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Scientific American's departing editor and the politicization of science

(reason.com)
473 points Bostonian | 4 comments | 18 Nov 24 22:04 UTC | HN request time: 0.715s | source
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BurningFrog ◴[19 Nov 24 16:02 UTC] No.42184933[source]▶
To the "everything is political" crowd:

The complaint is not that SciAm writes about politics. It's that they write SCIENTIFIC NONSENSE when arguing for political causes.

Exhibit A: "the so-called normal distribution of statistics assumes that there are default humans who serve as the standard that the rest of us can be accurately measured against."

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1. jayd16 ◴[19 Nov 24 16:22 UTC] No.42185159[source]▶
Is that nonsense? Isn't it just saying that normal distributions are misleading when multimodal distributions would be more accurate? The indignant tone is unnecessary but it's not wrong to say complex systems cannot be modeled with a simple normal distribution.
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2. thatcat ◴[19 Nov 24 16:26 UTC] No.42185220[source]▶
It is simply saying the assumption of a normal distribution is incorrect for the population, which without context of what particular data they were observing would be impossible to know if it is in fact nonsense.
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3. jayd16 ◴[19 Nov 24 16:39 UTC] No.42185366[source]▶
So, quite sesnsical indeed but possibly, circumstantially incorrect? It seems like a non-controversial stance to take.
4. BurningFrog ◴[19 Nov 24 19:38 UTC] No.42187259[source]▶
Perhaps something like that was the intention, but it's not what the written text says.

Normal Distribution is a mathematical concept used in probability theory and statistics. It has nothing to do with any concept of "default humans".

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Normal_distribution