Scientific American's departing editor and the politicization of science

Science has _always_ been political. On the front page a few days ago was the story of a bunch of physicists bitching at each other over what happened in WWI

I have a book from Scientific American from the 1960s that has a whole section removed for the british audience because it contained instructions on how to run experiments on bears. That is a political act.

But, seeing as how administrations of various colours have differing approaches to funding science, its pretty hard for "science" to be a-political. Trump has expressed "policy" for completely removing NOAA, which provides massive datasets for wider research. His track record isn't great on funding wider science either. So its probably legitimate to lobby for more funding, no? (did the editor actually lobby effectively, is a different question)

Now, should the editor of SA also take on other causes, probably not. But "science" has been doing that for year (just look at psychology)

>I have a book from Scientific American from the 1960s that has a whole section removed for the british audience because it contained instructions on how to run experiments on bears. That is a political act.

I think you'd need a bit more evidence for that being "political". A far more plausible reason for the removal is that Britain doesn't have bears to any degree (there have been isolated sightings but most think they've been extinct there for over 1000 years).

Galileo. Oppenheimer.

I think those two examples are already enough to show that science has been political for 400 years.

In all seriousness, no, it shows that there were at least two cases of political science in the last 400 years, not that all science is.

I think there have been more, and it plays a role, but I don't buy that you can just dismiss the criticism of political science with the claim that it always is.

There are matters of degrees, and it's almost universally acknowledged to be bad, because it usually means results and emphasis have been distorted because of the politics.