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.

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.