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499 points Bostonian | 5 comments | | HN request time: 1.115s | source
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tlogan ◴[] No.42183230[source]
The issue isn’t that Scientific American leans “pro-Democrat” and it is political. It always has, and that’s understandable.

The real problem is that the modern Democratic Party increasingly aligns with postmodernism, which is inherently anti-science (Postmodernism challenges the objectivity and universality of scientific knowledge, framing it as a social construct shaped by culture, power, and historical context, rather than an evidence-based pursuit of truth).

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smaudet ◴[] No.42183333[source]
I agree that postmodernism, or at least your definition of it, is so much nonsense (in the realm of hard sciences, at least - soft science unfortunately does suffer from human contextual bias issues).

I don't read SciAm (maybe that's an issue), but I'm a bit suspicious that this could be a political hit piece.

That being said, if any of the claims in the article are true (e.g. calling statistic normal distribution curves an affront to humanity), that would indeed be a travesty (that such makes it through editing).

I think a less impassioned, more objective take would also present e.g. the number of times a needlessly conservatively minded piece made it through editing.

I.e. is it that SciAm is suddenly biased unscientific drivel or is it that society representatively has become more extreme?

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1. GoblinSlayer ◴[] No.42185519[source]
Postmodernism has a bit of relevance for hard sciences, because relativity is known to be counterintuitive, and as a consequence theories will have absolutist bias. Consider Roger Penrose's Andromeda argument, where he tries to reason about synchronism in the context of special theory of relativity, but ends up assuming Galilean absolute synchronism, because Lorentz synchronism is counterintuitive.
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2. smaudet ◴[] No.42185994[source]
Bad interpretations of data or theories are always a possibility, however that's only relevant to the interpretation.

Unless the data itself is fabricated, i.e. unscientific, the hard sciences are "hard" because they don't suffer from these flaws of interpretation (as much). There of course issues with observability, replicability, however these are issues that can be dealt largely without invoking any societal biases, aka through the scientific method.

Rejecting the scientific method completely because humans are involved at any step, is a form of absurd-ism, yes, we are not perfect, but our methods are a lot better than a) nothing b) your choice to reject hard science because it doesn't match your personal belief (hard bias).

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3. GoblinSlayer ◴[] No.42191538[source]
It doesn't reject scientific method completely, but you also can't trivially ignore social dynamics, because scientific method routinely deals with issue simply by waiting for the old generation to go extinct, then consensus can be naturally reached.
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4. smaudet ◴[] No.42197047{3}[source]
I think you'll find upon inspection the hard sciences are based on consensus reached and not overturned for centuries, not generations.

If you were arguing with me in the 11th century perhaps you'd have a valid concern, at the point at which we've been successfully doing this for almost a whole millennia, I strongly disagree with your assertion(s).

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5. GoblinSlayer ◴[] No.42201699{4}[source]
In the past science waited to overturn a consensus, today it waits to reach a consensus.