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Comment by jdkee | Hacker News Reader

Reposting my comment from the E.O. Wilson thread from a couple of weeks ago,

"As a reader of the magazine for the past 35 years or so, Scientific American, the print publication, has devolved into what Popular Science was about 20 years ago. Sensationalist headlines, writing geared towards a much lower reading comprehension level and the introduction of politics and opinion in various articles. A sad state of affairs for a once great publication, unfortunately.

However, the mantle has been taken up by online publications such as Quanta, Aeon, Edge and Nautilus, as well as various science authors on Medium and Substack."

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Thanks for that list.

I really miss the quality content that Scientific American had in their issue from the 70s and 80s.

I spent hours and hours reading SA, PopSci, Omni and others at my library in the 80's. It was high quality content and much of it was highly detailed long-form writing.

I still remember my high school physics teacher literally used a scientific American special on quantum mechanics to explore the topic for a month. Really good

I definitely have been reading a lot more from alternative sources such as the ones you mentioned. I also would say that the democratization of journalism is really important today because of the politicization of so many institutions, including virtually all traditional media outlets like Scientific American. The threat to heterodox thinking isn’t especially new either - Quillette recently reposted an interview of E.O. Wilson from 2009 by Alice Dreger that feels prescient in its coverage of the social/political dynamics that we see continuing today and underpinning recent hit pieces written about Wilson (https://quillette.com/2021/12/29/speaking-with-e-o-wilson/).

> of journalism is really important today because of the politicization of so many institutions, including virtually all traditional media outlets like Scientific American.

Yes and no. Yes, many of these formerly prestigious publications have declined. No, they no longer qualify for the honor of being called journalists.

Words matter. We have to stop rewarding bad behaviour.

The SA article was terribly written and argued, but Wilson's own words in that interview greatly increased my sympathy for Wilson's critics who were suspicious of sociobiology. Wilson severely underplayed the connection between sociobiology and eugenics and Nazism that came before. "I'm just doing science" is a weak defense when the science is something so adjacent to what had just recently been used to murder 10million people.

You can and should be suspicious of any science. But you should not claim that science murdered 10 million people. A truly evil regime murdered those people.

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