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

> 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.