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

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 Research on gender affirming care for minors should not be published or buried simply based on which side it supports, but that is exactly what has happened in that field.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