First time in 175 years, Scientific American endorses a presidential candidate
scientificamerican.com
scientificamerican.com
The reason is that this act adds to the polarization of this country. It does nothing but add more hate to the world. It brings politics into an area of life which has previously been apolitical.
Worst of all it normalizes the idea that one political party is smart and rational, and another is stupid and illogical. Every time this idea is repeated, and this article will lead to the idea being repeated more, another swing voter who could go either way clings tighter to the Republican party.
Sure, it feels good to claim superiority in this manner, but it has the opposite effect from what was intended.
This seems like one of those bad faith argument that is just trying to muddle the water.
I think the entire point of their endorsement is that they are not saying anything about parties at all, but rather that a singular candidate is dangerous for reasons relevant to their purpose and readership.
But what is the corollary to Trump "rejects evidence and science"? It's that anyone who votes for Trump does the same thing.
You're right that they did not spell this out. But many people who hear the endorsement will immediately jump to that conclusion.
Naturally. In what reality would voting for a candidate not indicate at least some level of support for their platform, values, etc., and wanting to see more of it in government? That's quite literally what voting is designed to do.
Taking a position in favor of a candidate is not hate. Democracy is powered by civic engagement. People who professionally write bear a joint responsibility to be civic, to make cases, explain them.
And conversation here on HN is very restrained. When this news hits other social media, there will be more claims that Trump is stupid, Republicans are stupid, and any independent who is considering voting for a Republican is stupid.
So, yes, this article has unleashed a new wave of hatred in the world.
I have nothing against professional scientific writers writing a letter to the New York Times, or even writing an editorial there. In fact they should. I agree with you that it's good when they correct a specific claim with scientific evidence.
This is something else.
This is the whole Scientific American organization putting their stamp of approval on the idea that Republican voters are stupid.
> The group who names MSNBC as their main news source is far more likely than the Fox News group to answer correctly that the coronavirus originated in nature rather than a laboratory and that it will take a year or more for a vaccine to become available. On both questions, the portion in the CNN group to answer correctly falls between the MSNBC and Fox News numbers.
> About three-quarters (76 percent) of those who name Fox News as their main source are conservative Republicans and Republican leaners, while 57 percent who name MSNBC are liberal Democrats and Democratic leaners.
https://www.journalism.org/2020/04/01/cable-tv-and-covid-19-...
That hasn't been proven either way, and probably never will be.
And journalism.org's linked source is not scientific evidence, but rather a "Statement in support of the scientists, public health professionals, and medical professionals of China combatting COVID-19". I guess they mean "answer politically correctly".
I'm not going to accept a couple of downvoted outbursts as evidence of a problem. it's hard to guess who might leave such comments & whether they are even authentic. I'm not even going to judge a lot of these people even if they are authentic & being mean. I don't know what they have experienced & perhaps they have some good reasons to be so upset as to have become uncivil.
> So, yes, this article has unleashed a new wave of hatred in the world.
That you don't like how they feel & seem scared of it is not what civics is about.
You are right though, that mentioning this kind of deeply politicized mistreatment of science will stir anger in some people, often anger people already harbored. Perhaps some of that hate is due. Perhaps uncivil forces are acting with greed & profiteering, destroying earth's resources & legacy, plundering our shared inheritance.
I must have misunderstood what you meant.
Semi true. When both sides are engaging civically yes. If one side is acting partisanly or in bad faith, using demagoguery & deceit, civics is to call out the dis-ingenuousness & descent from reason.
> it pursues moderation and consensus.
Including moderation of bad actors & fanatics when necessary.
> Taking a position for or against a candidate (as in, not just e.g. a few policy positions from any given campaign) is the very opposite of actual, genuine civic engagement. reply
Obviously [insert explitives here]. Entirely bogus conclusion that in no way follows from some weak & very partial but slightly somewhat true origins.
Donald Trump is a single politician, and not the entire Republican Party. Having an opinion on one is not the same as calling an entire party stupid and illogical.
> the idea being repeated more, another swing voter who could go either way clings tighter to the Republican party.
If someone is a swing voter, and unsure which side to pick, why would reputable sources offering well reasoned advice lead them to cling tightly to the opposite (you said “tighter” here, which I assume was a typo, since you previously claimed they were a swing voter and so Therefore wouldn’t be clinging to either side yet).
I've read first hand accounts about what happened in Venezuela. About twenty years ago, Chavez turned a democracy into a dictatorship. How could this possibly happen?
Well, one ingredient was that the people who were against Chavez repeated over and over that the dictator was not logical.
In Venezuela, this type of argument did not persuade Chavez voters. It did the opposite. Chavez won and the country is now a dictatorship.
I see the same thing happening here. Trump supporters with a high school diploma are personally insulted when a bunch of PhD's get together and declare that their candidate is not scientific.
Fear actually gets voters off their couches and into the voting booth.
Logic gets people to nod their heads, but doesn't translate into actual votes.
“This was a mistake because they weren’t fear-mongery enough” is definitely an interesting take, though.
But I digress. My honest answer to what you're asking is:
The difference is that at this point in time, the staff of Scientific American is in a media bubble more than at any time in the past. They have lost touch with the common man. The man on the street who does not have a college degree. They don't realize how negatively that man is going to react to this endorsement.
That's honestly why I think they did it now, and not over the last 175 years.
FYI I also don't agree that it leads to "another swing voter who could go either say cling tighter to the Republican party." This kind of thinking is what leads to creating the false equivalence that both parties are relatively equal, which significantly benefits any party that acts in an extremely polarized and deceitful manner, since it can rely on the media to launder their actions to look roughly equivalent to the other party.
That's logical.
And yet, that's not the best course of action.
Sometimes, you have to go beyond logic, and take into account how others will react to your statements.
This is contrasted with policy-based evidence making, which is practiced exclusively by Trump's coterie of conmen, grifters, and swindlers.
It was flagged in no time despite being a thing that actually seems worthy of discussion even if one does not agree with either the decision to endorse someone at all or the choice of candidate.
Let's see if I can get the comment I wanted to write posted in here at least.
-Desmond Tutu
I suspect that question is as murky as it gets on almost every topic.
- Candidate A lies 95% of the time.
- Candidate B lies 5% of the time.
For the media to objectively/truthfully call out candidate A would be to act, inherently in a partisan, unequal manner. There's no way to both accurately report the difference between candidates A and B while also pursuing moderation and consensus.
This is essentially the dilemma faced by the media, and is why we're in this situation where despite the fact there is overwhelming evidence that the majority of what Trump says is a lie[1] - the media treat it as the truth, which is an enormous advantage to Trump (candidate A). A democratic system that relies on informed voters selecting their political representation breaks down when one candidate is allowed misinform voters, at will, by the media.
This is the same sort of situation with climate change, where the outlier scientific view (climate change denial) is given equal weight and validity in the media.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Veracity_of_statements_by_Dona...
I am sure we can and should discuss politics in objective terms. This is not about political parties, but about a single person.
Edit: My point is that 175 years ago the paper was run by other people. So to me it seems more likely that the people at this paper got more and more political over time until now that they fully endorse one candidate. It is fine to endorse one candidate, but talking as if this is a once in 175 year election is not honest.
Aside this, isn’t it so funny that more hyper connected we’ve become with 24/7 news, feeds, and social media etc, the more clueless we’ve become.
https://thehill.com/hilltv/what-americas-thinking/515198-pol...
That's not what that survey said:
> About two in three voters say they think it is likely that a significant number of people are not truthful when responding to political surveys, a new Hill-HarrisX poll finds.
It didn't ask if they lied, but if they thought other people lied. Maybe that's a proxy for figuring out if the polled person lied themselves, but that's not at all clear.
Even if the real number is 7% instead of 70% that could be enough to swing the election.
[..] Scientific American has never endorsed a presidential candidate in our 175-year history—until now.
The 2020 election is literally a matter of life and death. We urge you to vote for health, science and Joe Biden for President.[..]
The link below is a pretty awesome, counter intuitive use case of Bayes Therom that I saw which made me question statements like this. What the actual makeup of Scientific American's reader base is is probably lower than 50% but it isn't 0% either. That's a lot of wriggler room for me to be technically assertion that yeah, they probably didn't lose half of their reader base. But is it possible they lost 1/3, 1/5, 1/10? Those all affect the bottom line of a company like this in much different ways. I'd assume that the leaders made an educated decision, and weighed their pros/cons.
Also, just because you voted for Trump doesn't mean you'd unsubscribe to SA just because they endorsed the other candidate. What I'd like to read is some analysis that SA did on their readership base to determine how many people they'd lose based on this decision and then the results of their experiment. I mean what better way for a scientific journal to make a decision like this than to also follow their hypothesis up with some analysis.
I have nothing meaningful to contribute to whether or not they should/shouldn't have endorsed Biden, so I'll just say, it is not a zero consequence decision.
https://paulvanderlaken.com/2020/01/21/bayes-theorem-probabi...
Even if it causes a drop in subscriptions, it's a long vs short term result analysis. If Trump is reelected and civilization collapses because of it, the number of subscribers will be a relatively minor problem...
I understand voting Republican, but voting for him is hard to justify.
I personally don't believe this is a mistake, but the only problematic thing I can think of is that this might encourage Trumpers and Trumpworld to view science as a Democratic constituency, and thus withdraw their support for things like government science funding (thus making it more partisan and unreliable). However, that's probably already happened to a significant degree. Staying neutral towards someone who's already hostile to you is not a very tenable position.
See also Republicans and labor unions: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/09/06/opinion/labor-unions-repu...
> It is often forgotten that Eisenhower and many other Republicans used to support labor unions, if not always enthusiastically....
> It was Ronald Reagan, with his firing of 11,000 striking air traffic controllers, who sent the Republican Party’s relations with labor into a tailspin. Despite the party’s shift to the right under Reagan, there continued to be many pro-labor Republicans in Congress well into the 1990s, like Representatives Jack Quinn of New York and Bob Ney of Ohio. They often bucked party leaders, for instance, to support a higher minimum wage.
> The decisive break came in 1996 when Speaker Newt Gingrich was struggling to retain control of the House. With Gingrich openly hostile to unions, the A.F.L.-C.I.O. endorsed Democrats over many longtime G.O.P. allies.
> At the time, the A.F.L.-C.I.O.’s political director justified the move, saying, “Anybody who stands with Gingrich as often as they do is not standing with working people.” But the spurned Republicans said labor had turned its back on the G.O.P. That ended a 120-year stretch during which unions had always been able to maintain some level of bipartisan support.
Probably a fairly small overlap, but it almost certainly exists.
he's been <50% approval, >50% disapproval since January 21, 2017.
https://www.newsmax.com/politics/Trump-approvalrating-poll-t...
Who would pay money for a magazine subscription because of a political endorsement?
Maybe the editors just thought this was the right thing to do right now.
I don't trust the blue's candidate to wield the power of science properly and it will directly affect me. The blue candidate has said the he supports a nationwide lockdown "if the science supports it" as well as a nationwide mask mandate. I'm sure he has some science to back this up as well.
The red candidate wields science like a weapon but there's a difference: The actions of the red candidate do not affect me directly. The red candidate can say whatever he wants but day to day it doesn't change my life
On other hand the blue candidate has said he'll make me wear a mask and that he might make me stay in my apartment for weeks or months or years. That's not happening.
The red candidate's poor use of science doesn't affect me directly and I'm free to live my life (mostly) as I always have. The blue candidate's poor use of science may lock me in my apartment for weeks, months, or years.
With a stance like that the blue candidate has no chance at my vote.
However, the current red candidate is dangerous. I'll explain why. Someone who makes arbitrary decisions, can make any decision.
Even if they agree with your principals, and on the surface Mr. Red argues for Red policies (e.g. reducing illegal immigration), their actual implementation of it is atrocious (e.g. massive concentrations camps at the border, huge budget overruns, and tacit violations of civil liberties) and the results are poor in practice (e.g. fewer deportations than Mr. Blue who came before him).
A person who doesn't have consistent core beliefs, will always release an incoherent plan.
The Blue's may not see eye-to-eye with me, but at least their practices are understandable and can simply be rolled back in the next term.
Disclaimer: I may be biased, because shortly after taking office Mr. Red was photographed smiling next to a dictator who recently murdered a student in my alma mater university.
Coronavirus: Power resides with the states to institute lockdowns or not
https://www.usatoday.com/story/opinion/2020/04/20/coronaviru...