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Scientific American's departing editor and the politicization of science

(reason.com)
473 points Bostonian | 5 comments | 18 Nov 24 22:04 UTC | HN request time: 0.001s | source
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GMoromisato ◴[19 Nov 24 18:05 UTC] No.42186404[source]▶
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

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disentanglement ◴[19 Nov 24 18:15 UTC] No.42186511[source]▶
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?
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TimTheTinker ◴[19 Nov 24 19:16 UTC] No.42187046[source]▶
> 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.")

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cromwellian ◴[19 Nov 24 19:40 UTC] No.42187287[source]▶
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.

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1. TimTheTinker ◴[19 Nov 24 20:39 UTC] No.42187855[source]▶
> 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.

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2. cogman10 ◴[19 Nov 24 21:44 UTC] No.42188422[source]▶
> 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.

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3. TimTheTinker ◴[19 Nov 24 22:57 UTC] No.42188973[source]▶
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.

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4. cogman10 ◴[19 Nov 24 23:16 UTC] No.42189096{3}[source]▶
> 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.

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5. TimTheTinker ◴[19 Nov 24 23:58 UTC] No.42189388{4}[source]▶
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.