Scientific American's departing editor and the politicization of science

I'm conflicted about all of this because I gave up reading Scientific American when I felt it had become too political.

But of course, you can't remove politics from science. Scientists are human and humans are political. When a scientist chooses an area to investigate, it is influenced by their politics. You can ask scientists to be factual, but you can't ask them to be non-political.

It's not SciAm's fault that scientists (and science writers) are political.

The root failure, IMHO, is that several professions, including scientists, journalists, and teachers have become overwhelmingly left-wing. It was not always that way. In the 80s, 35% of university employees (administrators+faculty) donated to Republicans. In recent years it has been under 5%.[1]

I don't know the cause of this. Perhaps conservatives began rejecting science and driving scientists away; or perhaps universities became more liberal and conservative scientists left to join industry. Maybe both.

Personally, I think it is important that this change. Science is the foundation of all our accomplishments, as a country and as a species. My hot take is that trust in science will not be restored until there are more conservative scientists.

Sadly, I think restoring trust will take a long time. Maybe this change at Scientific American will be the beginning of that process. I certainly hope so.

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[1] https://www.nature.com/articles/s41599-022-01382-3.pdf

Or perhaps the republican party has developed such an astonishing anti-science attitude that hardly any reasonable scientist can support them? Imagine doing research on vaccines and hearing the soon to be secretary of health speak on that topic. As long as these kind of people count as "conservatives" in the US, how could you be a conservative scientist?

It might be because what being a "conservative" in America means has been grotesquely distorted into what it is today.

> Perhaps conservatives began rejecting science and driving scientists away

There isn't even a "perhaps" about this. My parents (both physicists at a research university) voted Republican my whole childhood. The last 15 years has changed that despite the fact that they are still fairly conservative.

Why would they align with people who are vocally anti-education, consistently work to undermine trust in the scientific process, censor research and constantly try to shift schooling away from being a public right to a private good?

> In the 80s, 35% of university employees (administrators+faculty) donated to Republicans

The Republican party used to be the leftwing party, right up until the 1960s - which is the right timeframe for the staff to have grown up in a "Republican family" without being conserve themselves.

AFAICT academia, in any country, since the 18th century, has leaned more towards being progressive than conservative, which is why academia has been consistently near the top of (s)hit-lists by dictators or strong-man "revolutionaries"

> being a "conservative" in America means has been grotesquely distorted into what it is today.

I am a recovering conservative and agree with this. Today's right wing occupies a space that I find to be distressing and deeply concerning. From my perspective, conservatism has become thin-skinned, extremely malleable and hair-trigger reactive - the same complaints we lobbed at the left, 20y ago. From my perspective, the right is dominated by the same boogeymen we once visualized and railed against.

"Perhaps conservatives began rejecting science..."

Naah...I think left-leaning/collectivists tend to be much less tolerant of people they disagree with, and when the pendulum swing of the wider culture allows it, this is manifested in hiring outcomes over time.

This may swing back in the years to come...

> Imagine doing research on vaccines and hearing the soon to be secretary of health speak on that topic.

I hope I'm not entering a minefield here... but from what I've heard, it sounds like he's not against vaccines in principle, just ones that haven't undergone clinical trials equivalent to what the FDA requires for pharmaceuticals.

(A sound byte I heard sums it up, where he said something like "no one called me anti-fish for working to get mercury removed from the fish sold in supermarkets, so I don't see why I should be labeled 'anti-vaccine' either.")

No, he’s pretty much against them and makes a new excuse each time. He would claim that no vaccine ever has gone through enough testing.

He also denied HIV causes AIDS, days it’s Poppers or lifestyle.

He also pushed ivermectin which studies show has no statistically significant effect on COVID.

He also pushed raw milk when prior to pasteurization, milk was the cause of 25% of all communicable diseases (it’s a great medium for bacteria, it has avian flu viruses, parasites, etc). We invented pasteurization for a reason.

The guy latches on to whatever statistical outlier study he can find like an ambulance chasing lawyer and is a threat to public health that has been massively improved over the last century.

All of his attacks on dyes and seed oils won’t move the needle when the real reason for US health decline is too much sugars/carbs, too little exercise, and addiction to opioids and nicotine.

If you look at political identification by academic discipline [1] you can see that the harder sciences tend to have smaller Democrat to Republican ratios relative to things like English Literature, Psychology, or Fine Arts.

To me, this implies there is an explanation other than partisan dislike for science that explains the large discrepancies in academic faculty. Whatever this reason is, perhaps it extends to other academic/scientific institutions.

1 - DOI:10.2202/1540-8884.1067 (this paper also discusses how Republican faculty tend to have better credentials controlling for the quality/rank of institutions they teach at)

> He also pushed raw milk when prior to pasteurization, milk was the cause of 25% of all communicable diseases (it’s a great medium for bacteria, it has avian flu viruses, parasites, etc). We invented pasteurization for a reason.

Raw milk is legal to sell in most of Europe and they still have overall better health outcomes, so at the very least it’s a triviality.

Plenty of reasonable scientists support a political party which explicitly denies the existence of biological differences between groups of humans. In the final analysis, it seems scientists will align with organizations that hold unscientific tenets. It's probably not really a big deal.

I'll also say that this is not unique to him, it's how conspiracy minded people operate.

You'll see exactly this playbook playout with flat earthers. "We can't know the earth is round because it's not been tested." or "It's actually industry captured" or "The US government prevents people from doing real tests to see if the earth is flat".

You see, if you asked them "what would it take for you to abandon this theory" their honest answer is "nothing" because any counter evidence to the theory will just get wrapped up in more conspiracy.

What would it take for me to abandon my belief in evolution? Evidence that explains why things appear to evolve and shows what actually happens instead.

What will make me abandon my support of vaccination? Evidence that shows vaccines are more dangerous than the diseases they protect against.

> He also pushed ivermectin which studies show has no statistically significant effect on COVID.

Studies showed that it had a statistically significant effect on COVID. The problem is that with hindsight it is obvious any sufficiently powerful study will show it has a statistically significant effect so the existence of that effect isn't particularly interesting evidence.

There will be people who have both COVID and parasites. If you give them Ivermectin around the time they catch COVID, they will get better outcomes. Statistics will pick that up, it is a real effect. AND it has real world policy implications, there are a lot of people in the world who should immediately be given Ivermectin if they catch COVID (or, indeed, any disease). The more important political issue was when people noticed that (very real) effect without understanding the cause they were attacked rather than someone explaining what was happening.

It is a good case study of evidence being misleading, but the statistical significance of that evidence is indisputable. Any study that doesn't find that effect is just underpowered - it is there. In fact as a baseline it turns out we would expect any effective drug will have a statistically significant positive effect on COVID outcomes.

Europe also has higher standards for animal husbandry and food products.

In most of Europe you can sell unrefrigerated chicken eggs. Why? Because chickens in the EU are vaccinated against salmonella, so the eggs don't need to be washed (and consequently it's also safer to eat poultry in the EU).

I'd be happy to sell raw milk on the market if there's a requirement that raw milk be tested for common pathogens to milk (Like listeria, for example).

Barry Goldwater's Presidential campaign ran on "I'm the only one that matters. Me me me." Party. I'm not wrong, he was a piece of shit

Until 2020 the anti-vax movement was dominated by the left wing, so maybe you should take a step down from your high horse.

> the real reason for US health decline is too much sugars/carbs, too little exercise, and addiction to opioids and nicotine.

I think a more fundamental root cause is that US regulation has failed to adequately keep up with the playbooks of large companies that stand to profit from various products that result in compromised health.

Take a look at what's being heavily advertised/marketed. If it contains ingredients people haven't been consuming for thousands of years, I think it's suspect and should be subject to intense scrutiny. (Same goes for widely used B2B products that affect what people consume.)

Unfortunately, there's too much "we only test in prod" going on, so it's hard to isolate widespread problems to a single source. That's why (in my opinion) the FDA should require clinical trials and use an allowlist-based approach to food additives. Currently it's a denylist, which amounts to testing in prod.

You think FDR was the right wing candidate?

I have avoided so many pointless arguments (or "debates") by leading with this question! I ask, "is there something I could say that would make you change your mind?" If the answer is no—if they can't tell me what will move them off their position—then I can say, "well let's not waste our time here, yeah?" and change the subject.

It's not perfect. But with otherwise-reasonable people, it's a nifty trick.

It's one thing to have liberal beliefs that influence your work in subtle ways, and a whole other thing to actively manipulate research to promote those social causes. Research on gender affirming care for minors should not be published or buried simply based on which side it supports, but that is exactly what has happened in that field.

Given how anti-science and anti-education the republican party has become I doubt we'll see a swing in political beliefs among researchers any time soon, but they absolutely can and should be as diligent as possible about maintaining their intellectual honesty.

> Studies showed that it had a statistically significant effect on COVID. The problem is that with hindsight it is obvious any sufficiently powerful study will show it has a statistically significant effect so the existence of that effect isn't particularly interesting evidence.

Preliminary studies with small n showed a statistically significant effect. Follow up studies with larger n showed no such effect. Meta studies also concluded no effect.

> Any study that doesn't find that effect is just underpowered

I'm sorry, but no, in fact the opposite is true. The underpowered studies are the only ones showing an effect. [1].

What has happened with Ivermectin is the "anchoring effect". [2] Early studies showed promise which has caused people to think there is promise there. After that, grifters and conspiracy peddlers started out publishing the actual research on the benefits.

[1] https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC9308124/

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anchoring_effect

“Newspeak”? Is there any point in engaging with this comment?

> If it contains ingredients people haven't been consuming for thousands of years, I think it's suspect and should be subject to intense scrutiny.

There are plenty of carcinogenic ingredients that have been consumed for thousands of years. There are plenty of additives that are effectively just refined versions of chemicals commonly/naturally consumed.

A prime example of a commonly consumed cancerous ingredient is alcohol.

My point being that prod is already littered with bugs and the most responsible thing to do is continuing research on what is being consumed to figure out if it is or is not problematic.

Merriam-Webster changed their definition of "vaccine" in 2021. They did this so the COVID shots could still be called "vaccines" despite not preventing infection, not preventing transmission, and providing only a moderate therapeutic benefit. In doing so they cannibalized and damaged public trust in "vaccines" which the medical community had built for so many years, and at such great expense.

As is often the case, the problem was not a dumb public "losing trust in [thing]" but managers playing sleight-of-hand with the meanings of words. See also: racism.

Back in 2008 RFK Jr was a Democrat and Obama was considering appointing him to a cabinet post. Anti-vaxers have historically been crunchy-granola hippie folks.

https://www.politico.com/story/2008/11/obama-considers-stars...

> I don't know the cause of this.

I think it's pretty clear when you analyze it from the perspective of Selectorate Theory (c.f. Bueno De Mesquita's Logic of Political Survival).

Basically, there's a natural tendency for political parties to bring entire classes of institutions into their patronage network, leading to extremely high polarization within given industries. The choice of which party an institution class gets aligned with may be entirely arbitrary, but you expect it to happen. It's an efficient way to pork-barrel buy votes.

E.g. the education sector is part of the D patronage network and the ag sector is part of the R patronage network. There's no inherent reason this particular selection needs to be the case, but you do expect some kind of polarization to emerge.

Dictionaries are descriptive, not prescriptive. And nobody treats them as an authority on labeling. This makes absolutely no sense.

Thinking this is about science per se betrays a very naïve understanding of the political dynamics involved. It's quite easy to come up with examples where the official progressive position is nonscientific; Lysenkoism, for example, is as popular in left-leaning politics as ever (in the context of human biology). I can come up with plenty of other examples, although stating them here is guaranteed to draw some administrative ire.

In reality, institutional political alignment is just a natural equilibrium outcome of a political process with pork-barrelling as a feature (which is almost all of them).

Not needed. The definition is in every dictionary.

The fact that you think we can just engineer our way out of climate change is half of the problem - to say nothing of the fact that, as far as I'm aware, the Republican party does not really accept the threat of climate change.

I haven't verified if it's true yet, but thanks for this. I think it deserves to be a whole HN post. It's a shame this place is such an echo chamber.

I mean within reason. Of course the FDA can't and shouldn't ban alcohol.

I mean things like BHT, FD&C colors, and anything else artificial that hasn't passed clinical trials.

We've banned this account for using HN primarily for political battle. That's not what HN is for, and destroys what it is for, regardless of which side of whatever battle you're on.

Please don't create accounts to break HN's rules with.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Please don't post political battle comments to HN, and also please remember this site guideline:

"Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize. Assume good faith."

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

(I'm not banning your account the way I banned the other account, because it doesn't look like you're using HN primarily for this purpose. Your account is still unfortunately on the wrong side of that line a lot of the time, though, so it would be good to correct this.)

> I mean within reason. Of course the FDA can't and shouldn't ban alcohol.

Certainly, but we are now at a sticky point where "reason" can be different things to different people.

Both BHT and FD&C are far less toxic than alcohol is. BHT and FD&C have both been integrated into the food supply for decades. The question would be, what would we learn from a clinical trial that we wouldn't learn from the ongoing population study?

I'm certainly not advocating for deregulation or looser standards for food safety. I certainly support the FDA being fully funded and actively investigating ingredients to ensure public health isn't being torpedoed because it turns out too much salt actually causes cancer (I don't believe it does, this is just an example). But also, I'd say that ingredients that have already been in the food supply for a generation are probably not the danger their detractors claim. At this point, we need evidence to say these additives are dangerous as the current weight of evidence (a generation eating this junk) points to them not being a primary contributor to negative health outcomes.

All that said, I certainly support the idea of applying a very high level of scrutiny to new ingredients. How the current set of GRAS ingredients made it onto the market was reckless.

If you believe that, it implies you believe someone infested with parasites expects the same COVID outcomes as someone who is mostly healthy. That is a pretty extreme claim, to the point where 1 study (or review, in this case) isn't really an argument. It is much more likely that that they just aren't picking up the statistical signal that is obviously going to be there somewhere.

There isn't a shortage of studies showing an ivermectin-COVID relationship. https://c19ivm.org/meta.html makes for interesting reading, although it is quite misleading because it is probably measuring parasite prevalence rather than anything new.

I'm advocating for a much harder-line stance than that.

Europeans are generally far healthier than folks in the US -- let's start from there.

Also, autism rates are dramatically increasing decade-over-decade.

> If you believe that, it implies you believe someone infested with parasites expects the same COVID outcomes as someone who is mostly healthy.

No, it doesn't.

The crux of your argument is that there is an invisible parasitic pandemic which is, frankly, absurd. Parasites by their nature are far less transmissible than an airborn virus is. They are primarily regionally locked and locked out of most developed countries. The US, for example, does not have a major internal parasite problem because public waters are treated against most parasites and filtered before general consumption.

As for the site, it's got a lot of pretty numbers that are like "Yeah look, 100% this ivermectin is great!" which is pretty fishy. You would not expect to see something like that. But, scroll to the bottom and all the sudden you see why that is, they purposefully find reasons to omit all studies that counter that claim.

Like, I'm sorry, I'm just not going to trust a website that is pushing for vitamin D supplements to treat covid. It's not a serious website and it has a very clear agenda.

Yourself (cogman10) and roenxi might both be in furious agreement from my PoV.

There are no good studies showing a useful relationship between ivermectin and COVID outcomes in low parasite G20 countries ( UK, AU, US, etc ).

The early studies most quoted had high N, good procedures, and showed ivermectin having a very positive effect across the board wrt many diseases ( flu, COVID, etc. ). These studies were in countries and regions with high parasite prevelance and demonstrated pretty conclusively that people with no worms were healthier, had better functioning immune systems, and both resisted and recovered from infections noticably better than untreated populations with parasites.

The supplement pushing website is being disingenous and obfuscating the context of the studies quoted in order to flog crap to rubes.

> No, it doesn't.

Alright, lets go through this slowly. Run me through the point which you think is unreasonable:

1. We do a study. Some % of the participants have parasites, in line with the base rate for the area.

2. Split the group into experiment and control. The experiment group gets Ivermectin.

3. Wait until everyone gets COVID. The people with parasites in the control group get terrible outcomes because their immune system is way overloaded, but the people who used to have parasites in the Ivermectin group do a bit better because they just took an anti-parasitic.

4. A sufficiently powerful statistical analysis correctly detects that the two groups got different COVID outcomes.

What part of that do you think won't happen in the real world?

I'm unaware of any definition of 'vaccine' which fits seasonal flu shots, but not COVID vaccines. Specifically, flu vaccine does not prevent infection or transmission, it has moderate therapeutic benefit and reduces instances of infection somewhat. That meets your presented criteria in full.

You're correct that many aspects of how the vaccine was handled in terms of authoritarian social policy, overpromising on results, sweeping bad reactions under the rug, and much more, has undermined public trust in vaccination.

But this has no bearing on whether the half-dozen or so vaccines developed against the virus are vaccines. They are.

Support for segregation is generally thought of as a right-wing position to take, is it not.

Best thing I've read that's summarized this well is the Scott Alexander piece incase anyone wants to do further reading from a somewhat reputable source: https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/ivermectin-much-more-than-y...

Fun read; I knew of the "good studies" that Scott ended up with, I'd never bothered to look much at the site in question as it screamed (to myself at least) of marketing driven bias .. and lo and behold many of the quoted papers are low N, sketchy, or outright fraudulent.

I suspect the best most concise summary is simply "If you have or even suspect you have worms, take ivermectin. Your general health and well being will most probably improve".

> Research on gender affirming care for minors should not be published or buried simply based on which side it supports, but that is exactly what has happened in that field.

Yes, work done by a liberal researcher, was buries because it didn't support her political views. Liberals hinging the entirety of their scientific "evidence" on political pseudo-nonsense like the WPATH files. Republicans maybe anti-science and anti-education, but the other side is very much the same. One cult does not excuse the other.

In what way are democrats pro-science and not simple pro-paycheck? "Science" today is a joke and most research is lacks reproducibility, rigor, or depth thanks to things like publish or perish. Quality science is almost impossible in today's academic and "scientific" ecosystem.

You mean the Republicans? I don't know any reasonable scientist who supports the Republicans.

> It's quite easy to come up with examples where the official progressive position is nonscientific; Lysenkoism, for example, is as popular in left-leaning politics as ever (in the context of human biology).

You believe the left believes children of parents with amputated arms will be born with amputated arms, that genes don't exist, that any species can be changed into any other species at the genetic level by manipulating only environmental conditions, and that random mutations do not occur?

Who do you think believes this? Name specific people who aren't irrelevant.