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?

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

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.