was a Young Libertarian in my day and I recognize the urge to blame lunatics who disagree with my politics for everything wrong in the world. But this particular case isn't convincing. It died and then the loonies moved in, not the other way around.

How are readers to know the difference?

Ostensibly, the staff. More specifically, editors and leadership.

> Are those rules agreed upon and enforced in some way?

Editorials were labeled to distinguish scientific findings, distilled to simple language for a larger audience, from opinion pieces and what-ifs. This evaporated over time.

> What are the consequences for breaking those rules?

The content wasn't published.

Asking inane questions with simple answers, that are readily available, is not productive.

Scientific America aimed to be informative and useful in context of that information, when I was a reader (80s).

To me, based on the content and context, the main quote written by the departing editor the article cited was clearly an opinion (or editor's column) piece and not part of SciAm's science reporting.

While this article didn't focus on it, the biggest factor when the editor-in-charge of a publication is biased isn't what is written but rather what never appears at all. An editor's curation and broad editorial guidance is subtle day-to-day yet has enormous impact over time. I've read accounts of newsroom reporters talking about editorial bias and it's remarkable how each individual biased decision is almost undetectable and, in fact, in some cases the biased editor may not even realize their bias is cumulatively shifting coverage.

Staff/editors/leadership cannot be trusted to label correctly if they are serving their own agendas. This is a real problem when we're looking to science to guide sociopolitical decision making, e.g. during a pandemic, or in childcare, or with the environment.

Bull puckey. I can be precise in my estimate, and contextual in my language.

"We believe x to be generally true because of y chance of likelihood" while not precise in conclusion, it is precise in its intent, which is to communicate a degree of certainty and to convey integrity of thought.

This is commonsense science writing that even the plebs can understand.

Reason is obviously a libertarian magazine, but the author is certainly not a libertarian.

I'm not a fan of Michael Shermer, but he claims SciAm demanded a complete revision of a column, and then later rejected one of his columns, right before getting rid of him entirely. So there's at least some rules about what opinions they're willing to publish, and that was under the previous editor-in-chief (as in the one before the one the article is about). The opinions that make it to press are curated, so if there's something off about them, the editors should be held responsible, and the op-eds don't have a different editor-in-chief than the main articles.

> Who even reads editorials in a science magazine?

I see no reason not to consider them as a significant part of the magazine's image. If the articles were all the same but the editorials were all written by, e.g. young earth creationists about their views, wouldn't what they put in that "free bullshit zone" shape your perception of the whole?

The editor-in-charge, and indeed every human being, is always biased. There will always be articles that don't make the cut and there is always going to be some criterion by which a decision is made. Some biases are more disruptive than others. Publicly acknowledged biases can be easily accounted for. You don't want an unbiased editor-in-charge, they're really just a person whose biases you don't recognize.

> Staff/editors/leadership cannot be trusted to label correctly if they are serving their own agendas. This is a real problem when we're looking to science to guide sociopolitical decision making,

...or you know, you could have stated what you meant instead of asking questions you didn't care about for your own reasons.

None of what you say applies to a publication any more than other forms of communication. There is a lot of philosophical rambling in these threads.

Scientific publications don't get to free themselves from that obligation if they want to be regarded as either.

> You don't want an unbiased editor-in-charge, they're really just a person whose biases you don't recognize.

These 2 truths are hard for some to digest, and they also diffuse the next step they want to implement: thumbing the scales to "Fix the political bias in science" by installing 'neutral' (to them) individuals to swing science rightwards.

Of course, it's not really about the science itself, it's about using science as a new front in the culture wars.

Indeed. The sad thing is I suspect a large number of those contributing to the 'culture war' biases often do so unknowingly (which doesn't make it any less wrong).

Mainstream science reporting is somewhat different in that poor reporting typically falls into two groups: culture war adjacent topics and "everything else." The problems on the culture war side are pretty well-understood but the "everything else" side, while less 'bad' on a per instance basis, still has a big impact because it's so pervasive. I include in this the near-universal tendency of mainstream media to either bury, under-report or ignore nuance, error bars and virtually all other kinds of uncertainty in science reporting. I'm sure the reporters and their editors feel all that uncertainty makes the story less exciting (and less newsworthy) while explaining nuance makes it 'boring'. Unfortunately, not including those things often makes the story misleading.

This can be boiled down to "nobody can be trusted to do anything", which is technically true.

The question is, is there evidence of motives leading to actual misbehavior? Having a nonzero motive to misbehave isn't the same as that.

> is there evidence of motives leading to actual misbehavior?

Yes. Having a 'very strong opinion' is a strong indicator that a publication concerned with science has gone off the rails.

Sure, if "it" here means your opinion of what's important.

Incentive alignment and misalignment isn't evidence of wrongdoing, though.

> Having a 'very strong opinion' is a strong indicator that a publication concerned with science has gone off the rails.

Interesting opinion. I thank you for it and respectfully disagree.