Scientific American's departing editor and the politicization of science | Hacker News Reader

Scientific American's departing editor and the politicization of science

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499 pointsBostonian994 comments

A book came out in August 2024 called "Soda Science: Making the World Safe for Coca-Cola," by Susan Greenhalgh. She's a professor (emeritus) at Harvard. The book is a history. It shows how the Coca-Cola Company turned to "science" when the company was beset by the obesity crisis of the 1990s and health advocates were calling for, among other things, soda taxes.

Coca-Cola "mobilized allies in academia to create a soda-defense science that would protect profits by advocating exercise, not dietary restraint, as the priority solution to obesity." It was a successful campaign and did particularly well in the Far East. "In China, this distorted science has left its mark not just on national obesity policies but on the apparatus for managing chronic disease generally."

Point being, the science that Coca-Cola propagated is entirely legitimate. But that science itself does not tell the whole, obvious truth, which is that there is certainly a correlation in a society between obesity rates and overall sugar-soda consumption rates. "Coke’s research isn’t fake science, Greenhalgh argues; it was real science, conducted by real and eminent scientists, but distorted by its aim."

"Trust the science" can thus be a dangerous call to arms. Here's the book, if anybody's interested. https://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/S/bo221451...

And this is exactly the problem we face now in so many aspects of life.

If cell phones or microwaves or a hundred other things were harmful we would not find out, because of all the lobbying and armies of scientists paid to find and publish a very narrow version of truth

> If cell phones or microwaves or a hundred other things were harmful we would not find out

While I agree that there may be things which have subtle but cumulatively harmful effects over time, the two specifics that you cited (cell phones and microwaves) are very poor examples because they've been deployed so broadly for so long, the chances there is some significant medical harm still undetected is vanishingly small.

Also, trial lawyers would rapidly become the wealthiest people on Earth if genuine, reproducible evidence of harm from non-ionizing radiation could be found.

If you thought the tobacco and silicone breast implant settlements were impressive...

just jump on the two examples instead of actually considering the point being made, i guess.

Think "leaded gasoline" if you need a concrete example

> trial lawyers would rapidly become the wealthiest people on Earth if genuine, reproducible evidence of harm from non-ionizing radiation could be found.

Probably not, as electronics manufacturers would quikly take that into consideration. Liability comes from both knowing and continuing.

Divorce lawyers are generally the most profitable. $750/hr if you’re good.

>cell phones

Well, as far as direct physical harms, yes, but as far as mental harms that translate to physical harms, the jury's still out:

'“Given that the increase in mental health issues was sharpest after 2011, Twenge believes it’s unlikely to be due to genetics or economic woes and more likely to be due to sudden cultural changes, such as shifts in how teens and young adults spend their time outside of work and school.'

https://www.apa.org/news/press/releases/2019/03/mental-healt...

> the chances there is some significant medical harm still undetected is vanishingly small

I don't think this statement is true.

Long-term effects can only be observed over the, well, long term which makes it hard to compare with the baseline. It was measured differently and with very different external factors. Then even if we do by chance manage to observe the harm today it could be very hard to identify the reason — we would see the factual result but neither the process nor the cause.

Take any unexplained health issue we have today, e.g. decline in male fertility estimated at 50% in western counties since 1970s, a dramatic change. Could it be microwaves? Well possibly, can't be ruled out at this point, among many other candidates. Furthermore, with the new research saying that 1) microwaving food in "microwave-safe" plastic containers releases huge number of microplastic particles into the food and 2) microplastic accumulates in testicles — it's not even a fringe science anymore but a normal theory to be studied and be proven or disproven.

Do we have any other health issues that increased over the past 50 years? Yes. What caused them, is it something recent that became popular in the past 50 years? Very likely, yes. Do we know it? Not yet.

It took us a very long time to figure out cigarettes. Or leaded fuel, even though we knew in advance that lead is poisonous.

> because they've been deployed so broadly for so long, the chances there is some significant medical harm still undetected is vanishingly small.

Cancer rates continue to rise, and will be well over 50% of all people in my lifetime.

There is no doubt our current world is making us very sick.

If you don't die of something else first, cancer is what will get you. Increased cancer rates are merely a side effect of improvements in other aspects of health and longevity.

That's part of it, but there legitimately has been a significant increase in cancer rates among younger people. There's something going on but we don't know whether it's radiation or food or something else.

That would be a good time to remind people that absence of evidence is not evidence of absence. Being skeptical does not mean embrace the conspiracy theory as probably true but not proven yet.

This is how propaganda works, you don't spread falsities and untruths, but change the mix of what signals get amplified.

This is how propaganda can still work. However, if a propagandist can get away with falsehoods, they will use those just as well.

The interesting/newer things start when propagandists have multiple outlets and can distribute a number of mutually incompatible falsehoods to different audiences.

Enhanced by algos that promote those falsehoods in a way that ensures widest possible spread

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/On_Bullshit

Disinformation is so much easier when truth is not a dimension you care about.

I wonder how much of this same kind of manipulation/distortion is going on when we are told to "trust the science" with regard to climate change? The pressure to ignore or minimise inconvenient facts would be overwhelming (career at stake situation).

what's the bellwether for climate change? Rising temperatures, rising CO2 concentrations?

There's strong evidence there actually isn't warming going on. The "warming trend" may be due to the temperature sensor locations. Originally the sensors were put in remote, rural, unpopulated and unused locations (ideally!). As communities grew... you understand that the sensors now are no longer rural, remote, unpopulated areas. What happens to the air in a city? If you're unsure, "urban heat island". This is extremely localized "weather" - the sort of thing that i've been yelled at "IS NOT CLIMATE".

I'm only going to link 1 thing here, because doing this sort of thing on my lifelong handle has never done me any favors:

> Research in Astronomy and Astrophysics, 23:105015 (20pp), 2023 October

> Challenges in the Detection and Attribution of Northern Hemisphere Surface Temperature Trends Since 1850

> https://doi.org/10.1088/1674-4527/acf18

Great example of what I was talking about!

I looked at the paper you referenced.

Interestingly, it does not say that the warming trend is not happening, rather they argue that the evidence is insufficient to say for sure if the warming is caused by human-driven causes or natural ones (e.g. volcanic activity or solar changes). They mention the heat island effect as one of the issues that may complicate the attribution of the contribution of different factors to the warming trend.

To quote from the paper:

“To summarize, by varying ST and/or TSI choice and/or the attribution approach used, it is possible to conclude anything from the long-term warming being "mostly natural" to "mostly anthropogenic" or anything in between. While each of us has our own scientific opinions on which of these choices are most realistic, we are concerned by the wide range of scientifically plausible, yet mutually contradictory, conclusions that can still be drawn from the data.”

okay, and whats your point? The point is "97%" or "99%" of "climate scientists agree" that "anthropogenic causes" are the reason for climate change. But this study questions the foundations (and i mentioned i am only linking one, that i downloaded a few weeks ago to save, there are of course other papers that each chip away at the political and media narrative about the whole field). Please refer to the GP:

> I wonder how much of this same kind of manipulation/distortion is going on when we are told to "trust the science" with regard to climate change?

"climate science" is all models, this paper (among others) implies that the data fed in to the models may be influencing the output of the models in a way that isn't conducive to actually understanding the "climate". How can i make this assertion? I read the IPCC reports. both the pre-release and the official releases. I don't recommend it, unless you feel like being Cassandra.

You're not sufficiently parsing causality versus predictivity. The global warming hypothesis matches the projections. So it's a food enough model. The causal attribution does take time, but recall we can estimate the global greenhouse emissions with reasonable accuracy and can compare to benchmarks in history.

Push all we want against the sun, it continues to shine regardless of our efforts.

global warming hypothesis! Have you seen the temperature graph for earth's history? Judd et al., Science 385, 1316 (2024)

It's actually remarkably cold on earth, colder than it's been in over 450mm years. but if you look at the graph, it's not a diagonal or straight line, it goes up and down over millions of years.

so, with these two facts: Will it get warmer or colder?

Knowing that, why do i have to listen to this claptrap?

The core of the concern about climate change is what it’s going to do to human society. Nobody gives a shit what the climate looked like a million years ago - complex human society reliant on large scale agriculture didn’t exist a million years ago, and that’s all we care about. We worry about droughts because they affect our crops and cause famines, we worry about heat waves because they kill our people and livestock, we worry about sea level rise because it damages our cities, we worry about hurricanes of increasing intensity because they kill people and damage our cities. We don’t give a shit if we’re in a relatively cool period in earth’s history or if the whole thing will shift in a hundred thousand years because that’s totally fucking irrelevant to what’s going to happen in the next hundred years and how we’re going to adapt our cities, crops, and cultures to it, because that’s what actually matters to us, because we’re actual living people in a complex society and we’d like to stay that way on both counts.

Ok, arctic sea ice.

Ice exists at temperature below 0C or 32F at 1atm AND at system energy levels below the enthalpy of melting for liquid water, or latent heat for this first order phase change.

Thermodynamics uses temperature and pressure to explain system energy of molecules for liquid vapor solid phase systems. Latent heat is the esoteric part of this phenomenon because it requires a scientific education to understand calculus and work. Understandably, everyone can grasp temperature.

I think your comment is a perfect example of misdirection and people using “data driven methods” to attack a “first principles” explanation of physical phenomena.

Here’s a link because that gives my idea more weight.

https://earth.gsfc.nasa.gov/cryo/data/current-state-sea-ice-...

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arctic_sea_ice_decline

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-022-05686-x

https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.adj8469

Computer people talk about scientific methods and their “home lab” stuff, ai and inherent structure of data then absolutely fall for the facebook-grade-misinformation arguments to not trust something that is too mainstream. Jfc

you mean the sea ice, that had the highest extent in 20 years this year? Or a different sea ice, perhaps the one they always trot out around January? you know, when it's summer in the southern hemisphere?

The sea ice data isn't 1:1 with the seasons, so "data scientists" and "climate scientists" pick the cutoff date that makes the best headline. Even this year they were saying the ice was lower than average, but they cutoff 3+ weeks early, the ice was above average a few weeks later.

https://usicecenter.gov/PressRelease/ArcticMaximum2024

Besides all this, i am unsure if you're supportive or not of what i said.

I admit data collection is imperfect, especially looking back 200 years. But to attack a fairly sound hypothesis that is multi factorially demonstrated in physical geological behavior, I wholeheartedly disagree with.

Just because US weather stations in the 70’s were more rural than urban does not in itself gives credence to the idea that climate change/warming/ greenhouse gases is a nonissue or somehow a totally misunderstood non-warming phenomenon. Even a climate that tended to one mean value zero standard deviation throughout the year would be devastating coming from our current temporal and geographical distribution.

Your point about weather stations is a technical detail in data collection while there are several other corroborating methods indicating a warming ocean and atmosphere, albeit not geographically uniformly distributed. But you have this gotcha fact about weather stations ambient baseline temp vs some platonic ideal temp that reflects what’s going on in the abstract notion of a climate.

The sea ice has satellite photo analysis (area) dating to 70’s or 80’s with daily or weekly granularity.

I cannot convince a climate change denier or skeptic but am leaving that comment and this one hoping that observers don’t just take your initial counter-fact to be a valid falsifying argument.

As everyone says weather is not the climate, spurious yearly data do not nullify long form trends, and I’d just look at low pass filtered or line fit or yearly average of granular image data to argue that there is a time localize trend since the 80’s consistent with a warming ocean.

I disagree with you I think you used logical fallacies to misdirect and cause skepticism about something that is fairly corroborated and the debate needs to focus on mitigation or investment or policy changes.

Edit I shouldn’t have used word geological bit meant ‘worldwide’

> you mean the sea ice, that had the highest extent in 20 years this year?

Your link says it's "the seventh highest recorded since 2006 when this metric from IMS was first tracked consistently". Where are you getting "highest extent in 20 years"?

This is cherry-picking. There is a raft of solid science from a large number of independent researchers looking at many different indicators that corroborate well with each other. The evidence is overwhelming, global warming is happening. Picking one thing that says we haven't always gotten it 100% right doesn't mean it isn't happening.

all the models that they use as evidence use the temperature sensor data so i am not sure what you're trying to convince me of. Also: Judd et al., Science 385, 1316 (2024)

I have yet to see a convincing motivation for doing something like that. There's more money to be made in denying climate change it seems, so what's the driving factor then?

Since climate change is a very popular topic, so popular that a person's belief or non belief in it will cause people on the other side to strike them down without hesitation... There's power, community, and social acceptance to drive people.

The downvotes to the above comment's parent comment prove my point.

That's completely correct and valid but also in order to see this as a problem one has to presume that that the belief in it, or anything else you might care to put in it's place, is itself flawed. I don't believe in climate change because it's beneficial or not beneficial: I have read numerous things on the subject, all of which paint a consistent, reproducible, and relatable-to-my-life situation which happens to be about a decades-long propaganda campaign on the part of the fossil fuel industry to downplay the harms their products were doing to our atmosphere since the goddamn 1950's, one that, as the parent says, happens to make them shitloads of money. Just like leaded gasoline did. Just like cigarettes did, which led the tobacco industry to do similar things previously until they were outlawed in the developed world, which has caused them to simply shift focus to developing countries where they're now poisoning a whole new generation of people.

I'm highly skeptical of folks who take issue with something like "trust the science" because, while I fully cosign that as a slogan it's lacking and one doesn't "trust" science so much as learn about it and see if it holds up, the sort of people who say things like that invariably follow up with something like questioning climate change, or questioning the handling of the COVID pandemic. And that's not to say that there weren't mistakes made, we made a shitload of them, but too many bad actors in that space will take legitimate problems with the response to COVID and use that to launch into things like saying vaccines cause autism or are a plot on the part of China to kill all the white people, or other such ridiculous fuckin nonsense.

And maybe that's wrong of me to assume, but also if you consistently find yourself on the same side of a debate as the worst people imaginable, maybe that's something you should sit with and figure out how you feel about it, and if it points to you possibly being skeptical about the wrong things.

I would also put forward that something I've observed as we've gotten further and further into the social media age is the conflation between skepticism and ignorance, which are different things, and people who are doing the second thing will reliably say they are doing the former. To be skeptical is not a bad thing, even an uninformed skeptic like a member of the general public is fully capable of being at least somewhat informed, vetting sources, and coming to reasonably accurate conclusions without a formal education, however, it is also extremely, trivially easy for a layman to find stuff that corroborates whatever they think is already the truth, stated in professional-looking formats, that looks like science but just isn't credible or worthy of being taken seriously, and then go "look, see, I found this thing. I'm right!" If you find one, single academic, who has an entire rest-of-their-discipline shouting at them about how wrong they are, which is more likely: that you found one truth teller in a sea of liars, or that you found one liar?

To the downvoters (and ToucanLoucan), I never claimed what I believed in, and you don't have enough information to know anything about it. I'll continue to neither confirm nor deny my stance, for the point Im making is IMO an important one. Can you walk away from this conversation with your eye opened to how your belief is driving you to strike? [0]

Here's a near-equivalent real world example: Alzheimer's research has been led in the wrong direction for decades, due to people chasing after power. [1]

[0] >And maybe that's wrong of me to assume, but also if you consistently find yourself on the same side of a debate as the worst people imaginable, maybe that's something you should sit with and figure out how you feel about it, and if it points to you possibly being skeptical about the wrong things.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eliezer_Masliah

> To the downvoters (and ToucanLoucan), I never claimed what I believed in, and you don't have enough information to know anything about it.

I didn't say anything about your beliefs. I said other people who say similar things believe these things, and when people say things like them, I tend to assume they're about to drop anti-vax nonsense. That's not an accusation, it's the statement of an observed correlation.

> I'll continue to neither confirm nor deny my stance, for the point Im making is IMO an important one.

I mean, again, I wasn't referencing your specific beliefs so I don't really care if you confirm them or not. But I would also say, again as a statement of a correlation not an accusation against you, that the people who espouse the anti-science sentiments I've been discussing also will refuse to lay down specific confirmations of their beliefs, as part of a larger "just asking questions" fallacious argument, in which they take the position of an unconvinced centrist but consistently espouse "questions" that favor one side of it.

Again, to be clear, not accusing, merely observing. You may indeed be someone who is genuinely just asking questions, the problem is a whole lot of shitty people out there corroborate that position to advance bunk. And assuming you're being truthful, which I have no reason to assume you aren't, for that you have my sympathies.

> ere's a near-equivalent real world example: Alzheimer's research has been led in the wrong direction for decades, due to people chasing after power. [1]

Well sure. Science isn't perfect, it's only as good as the people who are doing it. It's the same way that basically every anti-vax sentiment, measure, study, etc. that you can find leads in one way or another back to former-doctor Andrew Wakefield and his junk study about vaccines and autism from back in the 90's. There are still medical practitioners who believe he was correct, there are multiple organizations that are built off of his research who oppose vaccines, we've had numerous outbreaks of various preventable diseases because of vaccine hesitancy. This shit has real consequences.

However, it's worth noting that both that story and the one you're referencing are notable because on the whole, most of the time, science does get it right, and more importantly, if it gets it wrong but it is being done honestly, it is also self correcting.

If you publish new evidence in favour of a popular theory, your paper gets published – sometimes in a prestigious journal. Whereas if you demonstrate compelling evidence overturning a high-profile scientific dogma of international import, you… *checks notes* win the Nobel Prize in Physics. Hm.

Maybe the Nobel Committee is in on… no, that'd only affect whether they awarded the prize, not whether people expect them to. They must be suppressing the evidence at the source: the instruments themselves. … No, they'd have to alter everything, and there's no way they got to my weather station. Maybe there's some way to remotely manipulate all the weather station reading at once? Think, what do all the weather stations have in common?

I've got it! They're doing something to the atmosphere, to make it seem like there's anthropogenic climate change, and trick all the scientists into publishing studies showing that it's real and happening, but actually it's just people altering the chemical composition of the atmosphere en-masse for unspecified nefarious reasons, likely personal profit. Or, maybe it's a byproduct of some industrial process, that they don't want us to know about. I bet that's what chemtrails are.

>If you publish new evidence in favour of a popular theory, your paper gets published – sometimes in a prestigious journal. Whereas if you demonstrate compelling evidence overturning a high-profile scientific dogma of international import, you… checks notes win the Nobel Prize in Physics. Hm.

The last time a Nobel Prize was awarded to someone overturning a long-held charged dogma was in 2005 when Barry J. Marshall and J. Robin Warren won the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine. They demonstrated that Helicobacter pylori bacteria, not stress or excess stomach acid, were the primary cause of peptic ulcers.

Whereas the inverse--suppression of findings that invalidated long-held scientific dogmas--are numerous throughout the last 150 years. Stegener faced ridicule and suppression for continental drift. So did Semmelweiss for germ theory. And Mendelian inheritance. And Lemaître's expanding universe. And Prusiner's prion theory. And Margulis's endosymbiotic theory. And horizontal gene transfer.

Beyond Marshall and Warren, Prusiner was the only one to receive a Nobel for their findings and that was fifteen years after consensus had emerged from below.

And in the case of Marshall and Warren, the findings of a bacterial origin of ulcers had been published in 1906, 1913, 1919, 1925, 1939, 1951, 1955, 1958, 1964, 1971, 1982, and 1983. With this 1983 paper being authored by... Marshall and Warren. They will not receive a Nobel Prize for their findings for another 22 years.

Science is moved forward in spite of dogmatic consensus, not because of it.

Here, let me drop this mic for you

And a fun addendum: In the mid-1990s the patents expired on the vast majority of acid-reducing drugs which were, as you can probably guess, the first line "treatment" for PUD over antibiotics.

I have grown grumpier as the last decade has gone on and it is probably me just getting older but there is a point where you say enough is enough. You are starting with the premise that researchers are manipulating things and ignoring things so you have already 'won' by bringing doubt where there isn't any. 'I wonder how much of horrible terrible evil conspiratorial thing x is happening...' isn't a discussion opener, it is a statement that a thing is happening and now we just need to find out how much of that thing is happening. This is a terrible 'discussion' point and it needs to be called out, and stopped.

That's a good point. I tend to stay away from negative thinking about hot topics like this for that very reason. Even though I have my doubts about something, I tend to keep it to myself because I don't want to bring people down and anyway someone might come up with a way to look at, or take action in a positive light.

But I still feel its important for people to act from their own values, right or wrong, and not from a "hey trust the science" mentality which reminds me of majority thinking. Just because a lot of people have come to the conclusion that the science is sound, it doesn't make them right. There are plenty of situations where decided by majority viewpoints have been wrong.

Science done well is distrustful of its own results. The key is to trust science practiced by trustworthy institutions and individuals and reported on in an accurate and informative way. Similar to good journalism, trust should be earned and verified at every level. Not every time, that isn't reasonable, but enough that you aren't surprised at what you find when you do additional checking. Check sources. Look for conflicts of interest. Survey the field. These are all basic things that people think they do but often don't.

I'll also say that that 'I don't trust science' implies that the scientific method is somehow corrupt. The scientific method is a thing that can be used well or badly. 'I don't trust science' is like saying 'I don't trust statistics'. The wrong person can use out of context science, done well, to imply totally absurd things.

If you want to deny climate change you have to deny basic physics and chemistry, that's the problem with what you are saying.

Either you need to somehow show we've gotten the molecular properties of Carbon Dioxide wrong so that it doesn't absorb the wavelengths of light we think it does, or you need to show that we've gotten basic chemistry wrong, and that the reactions involving hydrocarbons and oxygen do not produce carbon dioxide.

These are all very basic things and have been known for about two hundred years. It was even possible, well over a century ago, to reason from these basic principles and conclude that mass burning of fossil fuels would result in a global temperature rise.

It just basic science, and if you want to deny it, you have to deny almost all of modern physics.

There are few slogans I hate more than "trust the science", primarily because it aligns scientific results with faith, which is exactly what science is not about. Science is fundamentally about skepticism, not trust.

Now, obviously that skepticism can be misused by some rando with no qualifications or even time spent researching telling you to be "skeptical" of people who have spent decades trying to figure shit out. What I really believe we should be teaching people is "what are the incentives?". That is, it's become very clear that many people are susceptible to provably false information, so we should train people to try to examine what incentives someone has for speaking out in the first place (and that includes scientists, too).

This is why I hate most conspiracy theories - even if you take everything the conspiracy supposes at face value, conspiracists don't explain how their conspiracy is somehow kept so secret when tons of people involved would have extremely strong incentives to expose it.

> This is why I hate most conspiracy theories - even if you take everything the conspiracy supposes at face value, conspiracists don't explain how their conspiracy is somehow kept so secret when tons of people involved would have extremely strong incentives to expose it.

I think the problem with this idea is that thinking can be corrupted by emotional bias. Ideologies and power differentials(People with powerful incentives to control narratives) can have a lasting effect on perception, when you pair this with modern media, it can create a cascade effect that can drown out the truth. The psychology of group-think also plays a part in this as well. Its a very complicated topic and your conclusion is one small part of the puzzle.

There is this great YouTube [0] video that describes this problem perfectly in my book. They interviewed people with some data that was math based and what they found is people would skew there own thinking to support there own political ideologies. This can be used against the population to create perceptions that don't line up with facts.

[0]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zB_OApdxcno

For example, it is too tired to prove mitochondria generate energy.

Unlike what you say, I think the real issue is people who have been studying something for a long time still being wrong about a subject. It’s not uncommon in any human endeavour. You can go to the gym for 20 years and never make any gains. You can also play badminton for 20 years without ever learning some essential strokes. You can study any subject without learning, it’s the default setting actually.

This becomes problematic since low quality experience is easily used to make arguments from authority with very high confidence.

I think this related to the “critical thinking” skill that all my teachers always stressed about growing up.

But I still don’t know how to put in useful words what “critical thinking” is because it’s not one thing.

It requires synthesizing a lot of information together in very specific and meticulous ways. And through feedback, collecting your previous thoughts and keeping track of how often you are correct or incorrect.

You can explain critical thinking in many ways but none of it will teach someone critical thinking.

I think of Critical Thinking as a closed loop process that aligns a person's mental model of the world with reality. It is just using the scientific method to analyze information in daily life. When done correctly and consistently it is like a really good spam filter against lies and bullshit.

The real trick is that critical thinking is almost always being critical with someone that's trying to mislead you.

Many people try to do it with many different methods. So you're right it's not one thing. Also nobody will teach you all the techniques because they're keeping theirs secret.

Everybody lies.

> Also nobody will teach you all the techniques because they're keeping theirs secret.

Sounds more like people who like to use propaganda who keep their methods in shadows (not always, though). I try to teach critical thinking all the time. I bet you do too. Do you not try to inform loved ones how detect spam or scams? How to evaluate what's true in their inbox or on a webpage? Do you have anything to withhold in such a scenario?

I go with critical thinking being thinking about thinking, or meta thinking. Which is to say have a thought, doesn’t really matter what, and then analyse it. Example is throw a dart at the board and then evaluate it compared to your expectations and desires. Feel free to throw a bullseye right away but that’s a different thing. Which is to say, imo, that critical thinking isn’t about being perfect all the time.

Critical thinking is one thing but that "thing" is a process rather than an individual item. Critical thinking, like science, is a process that iterates upon itself. You analyze the information you have and make a conclusion based on that information. The "critical" part comes in when you take a step back and then use that same process to analyze your conclusion and poke holes in it, checking to see if the information you have supports that hole or supports the conclusion.

It's like saying that a computer is one thing despite the fact that the one thing is made up of multiple pieces.

This is kind of why I get annoyed at the "facts don't care about your feelings!!!" crowd.

Sure, the raw facts don't care about your feelings, but the way that these facts are interpreted and presented absolutely do care. Two people can look at the exact same data and draw widely different but comparably accurate conclusions out of it.

Using your Coke example, the raw fact that "exercise is good for reducing obesity" is broadly true and not really disputed by anyone as far as I'm aware, but the interpretation of "exercise alone can be a solution to obesity" or "how much exercise vs how much diet restriction is a solution to obesity" is subject to interpretation and biases.

Perhaps not disputed, but exercise’s effect is probably overestimated, and thus, damage was done. https://youtu.be/vSSkDos2hzo?si=3U2UxQOa_ZgdmT37

Exactly. If your objective is to control your weight, changing your diet has probably 5x to 10x more impact than changing your physical activity.

Why is it that people can't wrap their head around the "Facts don't care about your feelings." slogan? I don't agree with everything that movement says, but that slogan means exactly what it's saying; the problem is what everyone like yourself adds to it. What you are adding has originated and lives in your mind, and you project it onto something that has nothing to do with your thought that you are projecting.

The slogan is directed at fragile liberals who would rather yell like a toddler at a town hall meeting than have an informed discussion centered around facts. You can try and broaden that statement all you want to pull in other topics, but that slogan says nothing about having a disregard for how facts are interpreted OR presented.

It goes without saying that facts can be subject to multiple interpretations. I think people need to be more honest about what you're really saying: you don't like conservatives and you distorted a basic phrase as you gaslit a group of people and accused that group of doing what you yourself just did.

I am saying that the statement “facts don’t care about your feelings” is a useless statement and it doesn’t make people who say it seem smart. People who say the slogan seemingly universally seem to think it makes them very smart. It doesn’t convey any information to anyone, all it is used for is for morons like Ben Shapiro to automatically dismiss people for being emotional.

You’re right, I don’t like conservatives very much, but I have seen left leaning people fetishizing stoicism and I think those people are dumb too.

ETA:

Also, slightly confused how I “gaslit” anyone. You can go through my post history and I am generally pretty happy to acknowledge I don’t like conservatives very much.

It didn’t take much prodding to make you show your entire hand. Might be time to look inwards.

Sorry, I think I'm missing something? I don't feel like any of my opinions were secret on pretty much anything?

Not the person you replied to, but what? The person you accused of being tricked into showing "their entire hand" was unashamed about their position and didn't try to hide it.

The difference in tone between their former and latter messages is obvious.

They went from a passive aggressive “I don’t understand this idiom” straight to an unhinged tirade of “conservatives are morons” without much provocation.

Of course you share that sentiment, like the overwhelming majority of people on this very left leaning message board, but I still find it funny when it comes out so explicitly.

I didn't say that I "didn't understand it", I said I get annoyed with it because I think it's a stupid statement. I stand by that.

"Unhinged tirade" seems like a bit stretch. I called Ben Shapiro a moron, a statement I also stand by, then I said that I don't like conservatives very much, which I also stand by, and that left-leaning people who fetishize stoicism are also dumb, so it's not really just about conservatives.

I'm genuinely confused how you got "conservatives are morons" out of that. Yes, Ben Shapiro is a moron, but I also called left-leaning people dumb.

What I'm trying to get at, and what you seem desperate to dismiss out of some strange partisanship, is that I think it's really dumb to dismiss emotions as part of an argument. I don't really care if it's a lefty or a conservative or a libertarian or communist or anything else I'm missing; emotions are important, and pretending that you're somehow "above" feeling emotional about a subject doesn't make you smart.

> They went from a passive aggressive “I don’t understand this idiom” straight to an unhinged tirade of “conservatives are morons” without much provocation.

They never said that. Ironically, this is a perfect case of "facts don't care about your feelings" - even though you're upset, it doesn't change the fact that they never said that. It seems like your comments about needing self-reflection and complaining about "gaslighting" actually apply towards you instead.

Edit: regardless, this whole comment subthread is a useless waste of time and only serves as an airing of irrelevant grievances.

Of course concealing one’s true intent just enough to be able to later play dumb and deny motivations when called out is a decent strategy for online arguments, but it’s not foolproof.

Deciphering the commenter’s true meaning wasn’t super hard in this case. From claiming that a highly intelligent conservative pundit is a moron it’s easy to deduce that the person thinks less intelligent conservatives are also morons. They also explicitly said they “don’t like conservatives” which is a pretty silly statement to throw out there in general.

It’s also painfully obvious that the poster doesn’t understand the idiom “facts don’t care about your feelings” from them having now tripled down on trying to explain it or those who use it unsuccessfully.

The idiom’s intended message is as simple as it seems. It says that getting emotional about facts doesn’t change them. It’s not some deeply profound thing to say.

They didn't play dumb.

The "true meaning" you're finding is not accurate.

And they're talking about how the idiom actually gets used in practice.

> Of course concealing one’s true intent just enough to be able to later play dumb and deny motivations when called out is a decent strategy for online arguments, but it’s not foolproof.

I don't see how I "played dumb". I obviously know how to parse a sentence, and in the original comment that you're deliberately misreading, I said "raw facts don't care about your feelings", and then I explain that most discussions aren't really about raw facts but rather how they're interpreted.

> Deciphering the commenter’s true meaning wasn’t super hard in this case. From claiming that a highly intelligent conservative pundit is a moron it’s easy to deduce that the person thinks less intelligent conservatives are also morons.

How exactly is Ben Shapiro "highly intelligent"? Because he went to an Ivy League school? I can promise you that there's almost certainly a politician that you think is stupid that went to an Ivy League school, this isn't exactly a strong filter. Oh, is it because he talks really fast? I do that too, I guess I'm highly intelligent.

I don't think all conservatives are morons, and I don't think conservatives have a monopoly on being morons. I think the considerably-more-left-leaning The Young Turks, for example, are also pretty dumb. I have stated this multiple times now, and the fact that you're not responding to me directly is telling: I think pretending that you're somehow "above" your emotions is stupid. I think fetishizing the idea of divorcing "reason" from "emotion" is a dumb, even if I believed it were actually possible, which I'm not sure I do.

> They also explicitly said they “don’t like conservatives” which is a pretty silly statement to throw out there in general.

It's actually not silly to not like someone for their beliefs. That's dumb, of course if someone believes in something that I think is bad then I'm probably not going to like them very much. I don't really need to go into specifics for this, there's a lot of rhetoric that has caught on in conservative circles that I think is bad. You're obviously free to disagree with what statements are "bad" and that's fine; I'm sure there's rhetoric in more liberal circles that you think is bad.

People are entitled to free speech and to believe whatever they want, I wouldn't take that away from them even if I could, but they're not entitled to me liking them in spite of their beliefs. Life is much easier when you realize that you don't have to be everyone's friend.

> The idiom’s intended message is as simple as it seems. It says that getting emotional about facts doesn’t change them. It’s not some deeply profound thing to say.

I actually pointed this out in the original comment, and I'm arguing that that's not how the idiom is actually used. When I've seen it used (and admittedly I've obviously not seen every argument in which it is), it's always been used as some sort of "gotcha!" to act like an argument is less valid because the person making it is emotional.

> The slogan is directed at fragile liberals who would rather yell like a toddler at a town hall meeting than have an informed discussion centered around facts.

Who created chaos at school board meetings with yelling about trans kids and history books over the last couple of years? I have yet to hear anyone who isn't on the Right freak out about "what they're teaching our kids" the way that conservatives do.

Conservatives also like pretending to be offended by the term "Happy Holidays" every year.

A sizable chunk of “banned” books were sexually inappropriate for school, and some even promoted pedophilia, so I have some serious concerns if you disagree with their removal.

I'm sure some of those banned books are reasonable to be banned, though I do find it amusing that the people promoting these book bans are simultaneously insisting on putting the Bible in the classroom, a book that has a passage about a woman fantasizing about donkey dicks and horse cum. That's not a joke: https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Ezekiel%2023%3A...

If there's actually a book in that list that promotes pedophilia, it probably should be banned; which book are you referring to?

She was not fantasizing about bestiality, it very clearly states she “lusted after her paramours”. Paramours being adulterous lovers. And, if you even skimmed the rest of Ezekiel 23, you’d know it was describing her being a prostitute to many, many men. I will concede that this chapter, and the Jewish scriptures in general, tend to be rather excessive and would not be where I would start my children for Biblical teaching.

What list are you referring to? Perhaps I missed something, but I don’t see a list of banned books. However, regarding books promoting pedophilia, the worst example I am aware of (that isn’t Lolita, which I feel is a cop-out) is The Bluest Eye. I won’t link directly to the passage, however searching “Passages Challenged Bluest Eye” should lead you to a website with excerpts. They have not just one, but two characters who prey on the main character, and she is assaulted twice by her father in unnecessarily graphic scenes.

I know she wasn't fantasizing about bestiality, but she is still fantasizing about guys with dicks as large as donkeys and cumshots as large as horses; sorry if I didn't make that clear.

Regardless, most of the old testament is pretty child-unfriendly. Lots of passages about rape and violence with extremely questionable morality (including unambiguous endorsement of genocide), and I do not think it has any place in a classroom, even if we disregard separation of church and state (which we shouldn't).

I didn't mean a literal "list", though I realize it was bad wording on my part.

"Unnecessarily graphic" doesn't imply "promotes". I haven't read the book, and it might not be appropriate for a school library, but your description here doesn't seem to indicate that it's promoting pedophilia.

The point that this is too graphic for children stands, but this is a metaphor for Samaria and Jerusalem. This is stated explicitly in the text.

Sure, I just was giving it as an example because I think it's a pretty funny bible verse out of context, and even a little funny in-context.

Still, the old testament in particular has pretty much every single theme that parents clutch their pearls at; Lot has incestuous sex with his daughters (and it's decidedly not condemned) [1], a man murdering his daughter because she's the first person to enter his house [2], prostitutes getting murdered, butchered, and mailed to her suitors [2].

If the old were accurately made into a movie, it would be right next to Se7en or Saw in categorization, certainly not appropriate for children.

I know that this stuff is probably wrapped in layers of metaphor and social context, that's fair enough, but I don't know why similar charity isn't awarded to books that aren't the bible.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lot_(biblical_person)

[2] https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Judges+11&versi...

[3] https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Judges+19&versi...

> but I don't know why similar charity isn't awarded to books that aren't the bible.

I‘m not sure what you‘re saying here, as the Bible is almost nationally “banned” from public school libraries due to the belief that so much as including it in a library is a literal violation of our country’s founding principles. If you mean why do parents who request books to be “banned” typically give charity to the Bible, while not giving the “banned” books the same charity, then in major part it’s because they are incomparable. The Bible is the book that has led us to where we are today; it led men to found nations, find unity with their fellows, and strive to create a better world. It is a book that has survived and thrived for over 2000 years, and is possibly as old as 8000 years. Additionally, if we wish to be less charitable, then it is because the Bible is the cornerstone of their worldview, just as many who decry “bans” find said books to be cornerstones of their worldview.

Finally, the majority of children are NOT exposed to the sections of the Old Testament you are quoting, or they have been redone (see Veggietales), and most parents, many who would request certain books be “banned”, would agree that those stories are not appropriate for children. The majority of biblical education is focused on the New Testament, which is historical and lacks many of the “colorful” descriptions that the Old Testament typically provides.

I was referring more specifically to the recent stuff in Oklahoma where they want to mandate that a Bible be placed in every public classroom. Constitutionality be dammed.

I might disagree with some of the finer points you laid out but I think I am more or less in broad agreement with what you said.

Intentionally leaving out important or key information is still lying and deception, and is harmful, and can be really harmful if it's a big thing, even in cases when it's done with good intentions.

"Trust the science" was also a propaganda campaign.

What they meant was "Don't question our data or our decisions".

Science isn't trusted, it's understood and practiced. Not everyone has enough scientific literacy to understand the difference between being data driven and hypothesis driven, even if they intuit parts of it on a daily basis.

We can easily be misled by data, but when we make decisions by evaluating the probability that any hypothesis is true conditioned on evidence supported by openly collected and evaluated data, we're much closer to doing science.

Glad that this can be openly said nowadays.

The tide seems to be turning, indeed.

If you run 200 studies trying to show nonsense that protects your industry, and you set a statistical significance level of p>0.05 in seeking statistical correlation, you will find 10 studies that achieve statistical significance without fudging any numbers. Then you will announce that an exhaustive meta-analysis of ten studies supports your contentions about your profitable activity.

You cannot entirely separate intention from the merit of the science. Those 200 studies are an elaborate propaganda campaign, and they always were, each and every one of them, regardless of the fact that they had an internal logic.

Scientists should react with violent disgust and ostracism at clear attempts to attain a specific result without a lot of very explicit framing (eg: pre-announcing, announcing the other 190 studies, having a third party independently replicate the 10, etc), but they can't, because this sort of industrial campaign is funding such a huge percent of scientific research.

The NSF is doling out 9 billion dollars a year to run at least semi-objective science, and if this was 90 billion or 900 billion, things would be quite a bit different, and motivated "research" would not have the same place. We are dramatically over-supplied on researchers, to the point that a lot of them are making sub-minimum wage working as adjuncts, postdocs, "grad students", baristas. We built a system of university research that is the envy of the world, that exports knowledge and culture en masse, and we're not using it for more than 0.03% of GDP because some Congressperson has a poster of researchers "Spent $1.5M studying the mating habits of fruit flies, like some kind of pervert", and because Reagan hated government and wanted Coca-Cola to do our science for us.

I want to be sympathetic to Singal, whose writing always seems to generate shitstorms disproportionate to anything he's actually saying, and whose premise in this piece I tend to agree with (as someone whose politics largely line up with those of the outgoing editor in chief, I've found a lot of what SciAm has posted to be cringe-worthy and destructive).

But what is he on about here?

Or that the normal distribution—a vital and basic statistical concept—is inherently suspect? No, really: Three days after the legendary biologist and author E.O. Wilson died, SciAm published a surreal hit piece about him in which the author lamented "his dangerous ideas on what factors influence human behavior."

(a) The (marked!) editorial is in no way a refutation of the concept of the normal distribution.

(b) It's written by a currently-publishing tenured life sciences professor (though, clearly, not one of the ones Singal would have chosen --- or, to be fair, me, though it's not hard for me to get over that and confirm that she's familiar with basic statistics).

(c) There's absolutely nothing "surreal" about taking Wilson to task for his support of scientific racism; multiple headline stories have been written about it, in particular his relationship with John Philippe Rushton, the discredited late head of the Pioneer Fund.

It's one thing for Singal to have culturally heterodox† views on unsettled trans science and policy issues††, another for him to dip his toes into HBD-ism. Sorry, dude, there's a dark stain on Wilson's career. Trying to sneak that past the reader, as if it was knee-jerk wokeism, sabotages the credibility of your own piece.

Again, the rest of this piece, sure. Maybe he's right. The Jedi thing in particular: major ugh. But I don't want to have to check all of his references, and it appears that one needs to.

† term used advisedly

†† this is what Singal is principally known for

Agreed fully on the JEDI stuff. I was somewhat hoping it was from an April first issue. That was bad.

And I thought I recognized the name. I really do not understand how trans debate has come to dominate some online discourse.

I thought the complaint on the normal distribution was supposed to be claims that many things are not normally distributed? Which, isn't wrong, but is a misguided reason to not use the distribution?

> And I thought I recognized the name. I really do not understand how trans debate has come to dominate some online discourse.

Much of it is pushback against widespread ideological capture, and in particular the authoritarian idea that everyone else has to change and restrict their behavior to accommodate increasingly absurd and harmful requests from an overly demanding identity group.

What is the group demanding that is "over" what you would consider appropriate? How do their demands restrict your behavior?

Personally I've never noticed trans people and their push for rights & recognition having any impact on my life whatsoever. And I say this as a devout member of a rigorous and conservative religious tradition.

Many demands, but probably the most egregious is the insistence that males be incarcerated in women's prisons if they say they are women. Several states now have policy that enables this, and female prisoners have been sexually assaulted, raped and even impregnated as a result of this.

More generally, this graphic has an astute depiction of the problem: https://i.ibb.co/ZcMWLvM/no.jpg

Is sexual assault in prison otherwise a particular concern of yours? I understand it's a massive issue affecting hundreds of thousands of incarcerated people, is activism on that broader issue how you came to be aware of this? Do you have a connection to any prisoner advocacy groups that have policy recommendations on this? I assume the sexual violence outcomes for trans women in mens prisons isn't very wonderful either.

I can't relate to the comic. like I said I have not really felt personally affected by trans people at all on any level ever.

"This graphic (an image macro) has an astute depiction"

The actual graphic:

"Lesbians must have sex with me!"

Get the fuck out of here. This is nonsense.

Does your daughter play competitive sports? Has she been knocked down by a boy playing on a girl’s team?

Nah that isn’t the problem. If that happened to my kid they would get back up and shove the other kid over.

The problem is maintaining the integrity of sports and competition. Only an uneducated person would ever try to argue that “the best women’s college basketball team would beat the best men’s college basketball team” even 1 out of 100 times.

my kid they would get back up and shove the other kid over.

Therein lies the rub. Some sure do, but most 13 year old girls don’t.

My 10 year old daughter would.

Wait until the hormones kick in. Personalities change.

What is your point? Puberty is a thing? No kidding. I choose to believe that how I rear my children has a larger affect on their psyche than hormones.

as a parent of a child athlete this is always a silly argument. Kids in sports get knocked down all the time! Sometimes pretty hard! I feel like people who clutch their pearls on this stuff either don’t have kids, don’t have kids in sports, or aren’t the parent who actually shows up to the games.

Has yours? As far as I can tell there are no trans student athletes in my state at any age or competitiveness level. There are several active anti-trans organizations that consider this an issue but no specific cases of it locally for me to assess or be affected by.

Amusingly, in my experience, it was the girls in coed soccer that were doing the knocking down. For a few seasons, they were bigger than the boys, and they could more easily use their hips to check people off the ball without drawing fouls.

True, girls hit puberty first and for a few years outperformed boys in athletics. That was my personal experience in a coed sport.

> Personally I've never noticed trans people and their push for rights & recognition having any impact on my life whatsoever.

Do you have young children? I don’t live in the USA, I live in Europe, but I have a very small baby and I already did. The daycare, just this year announced they aren’t going to be celebrating Mother and Father’s Day anymore. Instead we will have to celebrate a Parents day.

This is just a small thing of course, there are many other situations where it’s clear an agenda is being pushed over the general population. The only way I can see you never felt it, is if you don’t have children.

Do you actually know that switching from "Mother's Day" and "Father's Day" to "Parents' Day" has anything to do with trans people? Without the context of your comment I would have guessed it was more about (1) trying not to upset children who have lost a parent, (2) trying not to upset or confuse children who've never had two parents around, and/or (3) trying not to upset or confuse children brought up by same-sex couples.

Of course you might consider any or all of those to be Stupid Woke Nonsense, but whether right or wrong, sensible or stupid, they're not about trans people.

And would you say that "everyone else has to change and restrict their behavior to accommodate increasingly absurd and harmful requests from an overly demanding identity group" and that a parents day has harmed you?

As a person entirely out of the "trans debate" it almost always seems to me like right wingers or anyone who is asked to change anything at all catastrophizes it beyond all sane response.

The mild "huh that slightly bothers me" and the "they are TRYING TO CHANGE MY CHILDREN!!!" seem to be conflated to the point of making no sense.

Going from "I noticed a trans person" to "this must be stopped!" makes no sense whatsoever.

What does that have to do with transgender mothers and transgender fathers?

Replacing two Hallmark Holidays with a third Hallmark Holiday is unforgivable.

PS- Blame Bill Clinton.

On a personal level, linguistic imperialism. For all the rhetoric spewed regarding the impacts of colonialism and cultural imperialism and fervent calls to decolonize various aspects of society, the whites spewing that very same rhetoric have found a way to launder their own modern brand of imperialism into gender diversity and inclusivity by inventing and then imposing new language on that of other ethnic minorities: "Filipinx." This word shows a shocking ignorance of basic facts of Tagalog that it can't be construed in any way other than racist: there is no letter "x" in Tagalog, and the grammar of the language is already genderless. This point becomes readily apparent if you are conversing with a native Tagalog speaker who uses English as a second language, as they will readily confuse the pronouns "he" and "she" in everyday speech, the concept of gendered pronouns being, quite literally, foreign to them. Is this transphobic bigotry?

The Philippines has already undergone multiple rounds of colonization over centuries, leading to the slow-motion eradication of their native language as Spanish and especially English have overtaken it to the point where many Filipinos cannot even speak pure Tagalog any more [0]. Hasn't the western white already colonized the Philippines enough? First it was, "your pagan religion is immoral and barbaric; here, read this Bible." Now, it's, "your transphobic language is bigoted and uninclusive; here, take these pronouns." How about obeying Starfleet's Prime Directive by leaving other cultures the fuck alone?

If you don't find this top-down imposition and control of language disturbing, I suggest you review your Orwell.

On a more abstract level, "the group's" intolerance of dissenting opinion and academic inquiry, especially when such inquiry shows its positions to be internally contradictory. Take for instance Rebecca Tuvel's paper In Defense of Transracialism, published in Hypatia: A Journal of Feminist Philosophy, which argues that "considerations that support transgenderism seem to apply equally to transracialism." [1] Rather than judge this assertion on its merits and attempt to defeat it rationally, the community demanded the paper be retracted, the author was pilloried for her hateful language and dangerous ideas, and there were multiple departures from Hypatia's editorial team.

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tYLFoUTJuGU

[1] https://sci-hub.se/10.1111/hypa.12327

I don't see the connection between tagalog and trans people sorry.

I got banned from a leftist Discord that I'd spent years on discussing all sorts of topics, just because I dared to question some of the standard left-wing stances on trans issues.

I'd said something like, I don't think claiming an identity is enough, there has to be some sort of dysphoria. And then followed up with another comment like, if they want to keep the cock intact, then they're not actually trans women, as a genuine trans woman would want rid of it even if she couldn't afford the surgery.

This was enough to get me called bigoted and transphobic, and then permanently banned with no recourse, which surprised me because I'd disagreed with people there on the details of a few other topics in the past. Yet somehow this was too much.

It still baffles me how this is the one of the few issues that gets people on the left so riled up that they can't even bear to hear any dissent.

What is your expertise in the field?

About the same as anyone else on that Discord.

Well, in that case I guess they were lucky that their views were closer to reality than yours.

I know plenty of trans women who don't wish to have extensive bottom surgery. Given that you don't have expertise in the field and have basically invented your beliefs from whole cloth, I think you should revise them accordingly and take it as a learning experience about the value of study.

I did take the time to understand more after that, like learning that many trans people broadly agreed with the points I'd made but are now denounced as "truscum" by those who believe that gender identity and not gender dysphoria is fundamental to being trans.

Note also that these were the standard leftie views on trans back in the 1990s, which is when I first heard about it. My beliefs weren't invented from whole cloth as you state. At the time the common understanding was that gender dysphoria is such a debilitating medical condition that accommodating those rare individuals afflicted by this should be done to help them deal with it better. Sort of like how disabled people are provided ramps for access - it was the right thing to do to help a marginalized group.

Anyway my point was more about intolerance of dissenting views on this topic in particular. Being permanently banned from that Discord was an unpleasant surprise when I was just expressing a viewpoint that was previously how most on the left understood the issue.

On the plus side it did help me understand the perspectives on the other side better. I'd previously considered "terfs" to be nothing more than vicious bigots, but once I understood that the trans umbrella had been expanded to include those without gender dysphoria, including men that back in the day would have just been considered common transvestites and not transsexual at all, some of their arguments began to make sense.

Now I'm more middle-ground on the issue, which isn't a bad place to be. This also inspired me rethink other political stances that I had adopted without analyzing them too deeply. So overall I suppose being kicked out of this community was a good thing as it broadened my mind. It also helped me see first hand how political echo chambers are constructed.

No, it is a bad place to be! TERFs are wrong on the facts and wrong on the values.

You completely missed the reason transmedicalism fell out of favor. It's because doctors were given the power to judge if you were truly trans. The way it played out is that they had too much power and routinely abused it in horrifying ways. That is still the case in some medical systems like the adolescent care in Finland, where the doctors ask teenagers questions that if I were asked at that age I would be traumatized for life. It's sickening.

Modern informed-consent trans healthcare is patient-driven. It turns out that if you've put in the effort to seek it out, you almost certainly are trans. Cisgender people do not make a habit of seeking out trans care, because the act of doing so generally induces gender dysphoria.

Gender dysphoria manifests in several ways — anecdotally, distress at current hormone profile is by far the most common. A belief that bottom surgery must be required is not evidence-based, in the sense that it leads to worse outcomes. It is cis people's projection of their own internal insecurities about sex and gender.

(I do agree by the way that gender dysphoria and healthcare need to be recentered in these discussions. But we have a broader understanding of it than we used to, which is good.)

Anyway, you're welcome to find my GitHub and see all of the open source work I've done. It's work that is, among other things, saves several corporations 8+ figures in CI costs annually each. That only happened because I had a safe environment to transition in. If I hadn't been able to transition and be treated with respect, that wouldn't have happened. (More generally speaking, without trans people Rust wouldn't have happened either, and the IT world would be much worse off! In my experience, people in elite engineering teams fully understand this. TERFism is like Uncle Bob — it appeals mostly to mediocre minds.)

A cis person trying to define what being trans is? That's very common sadly.

I believe both "Latinx" and "Filipinx" were introduced by queer people of the respective ethnicities, not white Anglos. Basically every culture on earth has deep seated views on gender that don't match reality, and a strong reactionary response when that's interrogated from within the community.

Philosophy as a field has very little to contribute to basic object-level facts -- this is the whole reason science ("natural philosophy") split from traditional philosophy back in the early Renaissance. This isn't something you can reason out within your brain, this is entirely evidence-driven. There is a tremendous amount of evidence for transgender people and next to none for "transracialism".

> I believe both "Latinx" and "Filipinx" were introduced by queer people of the respective ethnicities, not white Anglos.

This kind of cultural ignorance is highly insensitive. I would suggest that you refrain from making assertions, without corroborating evidence, about other cultures and matters that you have no experience with.

My lived experience, as a Pinoy, speaking with other Pinoys, both here in the west and in the Philippines, is that very few people, especially amongst the older generations, have ever heard of Filipinx; of those who have, nobody respects the term as valid, and indeed many regard it as colonialist.

From an opinion piece in The Philippines' newspaper of record, the centre-left [0] Philippine Daily Inquirer [1]:

    The practice of gender-neutralizing all gendered words began in the 1960s with the purpose of supporting gender equality. Though we may see Filipinx as
    something to be celebrated for its obvious acknowledgment of gender neutrality borrowed from the Latinx and Chicanx communities in the United States, we
    must resist such adverse essentializing of our identity.

    If we use Filipinx here in the Philippines, many people would probably react in shock at such a strange word, and would immediately resist such naming.

    Absurd as it may seem, these Filipino-American digital natives prove once again the naming power of the American establishment to co-opt identities in their
    own sense. Haven’t we learned from history? The Philippine revolutions, the massacres, the campaigns for sovereignty, our fight to wield the Philippine flag
    and sing the national anthem? To legitimize Filipinx as gender-neutral is to efface and silence Filipino as gender-neutral.

    What could be more gender-neutral than the Philippine languages themselves spoken by our fellow Filipinos?

    We, the Filipino virtual community, have to resist this Western hype and instead empower our languages in the Philippines. We are all Filipinos. Our
    concerns are deeply rooted in our social realities than in the post-postmodern neutralized revision implied by Filipinx.

The media is replete [2] with [3] other [4] examples of how poorly this term is received overseas, despite its adoption by a small subset of the western Filipino diaspora. Take this interview conducted by VICE with "Nanette Caspillo, a former University of the Philippines professor of European languages" [2]:

    While it is intended to promote diversity, the word instead sparked arguments about identity, colonialism, and the power of language. 

    Right now, most people in the Philippines do not seem to recognize, understand, relate to, or assert Filipinx as their identity. Therefore, “the word
    [‘Filipinx’] does not naturally evoke a meaning that reflects an entity in reality,” [...]

    “Filipinx has not reached collective consciousness,” Caspillo said, perhaps because fewer people have heard of and relate to the new term.

> This isn't something you can reason out within your brain, this is entirely evidence-driven.

This just sounds like a justification for tolerating double standards and self-contradiction, to the tune of "rules for thee, and not for me."

> There is a tremendous amount of evidence for transgender people and next to none for "transracialism".

Beyond the question of Rachel Dolezal's transracial identity as discussed in Tuvel's paper, there is also the recent Canadian headline regarding a self-identifying Indigenous group that has received tens of millions in federal cash [5]. Is this group Inuit, or is it not? Who decides? Would you, in their words, "want to take food out of the mouths of our people? Why would you want to hurt our people and our communities?” All because you refuse to respect their self-identification and long-documented history as an Indigenous people?

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philippine_Daily_Inquirer

[1] https://opinion.inquirer.net/133571/filipino-or-filipinx

[2] https://www.vice.com/en/article/filipino-vs-filipinx-debate-...

[3] https://www.esquiremag.ph/long-reads/features/filipinos-fili...

[4] https://tribune.net.ph/2022/08/08/why-filipinx-is-unacceptab...

[5] https://www.theglobeandmail.com/canada/article-self-identify...

I said queer people of the respective ethnicities, not residents of the Philippines. I am aware that this comes from mostly queer people in the diaspora, but that doesn't take their ethnicities away.

Saying "Filipino" or "Latino" is gender neutral is similar to saying that "he" in English writing is gender neutral. It is not an unreasonable stance from a purely descriptive standpoint, but the amount of sensitivity that comes if anyone tries to interrogate it indicates a deeper rot in the respective cultures.

Like — why is the default descriptor not "Filipina"? Why is it not "Latina"? Why is the gender neutral term the same as the male term? The answer is quite obviously the patriarchy.

(By the way, "Latine" is what the queer people of that ethnicity I know use. I think between Latine being a better grammatical fit and cishet feelings being damaged, Latinx mostly fell out of favor. And linguistic imperialism? Really? There is a far more fundamental and insidious reshaping of the territory to fit the map at play, which is to turn all of human gender and sexual diversity into a single male/female binary.)

> I said queer people of the respective ethnicities, not residents of the Philippines. I am aware that this comes from mostly queer people in the diaspora, but that doesn't take their ethnicities away.

Adoption of new language imposed by whites upon the diaspora of an ethnic minority is different from that minority introducing the term themselves. The neologism "Filipinx" appears to have originated on dictionary.com [0] [1], with no Filipino spokesperson, residing in the Philippines, North America, or otherwise, publicly endorsing the term (quite the opposite). I invite you to provide sources to substantiate the claim that it was in fact introduced by Filipino diaspora. All I can find is a statement by one "John Kelly" [0]:

    “Among our many new entries are thousands of deeper, dictionary-wide revisions that touch us on our most personal levels: how we talk
    about ourselves and our identities, from race to sexual orientation to mental health,” said John Kelly, senior editor at Dictionary.com.

Ethnic minorities overseas in western culture are subjugated to the cultural dominance of whites and expected to adopt their lexicon or risk severe social censure; this is the essence of the definition of "systemic racism" as proposed by DiAngelo.

> Saying "Filipino" or "Latino" is gender neutral is similar to saying that "he" in English writing is gender neutral.

Tagalog is already ungendered. "Filipino" is ungendered. It is you who presuppose, based on Eurocentric linguistic norms, that "Filipino" is a gendered term and is assigned the male gender, and then from that presupposition conclude that the word "Filipino" is gendered and therefore patriarchal. This is an instance of begging the question, where you presuppose the very matter under contention. This is cyclical reasoning based on a predominantly white cultural worldview and linguistic background.

    Some — mostly those who grew up in the Philippines — argue that “Filipino” is already a gender-neutral term because the Filipino language
    itself does not differentiate between genders. Meanwhile, others — mostly from the large Filipino diaspora — say it is sexist, a holdover from
    the gendered Spanish that influenced the country’s languages. [1]

> And linguistic imperialism? Really? There is a far more fundamental and insidious reshaping of the territory to fit the map at play, which is to turn all of human gender and sexual diversity into a single male/female binary.

You again expose your ignorance of other cultures with this comment. Bakla culture [2] in the Philippines has a very long and well-established history that predates Western colonization, and is already considered a third gender, already escaping the male/female dichotomy.

Stop imposing your white framing upon other cultures. That is in fact the definition of cultural and linguistic imperialism.

[0] https://newsinfo.inquirer.net/1332278/filipinx-pinxy-among-n...

[1] https://www.vice.com/en/article/filipino-vs-filipinx-debate-...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bakla

I'm not white. I'm Indian, and I also happen to be a trans woman. I'm fully aware of cultures with three traditional genders like my own -- I'm also deeply suspicious of them. The third gender is virtually always constructed to be transmisogynistic, to exclude trans women from womanhood. That isn't true binary-smashing gender diversity, that is merely "men", "women", and "we don't believe you're really women".

Traditional third genders also typically only have room for straight trans people -- there is no room for a queer trans person like myself. Even today you have a lot of clueless people wondering how someone can be both bi/gay and trans -- something about it breaks the cishet brain in a way I've never really understood.

Modern western progressive ideas about gender diversity are far closer to reality than any traditional culture's, because they're grounded in science and humanism. (This is not to say that they're perfect -- I have several specific criticisms of queer theory authors like Judith Butler.) I am quite proudly a scientific humanist and I believe it is the most morally robust worldview in existence.

> why is the default descriptor not "Filipina"? Why is it not "Latina"? Why is the gender neutral term the same as the male term? The answer is quite obviously the patriarchy.

It's easy to blame patriarchy, but is it the responsible? According to linguists, the answer resides in how gender was introduced in European languages from the Proto Indo European [1, 2]. The feminine genus, in grammatical sense, was introduced later as a specialization of the general "animated" category. Therefore, what later became masculine was used for all "general humans", and was left the default form when gender was not indicated. Example even in English (and other proto-German languages) where nouns are (mostly) not gendered: you have the word of "woman" as a specialization of "man", which does not indicate the male, but it originally indicated the "human being" [3]. We are talking about the dawn of European languages, so take these as educated hypotheses, but blaming patriarchy is a very modern (and unsubstantiated) view.

The need to use a gender (either masculine or feminine) as the default gender is a need in the lack of a neutral gender for humans. Other languages in the world, like Maasai, use the feminine as the "default" gender, others have a proper neutral-animated gender.

Having a neutral gender in Spanish would be great, because it removes ambiguity in many cases where the sex is unknown, but introducing it, especially in languages like Spanish or Italian where all nouns are gendered, is a _massive_ undertaking, which would shake the foundations of those languages and would require a lot of energy by all its speakers. Theoretically possible, sure (we can make up any language we like), but I don't see a minority of agendered people being able to move so much inertia.

So how to go about it? The "x" or other non-standard symbols are pointless because unpronounceable. The "e" can work in Spanish (won't in Italian), and only for some cases, example above all: "españoles" is masculine. Choosing masculine and feminine randomly doesn't work either, it causes confusion and can even sound sexist in certain contexts (I've tried it and found myself in that situation).

My personal take is to stick to the rule: "default" gender is masculine. It's just a choice, as it would have been if we chose feminine (also remembering that the grammatical gender has -in most cases- nothing to do with sex). However, I also try to avoid ambiguities, even at the cost of redundancy, and try to introduce variation as much as possible, still within the constraints of the rules.

[1] https://allegatifac.unipv.it/silvialuraghi/Gender%20FoL.pdf [2] https://benjamins.com/catalog/cilt.305.04lur [3] https://www.etymonline.com/word/woman

Patriarchy is ancient! Yes it's quite fucked up that "woman" literally means "of man" — learning that in school was one of the things that radicalized me.

More than the actual policy prescriptions I'm interested in the reactions various cultures have when challenged on this. You get to see a rather extreme amount of emotional fragility, certainly a lot more than would be justified by a mindset of curiosity and openness. To me that is a pretty strong sign that something is deeply rotten in the culture (and I include my own culture here).

As I said elsewhere, I believe that scientific humanism is the most morally robust worldview in existence. I don't want to tell other people what to do, but I am going to live my life with moral conviction, and that includes saying what I believe to be true about other cultures.

The word “woman” never meant “of man”. It comes from the old English “wif mann” which means female person. Of course “mann” evolved to “man” but at the time it applied to either sex. “Wif” never meant “of”.

Thank you, TIL! https://www.etymonline.com/word/woman

In hindsight, I'm not surprised my horribly misogynistic English teacher lied about this.

I just need to remind that (very) often languages evolve in ways that have nothing to do with the underlying societal structure.

This is my issue with lots of things being said about politics and language. Language is a tool. There is nothing patriarchal in "woman", nor in the use of the default "unmarked masculine" (this is the technical term) that is present in many languages. The unmarked masculine may even be interpreted in a matriarcal sense: the feminine has detached from the "general human" as someone "special", "more important" than the man. But these are all speculations that are all valid and all silly at the same time.

How we _use_ language is another story though. For example, using the masculine with the consequence (intentional or not) to exclude women from a job ad is definitely not acceptable. The unmarked masculine has the problem of being ambiguous, but the ambiguity can be solved (with the added cost of redundancy) by repeating the same words with the feminine or simply by specifying who the message is referring to (example: "madame et monsieur"). This is common sense, but it's worth reminding people to be careful about it. What is not common sense (IMHO) is to ask all speakers of a certain language to change a thousands years old morphology because someone misuses it, and not even providing valid alternatives.

Other examples of politicised language can be found in the words that are used to signal virtue, or to offend, often completely changing the original meaning of the word to the point that it becomes a political slogan with no meaning at all. I have dozens of examples, including the same word "patriarchy", but I can also mention "fascist", "communist", "feminist", "violent" etc.

Some people enjoy this show, some use it as a very convenient way to bring attention to some topics (or themselves), others, like me, find it confusing and extremely tiring and a reason for disconnecting from politics rather than embracing it.

I want to live my way outside of superficial constructs like gender. I do not want to be forced to accommodate people who think that gender identity is something relevant.

The current political climate sucks for agender people.

I want to live my life outside of superficial constructs like religions. I do not want to be forced to accommodate people who believe religion is relevant. The current political climate is challenging for areligious people.

I don't get to have this opinion because conservatives are censoring me and are always shoving religion down my throat.

Imitating conservative argument style is fun, you get to tell how you feel but then still get defensive when people say you hate other people based on their identity.

I think you are being sarcastic but i actually agree with that.

I'm being sarcastic but also agree.

I'm pulling for you.

However. Cultural attitudes are propagated by people who's livelihood is frequent publishing. In that scenario, I think teams "what's to talk about?" and "it's not that complicated" are always going to lose to team "I've got a lot to say about this."

There is a thing I've noticed.

Some percentage of people do not strongly identify with any particular gender. I was assigned male at birth, I look stereotypically male, everyone assume I'm male and addresses me as such, but honestly, I don't care one way or the other and if I was female instead I doubt I would care. Let's say 50% fall here.

Another group of people strongly identified with one gender or the other, and can't imagine it being any other way. These people care deeply about gender because it is an important part of their identity. Let's say the other 50% fall here. Most of them are happy because they present as the gender they feel they are, and everyone treats them as such. In a small percentage, there is a mismatch and it makes their life hell.

I suspect the typical mind fallacy makes it very hard for most people to understand those that fall into the other group. And for those that are in the "happy with their gender" group to understand those in the "unhappy with their gender" group.

I noticed that too, and not only that. I and my peers in school had words for it: "girl" for people that were just female, and "girl girl" for people who were female plus "extra ideas". Same for boys.

> Some percentage of people do not strongly identify with any particular gender.

I’m the same. But, and this is a huge but: it’s my privilege to be able to think this way. I know that there are people who simply isn’t allowed to do this.

The same thing with skin color. I don’t care. However, my brother has a darker skin tone, he simply cannot have that luxury to not care, because other people force him. For example, when he wasn’t allowed to buy stuff at the nearby bakery because of his skin. He had to move to a country where people care less, because he didn’t want to put up his kids to the same. (Btw our country of origin is Hungary)

This is not an argument. That your brothers rights are not respected does not say anything about your rights and whether you are morally right to enforce them.

The operators and customers of this spa noticed:

https://x.com/KatieDaviscourt/status/1858611351901663550

https://x.com/ItsYonder/status/1858673181315506307

Yeah that judge, a woman, explicitly labels that "notice" as discriminatory. Seems pretty clear cut.

Judges are not infallible, and the judge being a woman is irrelevant since she does not represent all women.

I think it is reasonable for a woman to want a shared nude space to be free of people with penises, regardless of what that person identifies as, for simple logistics reasons of not being able to be sure if someone is being deceptive.

Speaking for myself, in terms of policy this issue wouldn't even crack my top 100. But in terms of electoral politics? I think the evidence is pretty good that it had a lot of salience in the last election. Many swing voters who broke for Trump have said that gender and/or trans issues were a big factor for them. Something like a third of Trump's closing ads were about this topic and Kamala's campaign checking a box that they were in favor of sex change operations for criminals became a huge talking point.

As someone who cares deeply about a lot of separate issues that Trump will be terrible on, I wish progressives would STFU on this topic and stop stabbing their party in the back. Treating trans people with dignity and respect should go without saying, but some of the left wing rhetoric on this issues goes too far like when they deny that there is any biological difference between men and women. A lot of the efforts on the left look more like virtue signaling and fighting for the sake of it, rather than trying to achieve better real world outcomes.

To address "over", here's my perspective. The invisible force is much stronger than any explicit demands. Would you agree sociopolitically trans transformed from the underdogs to a politically correct blessed identity group at least in the western world in the last 10 years or so?

I was more supportive of their rights when they were the underdogs. Being on the side of the eggs instead of the high wall is second nature for lots of people so I'd guess there are significant number of people going through the same transition.

Ultimately they're the minority though. A specific example is pronouns. Majority of the population is perfectly happy with gender based pronouns, making it sociopolitically disadvantaged or uncomfortable to use them freely is not in the best interest of the majority.

It's always about compromise when we're talking about not stepping on each others feet, and number dictates the power, that's fundamental to democracy. Their demand in general turned from having dignity and freedom to love - say legal marriage, slowly into not being offended - say pronouns. Not being offended is a privilege not a right, particularly so when it makes overwhelmingly majority of the population feel like walking on egg shells, can't say it is what it is, aka censorship.

IMHO, being a minority in the western society myself, it's much smarter and considerate for others to stop focusing on identiy politics when you have comparable sociopolitical rights and status to everyone else, which is a spectrum not a line. The problem is they (or a vocal minority within that minority) keep pushing when they're well pass that spectrum. IMO stop the pride parade in western society because they are just one of us, the differences have already been well acknowledged and accepted, so instead of sexual preferences or gender identity which they differ from the majority, how about holding a parade that is about some common grounds. Just stop talking about it, when or if systemic unjust creeps back in, find evidence and fight for it again.

You mean... abortion bans?

" I really do not understand how trans debate has come to dominate some online discourse."

It is a wedge issue, simply. It benefits entrenched interests because it allows them to anger and control people, just like they do with the War on Christmas, the War on Guns, Welfare Queens, Baby Killers, Wokeism, DEI, and so many other catchphrases that collapse nuanced issues to a sports slogan.

This entire discussion is grossly disappointing. So many otherwise intelligent people thinking they are debating issues, when they are being played like a fiddle.

I read it as a contrarian think-piece, what people used to call a "Slate pitch" when Slate was still relevant. It lands with a big wet gross "thud" in the context of a lot of the rest of what SciAm has been running.

I think most of the concern over "woke" themes in entertainment are straw men arguments. Such that it is frustrating to see opinions like this given credence.

I still feel the discourse is overblown. Would have preferred to see those lines as jokes, though. That said, will look into "slate pitches." Strong chance I am just ignorant in a new way here.

>>It's one thing for Singal to have culturally heterodox† views on unsettled trans science and policy issues††

I think his views are culturally orthodox, outside of liberal-left members of the laptop class.

Red tribe orthodoxy has a lot of disdain for people with trans identities. Blue tribe orthodoxy has maximal dain for those people. But both tribes are willing to promote pseudoscience to achieve their goals. Singal occupies a narrow sliver of the political possibility space where sympathy for those identities can exist at the same time as supporting evidence-based medicine.

Before I started transition I read through the available literature (this would be back in 2010-2015 ish, before it was quite so hot button) and the general consensus wasn't with Singals position then. I don't think skepticism ought to be ruled out or anything, but hormone therapy is better studied than the use of most antidepressants at this point. (although it could still use better study on particular dosage and effects - no one seems to have done anything comprehensive on progestin treatment, for instance, even though it's clearly associated with the rest.)

The Cass report in the UK was pretty clear that there isn't enough evidence to base decisions on https://cass.independent-review.uk/home/publications/final-r...

>>>

While a considerable amount of research has been published in this field, systematic evidence reviews demonstrated the poor quality of the published studies, meaning there is not a reliable evidence base upon which to make clinical decisions, or for children and their families to make informed choices.

The strengths and weaknesses of the evidence base on the care of children and young people are often misrepresented and overstated, both in scientific publications and social debate.

The controversy surrounding the use of medical treatments has taken focus away from what the individualised care and treatment is intended to achieve for individuals seeking support from NHS gender services.

The rationale for early puberty suppression remains unclear, with weak evidence regarding the impact on gender dysphoria, mental or psychosocial health. The effect on cognitive and psychosexual development remains unknown.

The use of masculinising / feminising hormones in those under the age of 18 also presents many unknowns, despite their longstanding use in the adult transgender population. The lack of long-term follow-up data on those commencing treatment at an earlier age means we have inadequate information about the range of outcomes for this group.

The report basically said that there wasn't a lot of evidence that the treatments in question make people happy in the long run, which is an unusual standard to apply. Usually we look for evidence that medical treatments achieve their medical goals, and leave judgments about what will or won't make someone happy to doctors or patients. (For example, it's questionable whether certain cancer treatments that extend life by only a few months will be a net benefit for patients, but we generally let patients and doctors decide for themselves whether or not to go ahead with them.)

Given that the treatments are meant to address gender dysphoria which is unhappiness caused by a sense of misalignment with one's sexual characteristics I struggle to think of a better measure of success than long-term happiness.

It's a good measure of success, but if we applied the same standard consistently, then all kinds of treatments for all kinds of partially psychological conditions would have to be thrown out.

Also, it's taking a particular position to characterise gender dysphoria as merely a subjective feeling of unhappiness. I do not have any fixed position on what exactly gender dysphoria is, but I believe many trans people see it as far more than just that.

The Cass report is pretty questionable quality wise - it was written with political goals pretty directly in mind and it rules out a lot of studies for not being double blind. (Which is necessarily a hard ask here, medical ethics boards aren't going to let you give hormones to the control group children or anything.)

And that criticism has come from medical boards in the UK and globally, I believe?

Anyway, that's also only for children, which feels politically like a wedge issue. The NHS is very slow at providing HRT and I rather doubt they're treating more than a hundred children for gender dysphoria in any way rn.

> and it rules out a lot of studies for not being double blind

Sorry but you're repeating disinformation that has already been refuted by the lead author, and is obviously incorrect if you read the Review itself.

http://archive.today/ea0Vi

> Dr Hilary Cass, 66, told The Times last week that one activist had begun posting falsehoods about her landmark review of the treatment of trans children before it was even published.

> She was referring to Alejandra Caraballo, an American attorney, transgender woman and instructor at Harvard Law School’s Cyberlaw Clinic.

> On April 9 — the day before the Cass review was published — Caraballo claimed it had “disregarded nearly all studies” because they were not double-blind controlled ones.

> Double-blind studies see patients randomly given either medicine or a placebo, with neither the patient or doctor knowing which.

> In a post on Twitter/X, Caraballo accused Cass and the review team of holding trans healthcare to an “impossible standard”. This was because, she said, transgender patients could not take hormones “blind”, as the effects of any hormones would fairly quickly become obvious.

> Her tweets were contradicted by the publication of the Cass review hours later.

> During a systematic review, researchers looking at studies on transgender healthcare found no blind control ones — so used another system altogether to determine study quality. Cass told The Times last week how difficult it would be to use blind control studies in relation to trans patients, for the same reasons identified by Caraballo.

> As for Caraballo’s claim that the review team “disregarded nearly all studies”, Cass pointed out that 60 out of 103 studies reviewed were used for the conclusions. They were studies deemed to be of moderate and high quality on the effects of puberty blockers and hormone treatment.

> Despite this, Caraballo’s post has been viewed 871,000 times and has not been deleted.

This is unfortunately quite a typical tactic of activists like Caraballo. They will deliberately lie to further their aims, relying on people who are unaware that their lies are lies to spread this disinformation.

This is a common misconception about the review. It is true that none of the studies they looked at were double-blinded but they were still included if they were designed and conducted well enough. In a Q&A shortly after the review's release Cass demonstrates that she is well aware that exclusion based on this would be silly.

https://thekitetrust.org.uk/our-statement-in-response-to-the...

The amount of myths circulating about the review prompted the publishing of an FAQ page which deals with some of the more egregious examples (e.g. the claim that 98% of studies were rejected).

https://cass.independent-review.uk/home/publications/final-r...

I think it's naive to call a series of "myths" coming from the same camp as misconceptions.

There was a (successful) effort to push misinformation regarding the report.

What's the basis for the claim that the Cass Review was written with political goals directly in mind? Is this just based on the conclusion of the report, or is there actual substance for this statement?

Most of the criticism of the Cass Review comes from the US. Most of Europe has either stopped prescribing puberty blockers and cross sex hormones for minors or never did in the first place. The UK is joining the consensus among the majority of developed countries regarding treatment of gender dysphoric youth, now the US and Canada stand as the sole outliers.

> What's the basis for the claim that the Cass Review was written with political goals directly in mind? Is this just based on the conclusion of the report, or is there actual substance for this statement?

Cass meeting with DeSantis staffers [1], for one

[1] https://www.erininthemorning.com/p/cass-met-with-desantis-pi...

> Notably, Hilary Cass met with Patrick Hunter, a member of the anti-trans Catholic Medical Association who played a significant role in the development of the Florida Review and Standards of Care under Republican Governor Ron DeSantis.

This meeting was held after the Cass Review was published, so it's odd to try and use it to discredit the review itself. Furthermore, Hilary Cass met with hundreds of people to discuss the findings of the review. Is any researcher who ever speaks with Ron DeSantis simply disqualified in your view? Including research published before meeting him?

No, she met with Hunter before it was published:

> A followup email from Hunter indicates that he met with Cass on September 22, 2022 (ECF 184-1). Even as Paul Vazquez wanted to invite Cass to the Board of Medicine hearing as a subject matter expert, Hunter felt that would put her “in a difficult position”:

Why downplay this link in a discussion about the politicization of science?

The interim report - which had the same findings that gender affirming care in minors had scant evidence - was published in March 2022.

Also, that quote is not appearing anywhere in the linked article. Did you post the wrong link?

Again, is the mere fact that Cass - whose job is to advise governments on healthcare - met with someone in government supposed to disqualify the review as politically motivated? What, specifically, did this DeSantis staffer change in the Cass Review?

This is just straightforward attempts at guilt by association. Given that Cass' job is to advise government on healthcare, meeting with government staffers is hardly surprising.

> Also, that quote is not appearing anywhere in the linked article. Did you post the wrong link?

Linked in the article, about her meeting with Hunter

https://genderanalysis.net/2023/11/new-trial-exhibits-in-doe...

> This is just straightforward attempts at guilt by association.

Call him a "government staffer" all you like, let's call it what it is: her meeting with an explicitly religious interest group

Again, can you point out how the report was influenced. We have the interim report published before Cass met with this staffer. We have the final report published after this meeting. Can you elaborate on how it was changed at the behest of this staffer?

Yes, I think there is a middle ground. Trans people are clearly going through something, and I think a bit more sympathy from the Right, particularly for adolescents wouldn't go amiss. Puberty in the age of social media, anxiety and other mental health challenges is rough. You can hate the policies/movement and still have sympathy for the individuals.

However, I'm not sure that encouraging young people to make one-way decisions (or decisions where we are not yet sure whether they are one way or not) is the correct approach.

> You can hate the policies/movement and still have sympathy for the individuals.

I think people on the right (outright bigots excepted) would say they do have sympathy, and it's for kids who have been influenced by the media or whatever to think that they are the opposite gender.

> However, I'm not sure that encouraging young people to make one-way decisions (or decisions where we are not yet sure whether they are one way or not) is the correct approach.

And I think the response here is that not taking action is also one-way, causing irreversible changes, like to the bone structure.

Yes, this is the kind of nuanced take that has been squeezed out by ideological snap-to-grid from the warring tribes.

I rarely see sympathy from anyone, it's easier to be staunch and tapped out unfortunately.

HN has a large discussion on the E.O. Wilson piece at the time...

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29990427

Note the source of that story.

> (c) There's absolutely nothing "surreal" about taking Wilson to task for his support of scientific racism; multiple headline stories have been written about it, in particular his relationship with John Philippe Rushton, the discredited late head of the Pioneer Fund.

The reason it's not surreal is because it's so banal.

Wilson viewed Rushton as a case of scientific freedom. I.e. research shouldn't be suppressed for socio-political reasons.

You're allowed to disagree with that. But you should understand that the scientifc freedom side isn't racist, even if ends up on the same side as racists.

I don't know what to make of you accusing Singal of "dipping his toes into HBD-ism". Maybe you just phrased that wrong. But it sounds like you're saying "Rushton was a racist, Wilson defended Rushton so he's a racist, Singal defended Wilson so he's a racist". Is that how racism works?

Where on the line are we talking?

It's one thing to say: "In my view, EO Wilson's association with Rushton is defensible and should not be considered a stain on his career".

It's quite another to say: "That, and I believe it so much that I cannot take seriously anybody who disagrees with me on this, I shall call them and their viewpoints names such as 'surreal' and make grandiose claims that their opinion is so ridiculous, it requires a cultural change at this magazine".

The latter is what was said.

I see no conflict between holding both of these ideas:

* EO Wilson's association with Rushton isn't a problem, and it wasn't about him supporting those ideas themselves, it was about supporting the idea of 'let ideas be, do not censor them'.

* Singal is wildly inappropriate with this, and the plan as stated is cancel culture/crazy politication of a magazine.

In:

> "Rushton was a racist, Wilson defended Rushton so he's a racist, Singal defended Wilson so he's a racist"

You've made an evident mistake. It's instead:

> Rushton was a racist, Wilson defended Rushton so he might also be and we should look into that, Singal called that very thought of questioning Wilson's association with Rushton as ridiculous - and THAT means he's a racist'.

Maybe still wrong but not nearly as crazy as you seem to think it is.

I think your post is very reasonable. Singal may be exaggerating how bad SciAm is. Though my view is that the Wilson article is part of a pattern.

I responded to this because I read a biography of EO Wilson recently. It's strange to say his association with Rushton was a stain on his career because his career was massive. He published an absurd number of papers, did lots of field work, discovered many new species, wrote many popular science books, and was influential as an early conservationist. He was, by all accounts, an incredibly kind person. His link to some racist is a footnote, not a stain.

It's worth asking why it's even coming up. Here are a few possible reasons:

1. A number of left-wingers attacked Wilson following Sociobiology and it's been open-season on him ever since

2. It's trendy to call famous white scientists racist

3. Highly accomplished people cause envy in others which leads to tendentious attacks

For what it's worth: I'm not saying Singal is exaggerating how bad SciAm is. I think I agree with him, and have complained about it elsewhere.

I do have a problem with him dipping his toes into defenses of scientific racism (which is what he's doing when he implicitly imputes wokeism to an editorial calling E.O. Wilson out for dabbling in scientific racism). This is a problem with the reflexive contrarian rationalist sphere Singal has allowed himself to be relegated to (listen to his podcast, it's even more obvious there).

A lot of stuff SciAm has written is real dumb and even destructive. But not everything that anti-woke people object to in SciAm is wrong; if you adopt that stance, you can launder all sorts of crazy things into the discourse. He did that here.

The Wilson article really does say:

> First, the so-called normal distribution of statistics assumes that there are default humans who serve as the standard that the rest of us can be accurately measured against.

That’s at best sloppily written, regardless of what one thinks about Wilson. The normal distribution is a mathematical tool; it doesn’t “assume” anything about some particular concrete topic like measuring humans.

The normal distribution does indeed make some assumptions. Certain natural qualities tend to be notmally distributed like height, but other things like net worth are NOT normally distributed because of feedback loops. The choice of distribution either makes an assumption or validates some other prior assumptions.

Thr choice of using a normal distribution vs another mathematical distribution is not purely a mathematical device, the choice either reflects some assumptions (which one would quickly see if they're valid or not generally).

An interesting case in point for me is when a lot of mathematics assume bell curve distribution in stock market price distributions, like the black scholes option equation does, and it turns out to not really be the best fit. It sort off almost works, but systematically underprices extreme events.

This is what can happen when your assumed distribution turns out to be wrong.

So far though, I haven't heard of refutations that height or IQ (as measured on standardised tests and processed in prescribed ways) are indeed bell curve distributions.

What a minute, this sentence was literally in the SA piece: “First, the so-called normal distribution of statistics assumes that there are default humans who serve as the standard that the rest of us can be accurately measured against.”

Is that not a denunciation of the normal distribution?

I don't think so -- the comment in context was not about the "normal distribution of statistics" per se, because when we're talking about Bernoulli trials and the law of large numbers, it clearly is not necessary to assume anything about "default humans".

Rather the article is critiquing the specific use of the normal distribution in assessing population and sub-population statistics. I do think that this critique is kind of nonsensical because the normal distribution assumes nothing of the kind -- a person who is of average height, a "default height" human, is a concept utterly distinct from the concept of a person who is of average weight, a "default weight" human.

It's saying multi-modal data should not be crammed into a simple normal distribution.

Much of the piece leans on the right's habit of "refuting" leftist academia by merely repeating its summed-up headline form in a sneering voice, without offering a real counterargument.

This is not to say that I don't think there should be a rebuttal of any social sciencey claim, but that it should - and can - be done socratically.

it's like any topic you think is simple until you research even a bit of it and go 'oh'

By chance I just started reading Sci Am after a lapse 10 years. This month, there is an article that mentions that empathy is mentally taxing, which is obvious but worth stating. Shortly afterwards it is followed by a series of articles on sickle cell disease.

I suspect the order of these two articles was a deliberate choice by the editor. Subconsciously I never cared much about sickle cell since I am not black and I am more interested in diseases that would affect me and my family. But then I realized that I am choosing to be dismissive, which has zero cognitive cost, as opposed to empathy which comes at a cost. I read the report and immediately reflected on how I should give more blood since transfusions can ease the unbearable pain of this disease. I learned a lot of science too.

The examples in the parent article make it clear the editor needs be replaced. But like all over-corrections I hope some of the changes made during her tenure remain.

You're happy you got psyoped?

The author's critiques seem nit-picky to me. I'd like to hear from somebody that follows this, scrolling through SciAm articles published in the past few years, it seems like the bulk of content is still normal popular science. While it does publish a large chunk of partisan opinions now, a lot of them are pretty normal party-line defenses of democrats and their causes with respect to science, health, and whatnot. While I see they published a half-dozen or so articles defending gender-affirming care in youth, it's not like this is so central to the rag that this was mentioned on the covers. Is the author trying to rationalize an aversion to partisan politics in a magazine coming from a nation with a climate change denialist party?

Make of it what you will, but the author's wikipedia page seems to put this article in perspective: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jesse_Singal

I notice there has been a mixing of expert/academic opinion with advocacy, and this is an example of that. But expertise and advocacy are important but different things.

They don't seem mutually exclusive to me. I would think an issue would only arise if one lets their advocacy jeopardize their expert judgement.

I think Jonathan Kanter lays it out much better than I can here, when it comes to research into monopoly

https://www.justice.gov/opa/speech/assistant-attorney-genera...

I remember when that article wildly mis-describing the normal distribution came out and I was so sad. It was just so embarrassing. The author was in no way qualified, yet the burden rests on the editors of a publication with the reputation to catch this incredible incorrect statement to come out.

I usually think woke/antiwoke complaints go too far, but that was such a failure.

Reference for the curious: https://scottaaronson.blog/?p=6202

Thanks. I didn’t realize how bad things were. I’m not American. Is this an example of America’s culture war I keep reading about ?

This would be an example, but far from the whole picture.

Yikes, quite the scathing article and example of a the politicization of science.

“Trust the science” has always bothered me for two reasons: 1) science is frequently not black and white and anyone who has done hard science research knows there are plenty of competing opinions among scientists and 2) while scientific facts are facts, we still need to decide on how to act on those facts and that decision making process is most certainly political and subjective in nature.

"Trust the science" is the very antithesis of the scientific spirit. The essence of science is to distrust authority and received wisdom. If you treat scientists as some sort of infallible priesthood then you've missed the whole point of science.

> The essence of science is to distrust authority and received wisdom.

This is not "the essence of science" by any means.

The motto of the Royal Society:

"The Royal Society's motto 'Nullius in verba' was adopted in its First Charter in 1662. is taken to mean 'take nobody's word for it'. It is an expression of the determination of Fellows to withstand the domination of authority and to verify all statements by an appeal to facts determined by experiment."

It's highly consistent with the statement above and in many ways is consistent with science as it is practiced.

... source?

(sorry, couldn't resist)

https://royalsociety.org/about-us/who-we-are/history

The motto here does not align with how I read it compared to:

> The essence of science is to distrust authority and received wisdom

"take nobody's word for it" -> anyone can say anything, that is just a claim, things other than that matter like data, replication, etc.

That is different and superior than a simple, broad, statement to 'distrust'.

"Science advances one funeral at a time" [0]

The Scientific Principle (hypothesis -> experiment -> conclusion and all that) does not pay any heed to authority and received wisdom. And it should not; the experiment results are all that matter.

Academia, the set of very human organisations that have grown to manage our implementation of the Scientfic Principle, are a long way from perfect and are heavily influenced by authority and received wisdom.

So yeah, I don't think it's the essence of science, but distrusting authority and received wisdom definitely required to practice good science.

[0] https://www.chemistryworld.com/news/science-really-does-adva...

One funeral at a time is true but “standing on the shoulders of giants” is also true and there is absolutely good science done without redoing all experiments since Newton, like there is a bad science standing on the sand hill of the other bad science. Having distrust by itself will not make one a good scientist and so it can’t be “the essence of science”.

Which is what I said...

The Scientific process does not have any authority except observed natural phenomena.

Yes, therefore trusting or distrusting authorities is irrelevant. One can distrust authorities and do bad science, one can trust authorities and do good science, and other combinations.

The scientific method has no authorities, but science does.

It literally doesn't. Even Nobel Prize winners do not get a free pass to make baseless claims.

There's an entire realm of people who did great science, won a Nobel prize, and then went on to make absurd unfounded claims about shit they do not know.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Planck%27s_principle

Why do you suppose he said that? Do you really think it's different now? It's not.

> The essence of science is to distrust authority and received wisdom

The essence of science is the use of scientific method which have specific meaning and way of doing things. It relies on evidence based knowledge not on any distrust. It does not have to do with authority but you would question if your tools you are using is good (calibrated and not interfering with measurements in an unaccounted way ..etc) or if your methodology is flawed.

So when someone says "trust the science!" they mean "define your null hypothesis, design an experiment to test it, run said experiment, analyze the data for statistical significance and submit for peer review"?

Or do they really mean "trust the scientists"?

I think when someone say something you are confused or have doubts about what they mean, then you ask them what they mean. This sentence can be used to mean many things (including mocking up scientists ot trolling). So please next time you see or hear someone says that please ask them that.

If I would use it personally I will probably use it to mean trust the evidence based knowledge that the scientific community is using.

> If I would use it personally I will probably use it to mean trust the evidence based knowledge that the scientific community is using.

Where can one find this knowledge? Are you suggesting regular folk go out and review the literature themselves (most of which is paywalled)? And even if they did and were able to understand the contents, they'd still lack the required context to weigh contradicting results, dismiss old studies now known to be wrong, etc etc.

And that's why "trust the science" ends up being an appeal to authority.

I'm not saying I have a better alternative than the scientific method, I'm just pointing out that the "scientific consensus" isn't some magical spark that is immediately obvious when one reads the literature, it's something that evolves over many decades of research, conferences, etc. And that's assuming there is a consensus for a given topic at a given time. And I'm not even going to get into why reasonably questioning the scientific consensus is a good thing (otherwise it stops being science).

I have never once in my life heard the phrase "Trust the science" from anyone other than someone fighting a strawman

Unfortunately science is full of academic authorities with vested interests (grants, acclaim, stature), conflicts of interest, narcissism, and other problems. To do real science you need to be able to distrust the authorities of the day.

Somewhat disagree. Science requires trust. In fact, it's the process for building that trust up from nothing. Are you friend or foe? I'm going to assume one but watch you closely until I have enough evidence to trust you. Hurray, that's science!

I totally agree that the phrase is often misused to mean "trust my favorite authority figure" or "trust the status quo," which is distinctly unscientific. Good news though, if we're willing to actually do the work (the hard part) trust in science is what allows us to change the status quo!

No, the antithesis of the scientific spirit is to believe anything joe nobody posts on facebook or twitter that fits your worldview, regardless of (or perhaps especially due to) the presence of contradictory facts.

The essence of science, and what is meant by "trust the science", is to accept theories that fit the existing data until such time as new data contradicts them, while encouraging people to ruthlessly search for just such data which would falsify them.

Sadly, there are a lot of people whose only standard of proof for conspiracy theories is that it contradicts what experts claim.

Just like there's people whose only standard of proof is the word of "experts", regardless of (or perhaps especially due to) the presence of contradictory facts.

Maybe you saw “trust the science” used in different ways, but the way I saw it used was:

- to shut down any debate as the science was “settled”

- to argue for censorship as any discussion that went outside the approved borders of “settled science” was by default false and dangerous to expose people to

- to argue that the “flavor of the month” study was the final word no matter how rigorous the research study was

Science is built on trust because in reality it’s not practical to check every single result in a paper. Often it’s literally impossible (e.g the result from a one of a kind, billion dollar machine).

The process involves collecting data or performing analysis. Simply saying "ugh, why should we listen to received wisdom" and declaring that the experts are idiots is not the scientific spirit.

If someone hand-waves away the conclusions of scientists without doing any science of their own I feel no obligation to take them seriously.

Is science authority? If science is not authority, then distrusting authority and trusting science are not in opposition.

The second point is critical. Relevant testimony from the former head of the NIH during the pandemic, Francis Collins: https://www.bladenjournal.com/opinion/72679/confession-of-a-...

> “If you’re a public-health person and you’re trying to make a decision, you have this very narrow view of what the right decision is.” “So you attach infinite value to stopping the disease and saving a life. You attach zero value to whether this actually totally disrupts people’s lives, ruins the economy, and has many kids kept out of school in a way that they never quite recover from.”

While I agree with the fundamental point, I find that a kind of ironic choice of examples. I wonder what kind of person attaches so much value to keeping kids in school whether it's good for them or not.

Or masking kids when it's actively harmful to them?

I think most reasonable and quite frankly, honest, people understood now and then, that taking the kids out of school would fuck them up pretty bad.

When the actual science was suggesting we take care of the medically vulnerable and elderly. But hey, there’s an election to win!

Who do you think closed schools in order to try to get an electoral advantage?

It was well established before COVID that missing in-school days has a major adverse effect on learning. Keeping kids out of school had exactly the predicted effect—reading and math scores fell significantly: https://www.gse.harvard.edu/ideas/news/24/01/despite-progres....

We also knew early on that COVID posed little risk to kids themselves. So it was entirely rational for parents, especially of young children, to value keeping those kids in school over the negligible health risks (to the kids) of COVID exposure.

Fewer days in school reducing test scores is very much expected. Going from that to claiming an adverse effect on learning, much less an overall harm, is quite a leap.

Test scores accurately measure learning. That’s one of the most robustly supported facts in all of education, and something virtually nobody in Asia or Europe disagrees with.

> Test scores accurately measure learning.

I think you claim to much here. Or are using odd definitions, to me at least.

Sure you can extract something about what has been learned with properly made tests administered correctly. It is the tool that is used because it is the tool we have, not because it 'measures learning' in all the ways we want to measure.

Which is why reorganizing all school systems around teaching the standardized test and judging teachers by these results has been such an overwhelming success that "virtually nobody [..] disagrees with".

The US has probably the least test-focused education system in the developed world (you don’t need to take any exam to graduate high school except in some cases an extremely easy one as a formality). Would you claim the US education system is better than the UK, France or Germany?

The fact that we even have year-by-year, grade-by-grade test figures for the US implies it's significantly more test-focused than the UK, where those tests simply don't exist for most grades.

Whether you get any qualification at all in the UK is entirely determined by high-stakes standardized tests, at least on the main academic track (GCSE and A levels)

Sure. But students have very little influence on the system. How test-focused a schooling system is isn't going to depend on how much test results affect the students, it's going to depend on how much test results affect the teachers and especially the administrators.

Are you talking about finals or standardized tests? Because from my experience at least, the latter has minimal impact on the track that kids follow (could put on you advanced math or reading track but there is opportunity for mobility regardless) and only the SAT/ACT (highest score of however many times on chooses to take them) is used to determine where someone can go to college. But test scores (even MCAT/LSAT) will never determine what someone can study, just where, which is not the case in the UK per my understanding.

There is no "US" education system in reality. There is a "Maine" education system, and a "Colorado" education system, and a "Florida" education system.

They have wildly different rules, designs, systems, and results.

> The US has probably the least test-focused education system in the developed world

And there I was, in American schools being told test scores were 80% of my grade with homework accounting for 10% and class projects another 10%. Both high school and university. Fucking liars.

Presumably random exams made up by your teachers, not nationwide or statewide standardized tests, though.

The point (as I understand it) was not to protect the kids themselves from covid, but that kids are active vectors of illness: they get sick easily and rapidly spread it to everyone around them. Sending kids to school during a pandemic is basically asking to fast-track that sickness to everyone in the community.

There was never any scientific basis for that belief. It was just made up without conducting experiments. And if fact we saw that some countries like Sweden kept primary schools open throughout the pandemic (without mask mandates) and it was fine.

> There was never any scientific basis for that belief.

This is an incorrect statement that can be fixed with minutes of research.

https://www.pnas.org/doi/abs/10.1073/pnas.0610941104 https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S00916...

One might argue about the quality of the research or point out contradicting studies, but saying there was zero basis is flat-out false.

Adding that the idea was "made up" is a great example of bending the idea of science to prop up a point.

COVID is not the Spanish Flu or asthma. Rayiner's point was about SARS-CoV-2 and he is correct. You can read papers published in 2020 to see.

And COVID and the Spanish Flu essentially targeted opposite populations, the former being dangerous to those with compromised immune function while the latter turned strong immune systems against the body in a “cytokine storm”.

That’s why you focus resources on protecting those who you don’t want kids to spread it to, the sick and the elderly, a la the suppressed Great Barrington Declaration.

It wasn't 'suppressed'; it was announced to wide acclaim, others took issue with its premises, and there were significantly more of the latter than the former. There was considerable skepticism of the sponsorship of the libtertarian AEIR, and the fact that hundreds of thousands of people had already died in the US by the time of its publication probably had a lot to do with its lack of popularity.

Or uh, we could stop the virus in its tracks and go back to normal? This was the New Zealand plan, and it worked.

I'm sure the brain damage that COVID still causes (there are 3x more cases this year than in 2020, fun fact) is more of a danger to kids than staying home.

I'm pretty happy Collins came to that conclusion and learned from it.

I don't expect public health officials to have a utilitarian function that maximizes global health considering second order effects. This should have been stated more clearly at the beginning of the epidemic.

Some people were saying we should consider second order effects from the very beginning. I believe the term used for these people was "grandma killers."

Those were the same people causing the second order effects. And the second order effects they caused killed my grandma. So I don't see the problem with referring to them as such.

>I don't expect public health officials to have a utilitarian function that maximizes global health considering second order effects.

Why not? It sounds to me that is the ideal scenario. If I go to the doctor I want them to maximize for health, it's up to me to make health concessions

In the same way, we have an entire political class who should be able to look at the health of the population and gauge which measures are worth taking and which aren't, no?

Ideally, i guess, in some mental models, we'd love to have some sort of super powerful system that can compute a global utility function that considers second (and third, etc) order effects accurately enough to plan out actions that maximize the global utility (without violating ethical norms) until we are immortal and have unlimited energy resources and ability to manipulate matter.

In practice, we instead have centers that focus on first-order effects and who advocate for their position (from an authority based on scientific knowledge, and preparation for emergencies) which are then evaluated and mixed with other centers by political leaders to incorporate the best attempt at considering second and further effects.

Everybody has a different utilitarian model and we don't have enough data or algorithms to predict second or third order effects (we usually fall back on "wisdom" from prior experience).

I am taking a graduate level public health course and this trade off is literally covered in the first lecture its something they call prevention paradox. It's surprising to see that the head of the NIH would say something like this when it's literally part of the curriculum for public health. I'm so tired of political opinions masqueraded as we know better than the experts or we know better than the scientist.

how many public health officials acted with awareness of the prevention paradox during covid?

I don't think anyone attached zero value to everything else. The legit question is how do you weigh all of the factors. How do you weigh making things slightly worse for a bunch of people and way worse for some, etc...

It reminds me of a comedian snippet I saw recently who was asking the crowd... "Has life gotten back to how it was before Covid", and one person in the audience yells out, "No"... and the comedian says, "OK, tell me one thing you had before Covid that you don't have now"? And the person says, "My family". The comedian goes -- "Oh yeah, I guess that was the point of it all wasn't it..."

Anyone who unironically says “Trust the science” automatically tells me that they are probably not an informed person.

I trust that most research is done in good faith and at least some of it is useful. Saying 'Trust the science' might as well be saying 'Trust in God'

> I trust that most research is done in good faith and at least some of it is useful. Saying 'Trust the science' might as well be saying 'Trust in God'

Hopefully this is hyperbole. Any faith I have is separate from, for example, if I cancer, I am going to trust the science on the next steps of treatment.

Medicine is extremely complex and medical errors are the 4th leading cause of death in the US. The science on the next steps of treatment is often incomplete, variable, and dependent on the practitioners' experience. You shouldn't simply trust your doctor, but instead get a second opinion at minimum, and probably a third and fourth if you're able. It's best to triangulate on the problem, searching out varying perspectives from subject matter experts, listening to how they disagree, in order to better understand reality.

I would describe what you said here as a procedure for how to gather and apply the science/knowledge you are going to use for your treatment. So trusting the science, just more details on how to go about doing that.

> Medicine is extremely complex and medical errors are the 4th leading cause of death in the US.

Do you have the source for this? I have never seen it on the list of leading causes of death. For example:

https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/databriefs/db492-tables.pdf#4

Preventable medical errors are one of the leading causes of morbidity and mortality. This was well documented in the Institute of Medicine report "To Err Is Human" in 2000.

https://nap.nationalacademies.org/catalog/9728/to-err-is-hum...

Since then there have been positive system changes in terms of things like quantitative care quality measures and use of checklists. But it's still a huge problem. Whether it's the 4th leading cause of death is unclear, it depends on how you analyze the data and what assumptions you make.

https://doi.org/10.1377/hlthaff.2018.0738

Still reading digging in. In particular one reference in the second link[1]

Still not clear to me how they are generating the numbers for putting it at 3rd or 4th. I might have to read the paper rather than listen the author interview in my link above.

That said 98,000 dead from medical error in 2000, from the first link, would put it at 9th in the list that I linked:

https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/databriefs/db492-tables.pdf#4

from 2020. So even with that lower estimate it would put it in the top ten.

The definition of a death caused by medical error from [1] seem too board from the likely simplified explanation at least:

"Medical error has been defined as an unintended act (either of omission or commission) or one that does not achieve its intended outcome,"

That "or does not achieve its intended outcome" seems like it would count cases I would not want in a statistic like this. For example surgery to remove cancer to save the patients life did not achieve the intended outcome of saving the patients life so it is counted as death via medical error.

Probably have to look at the full paper to see how they applied the standard, but the pdf is not free on the site I linked. I might come back later and look for a free copy or another source.

[1] https://www.bmj.com/content/353/bmj.i2139/

The point is more that "the science" is too broad and vague and uncertain. The science for cancer might be that the currently best known treatment acknowledged in country X is to follow a particular treatment process. That changes across time and countries. And often the studies have assumptions baked in. So there isn't a blind belief in "the science"

> Saying 'Trust the science' might as well be saying 'Trust in God'

In the past, many cultures had priests doing most of the science as well.

Ultimately it all boils down to trust. The common man doesn’t have time nor intellect to evaluate “the science”. When scientists display obvious bias, they lose trust, since they claim to be impartial. It’d be better if they didn’t claim to be impartial.

It's better that scientists be clear about context when communicating. There's nothing wrong with a single person being both a scientist and a political advocate. But they ought to be clear which hat they're wearing at any given time. Science is a process that can never give definitive guidance on public policy.

The other issue is that science has nothing to say about livelihoods and personal freedom - there's no "Lockdown Science". Those were political decisions, ie. opinions disguised as science to shutdown dissent.

Generally you should trust science on matters of "is". But on matters of "ought" science only bears indirectly.

ideally, science would be the best available information on "is". When the science is i.e. funded by a tobacco company and regarding the safety of tobacco, we should be skeptical. How much of current science falls in a similar class?

then you should just trust in God and forget about science

Scientific facts aren’t facts. Empiricism only tells you when you are wrong or have enough data to believe something for now. At any point, something we believe can be proven wrong.

To even get there requires independent, skeptical, peer review. That often doesn’t happen. It’s questionable how many scientific facts are even science. Much less factual.

> while scientific facts are facts

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Half-life_of_knowledge

I don't think people who say "Trust the science" are saying that science has it all figured out. It's telling people that they should weigh scientific data into their thought process. In reality many people make all of their decisions based on emotions and "feels".

"Trust the science" really came into its full form during the pandemic and was a veiled line in appealing to authority. The CDC, Dr. Fauci, NIH, or any governing body issuing mandates during the pandemic would tell you to trust the science, when in reality they just didn't want people to question their decisions. As it turns out, some of the people questioning school closures or masks were correct! Questioning vaccine safety for young men was and is correct, as long as there were not comorbidities. The people or institutions that were yelling "trust the science" the loudest were indeed saying that they had it all figured out and that anyone that questioned them was wrong.

"Trust the science" became a campaign slogan during the pandemic, and fell into the same realm as "defund the police" or "trust all women".

So yes, "trust the science" does mean what you said that it is a process that should take data new and old into account. However, the sad thing is it was co-opted by people who used it as a cudgel to silence anyone that didn't toe the line.

I and everyone around me questioned their statements and came to the conclusion they were in fact true. That is what "trust the science" means. It does not mean "do whatever I say" - it means "I am right and you can verify that, so you should probably take what I'm saying into consideration lest we all suffer."

The right wing somehow took "science" to mean "Anthony Fauci"...

It's true that some of the people who questioned the science were right, but not because they knew something scientists didn't. A broken clock is right twice a day. If something like that happens again we may need to be more cautious than we were last time. It certainly makes sense to be as cautious as possible until we know for sure how deadly some new disease is. Another side effect is that people took sides and trenched in. When it started becoming clear that masks weren't as useful as once thought (at least for sure cloth masks), the other side refused to admit it. What we should do (but are incapable of) is make the best decision based on the current information and change practices as new information comes in or conditions change.

There is a pure form of science which are basically just methods and principles. Then there is stuff around that like institutions. Some further the core methods and principles. And sometimes it's quite literally a religion.

There is also a weird thing where people will attribute simple natural phenomena to science. Conflating the subject matter with science itself. I recall seeing a post with these colored ants and a caption like "Isnt Science Cool?" https://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/these-rainbow-...

Thats not science. Those are ants being colored by food coloring... that would be true with or without the scientific method and you don't even need it to observe the effect. And when you do need science to discover some phenomena (say the nature of black holes) its not science that is amazing if you are simply talking about how amazing black holes are. Its the method applied to understand them that can show how amazing science is. Black holes arent science.

all of the "Trust/Believe X" statements would be profoundly improved by substituting "Take X seriously". It makes the same point without posing the obvious problems with trust and believe

But that wouldn't capture how it tends to be meant -- an instruction to take things on faith without any questioning, even if it contradicts other known facts or your direct experience.

I feel like rational communication requires an overlap in perspective - not the same point of view, but some amount of overlap.

Science relies on rational communication between people who disagree, because we can fool ourselves, and we can fool our in-group. The narrative fallacy doesn't just affect weak minds; by yourself, you won't outsmart your own filters.

To learn about the world, you have to accept the world, and some things about the world are hard to accept as bare facts. Donald Trump was elected president. Can you accept that as a bare fact? Probably not if you've fought with people about it. There's a drag show in town. Can you accept that as a bare fact? ... IQ tests have a history of racial disparity. ... The earth is round and orbits the sun. ...

A lot of rational minded people tend to disparage emotional intelligence, but I feel that rational communication across strong moral feelings requires a lot of emotional work and trust, and it's really hard to trust while you are fighting.

---

I feel like 'virtue signaling' is poorly named. I think 'Comfort Signaling' and 'Loyalty Signaling' are easier to talk and reason about.

* I am flying this flag because I want my people to be comfortable with me.

* I am flying this flag because I want my people to know that I am loyal to them, and I don't care about what other people think. (Or, I'm fine with the other people hating me because of this flag)

> I feel like 'virtue signaling' is poorly named. I think 'Comfort Signaling' and 'Loyalty Signaling' are easier to talk and reason about.

> * I am flying this flag because I want my people to be comfortable with me.

> * I am flying this flag because I want my people to know that I am loyal to them, and I don't care about what other people think. (Or, I'm fine with the other people hating me because of this flag)

Why don't you think "virtue" signaling works for that? That's the same meaning.

Because I don't feel that the confederate battle flag is virtuous.

Virtue signaling is done by people in every in-group; when it is done by people my in-group is fighting against Virtue Signaling does not feel like a virtue.

The thing is, it's not just loyalty, it's also a 'better than only mid-level believers in the cause'. There's definitely a purity / piety aspect. I do like "piety" as it captures the religious aspect.

I think that's a good addition. My main point is that it's not just one signal, and that 'virtue' carries too much emotional and moral freight. Maybe call them Signals of Virtues.

It is 100% virtue signaling because it is used as a means to feel and show moral superiority to others that do not hold those views or 'virtues'.

It is also a loyalty and comfort signal, but as we saw with Helmuth's reaction - it is impossible that Gen X saw fault with Harris' policies. It is only that they are bigoted, narrow minded, fascist loving, misogynist. If a 'virtue' is questioned, you are excommunicated from the 'liberal/ Democrat' party if you want to label it as such.

Yes, this is exactly why I don't like the term; it does not do a good job of describing intent as seen from the person in question.

This comment started off really well with the need for successful communication requiring at least a partial overlap of of worldviews but then goes into the weeds with the comment about Trump. No one is denying that Trump won the election. But a huge percentage of Republicans believe that Trump actually won the last election. This is a real example of how worldviews on the right and left differ radically. The drag show is also a terrible example.

Those are examples of things that are hard for some to accept as bare facts.

Person Y won the election

Person Y won the election and that is BAD

Person Y won the election and that is GOOD

It is not a matter of denial, it is a matter of what story is made to accept the event.

If you have not had to fight about the topic, you can just make the first bare assertion. The event happened.

If you have fought about the topic and your central nervous system gets activated when you think about it, then the assertion will likely include moral judgement. The event didn't just happened, it happened for a good or bad reason.

Sorry but no one is denying that Trump won the 2024 election in the same way Trump and Republicans have denied that Biden won in 2020 and claiming such is very disingenuous. And saying person Y winning the election is good or bad is a matter of opinion, not fact.

You are misunderstanding their point. They are not saying that anybody is denying the election results.

A "bare fact", as they put it, is a statement exclusively of fact. Adding the qualifier to the fact makes it no longer a "bare fact". To use their example, "Snoop won the election," is a bare fact and, "Snoop won the election and that's bad," is not a bare fact.

What they are saying is that some people cannot accept "bare fact" statements as such; they tend to add or expect some qualifier to the effect of "that's good" or "that's bad".

I quote OP "Donald Trump was elected president. Can you accept that as a bare fact? Probably not if you've fought with people about it."

That quote is consistent with what I wrote. If a quarrel (or a physical fight) breaks out over a discussion about a fact then it’s likely that the parties involved with the quarrel aren’t accepting the fact as “bare” (per the meaning I take from OP’s comment). That is to say, they implicitly or explicitly include the “that’s good” or “that’s bad” qualifier alongside the fact rather than accepting it as a “bare” statement of fact.

This is meta communication - communicating about communication. In a complex world it is important to understand when and why communication fails.

I feel that it is important to accept that some things are hard to talk about, and it is important to understand why those things are hard to talk about.

It is hard to communicate rationally while the fight or flight response is engaged. It is hard to communicate rationally to people who either explicitly want to hurt you or who don't mind if you are harmed.

I also am not denying that Trump won.

I am saying that acceptance is complicated.

Yes people have strong opinions.

Denying that strong opinions exist harms communication.

> No one is denying that Trump won the election

Not strictly true, is it? There's a bizarre theory floating around in some liberal circles that Elon Musk somehow stole the election using Starlink satellites. And in years past, George Bush stealing his election was a pretty popular theory.

Trump still says he won the last election.

I didn't say otherwise.

Which makes him ineligible to be the president next year, but his side doesn't care about consistency

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.

---------

[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?

> Imagine doing research on vaccines and hearing the soon to be secretary of health speak on that topic.

I hope I'm not entering a minefield here... but from what I've heard, it sounds like he's not against vaccines in principle, just ones that haven't undergone clinical trials equivalent to what the FDA requires for pharmaceuticals.

(A sound byte I heard sums it up, where he said something like "no one called me anti-fish for working to get mercury removed from the fish sold in supermarkets, so I don't see why I should be labeled 'anti-vaccine' either.")

No, he’s pretty much against them and makes a new excuse each time. He would claim that no vaccine ever has gone through enough testing.

He also denied HIV causes AIDS, days it’s Poppers or lifestyle.

He also pushed ivermectin which studies show has no statistically significant effect on COVID.

He also pushed raw milk when prior to pasteurization, milk was the cause of 25% of all communicable diseases (it’s a great medium for bacteria, it has avian flu viruses, parasites, etc). We invented pasteurization for a reason.

The guy latches on to whatever statistical outlier study he can find like an ambulance chasing lawyer and is a threat to public health that has been massively improved over the last century.

All of his attacks on dyes and seed oils won’t move the needle when the real reason for US health decline is too much sugars/carbs, too little exercise, and addiction to opioids and nicotine.

> He also pushed raw milk when prior to pasteurization, milk was the cause of 25% of all communicable diseases (it’s a great medium for bacteria, it has avian flu viruses, parasites, etc). We invented pasteurization for a reason.

Raw milk is legal to sell in most of Europe and they still have overall better health outcomes, so at the very least it’s a triviality.

Europe also has higher standards for animal husbandry and food products.

In most of Europe you can sell unrefrigerated chicken eggs. Why? Because chickens in the EU are vaccinated against salmonella, so the eggs don't need to be washed (and consequently it's also safer to eat poultry in the EU).

I'd be happy to sell raw milk on the market if there's a requirement that raw milk be tested for common pathogens to milk (Like listeria, for example).

I'll also say that this is not unique to him, it's how conspiracy minded people operate.

You'll see exactly this playbook playout with flat earthers. "We can't know the earth is round because it's not been tested." or "It's actually industry captured" or "The US government prevents people from doing real tests to see if the earth is flat".

You see, if you asked them "what would it take for you to abandon this theory" their honest answer is "nothing" because any counter evidence to the theory will just get wrapped up in more conspiracy.

What would it take for me to abandon my belief in evolution? Evidence that explains why things appear to evolve and shows what actually happens instead.

What will make me abandon my support of vaccination? Evidence that shows vaccines are more dangerous than the diseases they protect against.

I have avoided so many pointless arguments (or "debates") by leading with this question! I ask, "is there something I could say that would make you change your mind?" If the answer is no—if they can't tell me what will move them off their position—then I can say, "well let's not waste our time here, yeah?" and change the subject.

It's not perfect. But with otherwise-reasonable people, it's a nifty trick.

> He also pushed ivermectin which studies show has no statistically significant effect on COVID.

Studies showed that it had a statistically significant effect on COVID. The problem is that with hindsight it is obvious any sufficiently powerful study will show it has a statistically significant effect so the existence of that effect isn't particularly interesting evidence.

There will be people who have both COVID and parasites. If you give them Ivermectin around the time they catch COVID, they will get better outcomes. Statistics will pick that up, it is a real effect. AND it has real world policy implications, there are a lot of people in the world who should immediately be given Ivermectin if they catch COVID (or, indeed, any disease). The more important political issue was when people noticed that (very real) effect without understanding the cause they were attacked rather than someone explaining what was happening.

It is a good case study of evidence being misleading, but the statistical significance of that evidence is indisputable. Any study that doesn't find that effect is just underpowered - it is there. In fact as a baseline it turns out we would expect any effective drug will have a statistically significant positive effect on COVID outcomes.

> Studies showed that it had a statistically significant effect on COVID. The problem is that with hindsight it is obvious any sufficiently powerful study will show it has a statistically significant effect so the existence of that effect isn't particularly interesting evidence.

Preliminary studies with small n showed a statistically significant effect. Follow up studies with larger n showed no such effect. Meta studies also concluded no effect.

> Any study that doesn't find that effect is just underpowered

I'm sorry, but no, in fact the opposite is true. The underpowered studies are the only ones showing an effect. [1].

What has happened with Ivermectin is the "anchoring effect". [2] Early studies showed promise which has caused people to think there is promise there. After that, grifters and conspiracy peddlers started out publishing the actual research on the benefits.

[1] https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC9308124/

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anchoring_effect

If you believe that, it implies you believe someone infested with parasites expects the same COVID outcomes as someone who is mostly healthy. That is a pretty extreme claim, to the point where 1 study (or review, in this case) isn't really an argument. It is much more likely that that they just aren't picking up the statistical signal that is obviously going to be there somewhere.

There isn't a shortage of studies showing an ivermectin-COVID relationship. https://c19ivm.org/meta.html makes for interesting reading, although it is quite misleading because it is probably measuring parasite prevalence rather than anything new.

> If you believe that, it implies you believe someone infested with parasites expects the same COVID outcomes as someone who is mostly healthy.

No, it doesn't.

The crux of your argument is that there is an invisible parasitic pandemic which is, frankly, absurd. Parasites by their nature are far less transmissible than an airborn virus is. They are primarily regionally locked and locked out of most developed countries. The US, for example, does not have a major internal parasite problem because public waters are treated against most parasites and filtered before general consumption.

As for the site, it's got a lot of pretty numbers that are like "Yeah look, 100% this ivermectin is great!" which is pretty fishy. You would not expect to see something like that. But, scroll to the bottom and all the sudden you see why that is, they purposefully find reasons to omit all studies that counter that claim.

Like, I'm sorry, I'm just not going to trust a website that is pushing for vitamin D supplements to treat covid. It's not a serious website and it has a very clear agenda.

Yourself (cogman10) and roenxi might both be in furious agreement from my PoV.

There are no good studies showing a useful relationship between ivermectin and COVID outcomes in low parasite G20 countries ( UK, AU, US, etc ).

The early studies most quoted had high N, good procedures, and showed ivermectin having a very positive effect across the board wrt many diseases ( flu, COVID, etc. ). These studies were in countries and regions with high parasite prevelance and demonstrated pretty conclusively that people with no worms were healthier, had better functioning immune systems, and both resisted and recovered from infections noticably better than untreated populations with parasites.

The supplement pushing website is being disingenous and obfuscating the context of the studies quoted in order to flog crap to rubes.

Best thing I've read that's summarized this well is the Scott Alexander piece incase anyone wants to do further reading from a somewhat reputable source: https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/ivermectin-much-more-than-y...

Fun read; I knew of the "good studies" that Scott ended up with, I'd never bothered to look much at the site in question as it screamed (to myself at least) of marketing driven bias .. and lo and behold many of the quoted papers are low N, sketchy, or outright fraudulent.

I suspect the best most concise summary is simply "If you have or even suspect you have worms, take ivermectin. Your general health and well being will most probably improve".

> No, it doesn't.

Alright, lets go through this slowly. Run me through the point which you think is unreasonable:

1. We do a study. Some % of the participants have parasites, in line with the base rate for the area.

2. Split the group into experiment and control. The experiment group gets Ivermectin.

3. Wait until everyone gets COVID. The people with parasites in the control group get terrible outcomes because their immune system is way overloaded, but the people who used to have parasites in the Ivermectin group do a bit better because they just took an anti-parasitic.

4. A sufficiently powerful statistical analysis correctly detects that the two groups got different COVID outcomes.

What part of that do you think won't happen in the real world?

> the real reason for US health decline is too much sugars/carbs, too little exercise, and addiction to opioids and nicotine.

I think a more fundamental root cause is that US regulation has failed to adequately keep up with the playbooks of large companies that stand to profit from various products that result in compromised health.

Take a look at what's being heavily advertised/marketed. If it contains ingredients people haven't been consuming for thousands of years, I think it's suspect and should be subject to intense scrutiny. (Same goes for widely used B2B products that affect what people consume.)

Unfortunately, there's too much "we only test in prod" going on, so it's hard to isolate widespread problems to a single source. That's why (in my opinion) the FDA should require clinical trials and use an allowlist-based approach to food additives. Currently it's a denylist, which amounts to testing in prod.

> If it contains ingredients people haven't been consuming for thousands of years, I think it's suspect and should be subject to intense scrutiny.

There are plenty of carcinogenic ingredients that have been consumed for thousands of years. There are plenty of additives that are effectively just refined versions of chemicals commonly/naturally consumed.

A prime example of a commonly consumed cancerous ingredient is alcohol.

My point being that prod is already littered with bugs and the most responsible thing to do is continuing research on what is being consumed to figure out if it is or is not problematic.

I mean within reason. Of course the FDA can't and shouldn't ban alcohol.

I mean things like BHT, FD&C colors, and anything else artificial that hasn't passed clinical trials.

> I mean within reason. Of course the FDA can't and shouldn't ban alcohol.

Certainly, but we are now at a sticky point where "reason" can be different things to different people.

Both BHT and FD&C are far less toxic than alcohol is. BHT and FD&C have both been integrated into the food supply for decades. The question would be, what would we learn from a clinical trial that we wouldn't learn from the ongoing population study?

I'm certainly not advocating for deregulation or looser standards for food safety. I certainly support the FDA being fully funded and actively investigating ingredients to ensure public health isn't being torpedoed because it turns out too much salt actually causes cancer (I don't believe it does, this is just an example). But also, I'd say that ingredients that have already been in the food supply for a generation are probably not the danger their detractors claim. At this point, we need evidence to say these additives are dangerous as the current weight of evidence (a generation eating this junk) points to them not being a primary contributor to negative health outcomes.

All that said, I certainly support the idea of applying a very high level of scrutiny to new ingredients. How the current set of GRAS ingredients made it onto the market was reckless.

I'm advocating for a much harder-line stance than that.

Europeans are generally far healthier than folks in the US -- let's start from there.

Also, autism rates are dramatically increasing decade-over-decade.

If you look at political identification by academic discipline [1] you can see that the harder sciences tend to have smaller Democrat to Republican ratios relative to things like English Literature, Psychology, or Fine Arts.

To me, this implies there is an explanation other than partisan dislike for science that explains the large discrepancies in academic faculty. Whatever this reason is, perhaps it extends to other academic/scientific institutions.

1 - DOI:10.2202/1540-8884.1067 (this paper also discusses how Republican faculty tend to have better credentials controlling for the quality/rank of institutions they teach at)

Plenty of reasonable scientists support a political party which explicitly denies the existence of biological differences between groups of humans. In the final analysis, it seems scientists will align with organizations that hold unscientific tenets. It's probably not really a big deal.

You mean the Republicans? I don't know any reasonable scientist who supports the Republicans.

Until 2020 the anti-vax movement was dominated by the left wing, so maybe you should take a step down from your high horse.

Back in 2008 RFK Jr was a Democrat and Obama was considering appointing him to a cabinet post. Anti-vaxers have historically been crunchy-granola hippie folks.

https://www.politico.com/story/2008/11/obama-considers-stars...

Thinking this is about science per se betrays a very naïve understanding of the political dynamics involved. It's quite easy to come up with examples where the official progressive position is nonscientific; Lysenkoism, for example, is as popular in left-leaning politics as ever (in the context of human biology). I can come up with plenty of other examples, although stating them here is guaranteed to draw some administrative ire.

In reality, institutional political alignment is just a natural equilibrium outcome of a political process with pork-barrelling as a feature (which is almost all of them).

> It's quite easy to come up with examples where the official progressive position is nonscientific; Lysenkoism, for example, is as popular in left-leaning politics as ever (in the context of human biology).

You believe the left believes children of parents with amputated arms will be born with amputated arms, that genes don't exist, that any species can be changed into any other species at the genetic level by manipulating only environmental conditions, and that random mutations do not occur?

Who do you think believes this? Name specific people who aren't irrelevant.

Lysenkoism persisted in the Soviet Union because people who pointed out the inconsistencies too straightforwardly would find themselves in hot water. Anyone who wanted to discuss the issue had to approach it somewhat obliquely. Most people were unable to comprehend this discourse - a necessary precondition to avoid trouble.

You could try looking very closely at your middle paragraph and looking for analogies with contemporary bio-politics.

In what way are democrats pro-science and not simple pro-paycheck? "Science" today is a joke and most research is lacks reproducibility, rigor, or depth thanks to things like publish or perish. Quality science is almost impossible in today's academic and "scientific" ecosystem.

It might be because what being a "conservative" in America means has been grotesquely distorted into what it is today.

> being a "conservative" in America means has been grotesquely distorted into what it is today.

I am a recovering conservative and agree with this. Today's right wing occupies a space that I find to be distressing and deeply concerning. From my perspective, conservatism has become thin-skinned, extremely malleable and hair-trigger reactive - the same complaints we lobbed at the left, 20y ago. From my perspective, the right is dominated by the same boogeymen we once visualized and railed against.

> Perhaps conservatives began rejecting science and driving scientists away

There isn't even a "perhaps" about this. My parents (both physicists at a research university) voted Republican my whole childhood. The last 15 years has changed that despite the fact that they are still fairly conservative.

Why would they align with people who are vocally anti-education, consistently work to undermine trust in the scientific process, censor research and constantly try to shift schooling away from being a public right to a private good?

> In the 80s, 35% of university employees (administrators+faculty) donated to Republicans

The Republican party used to be the leftwing party, right up until the 1960s - which is the right timeframe for the staff to have grown up in a "Republican family" without being conserve themselves.

AFAICT academia, in any country, since the 18th century, has leaned more towards being progressive than conservative, which is why academia has been consistently near the top of (s)hit-lists by dictators or strong-man "revolutionaries"

Barry Goldwater's Presidential campaign ran on "I'm the only one that matters. Me me me." Party. I'm not wrong, he was a piece of shit

You think FDR was the right wing candidate?

Support for segregation is generally thought of as a right-wing position to take, is it not.

"Perhaps conservatives began rejecting science..."

Naah...I think left-leaning/collectivists tend to be much less tolerant of people they disagree with, and when the pendulum swing of the wider culture allows it, this is manifested in hiring outcomes over time.

This may swing back in the years to come...

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.

> 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.

Yes, work done by a liberal researcher, was buries because it didn't support her political views. Liberals hinging the entirety of their scientific "evidence" on political pseudo-nonsense like the WPATH files. Republicans maybe anti-science and anti-education, but the other side is very much the same. One cult does not excuse the other.

> I don't know the cause of this.

I think it's pretty clear when you analyze it from the perspective of Selectorate Theory (c.f. Bueno De Mesquita's Logic of Political Survival).

Basically, there's a natural tendency for political parties to bring entire classes of institutions into their patronage network, leading to extremely high polarization within given industries. The choice of which party an institution class gets aligned with may be entirely arbitrary, but you expect it to happen. It's an efficient way to pork-barrel buy votes.

E.g. the education sector is part of the D patronage network and the ag sector is part of the R patronage network. There's no inherent reason this particular selection needs to be the case, but you do expect some kind of polarization to emerge.

I grew up believing that science was the search for truth and fact, and that it should be constantly challenged to further that. What has happened I think, is that there has been a great polarization of science as government and groups have used and twisted it to fit a political agenda. Which essentially stops that search for truth. Challenging scientific conclusions should be encouraged not cancelled.

But only to a point, correct? Otherwise we end up in the current dialogue where flat earthers, moon landing deniers, and a large percentage of religious believers feel more platformed than ever. It's far too easy for the uninformed to challenge science simply because it challenges their non-scientific beliefs.

Scientist 1: If we put a sugar cube into water whose temperature is exactly 74.7373 degrees centigrade, the water will likely turn pink. here is our evidence for this.

Scientist 2: we tried this and found that if the water is cooling that it doesn’t work, it has to remain at a constant temperature.

Scientist 3: we tried it with refined and unrefined sugar. unrefined sugar did not work.

scientist 1: we took another look - it seems there was some weird additive in the refined sugar, when this additive added to water at 74.7373 degrees centigrade the water turns pink.

that’s a very silly and stupid example of “challenging” other scientist’s work. you precisely explain what you tried and how it differed, in the hope it leads to a more specific and accurate picture down the line.

flat earthers et. al just “say stuff” they think is right, where the evidence does not actually challenge any hypothesis or existing evidence because the claims are just … bad.

this is not “challenging” science. it is stubborn ignorance. pure and simple.

most of it is so easy to refute any random youtuber with a spare hour can do it (read: 6-12 months [0])

- https://youtu.be/2gFsOoKAHZg

however, your point about platforming is important, because people who wouldn’t have had a soapbox 15 years ago, now have a soapbox anyone in the world can find them on.

if you’re looking for something to confirm your world view, there’s something on the internet for you.

rule 1 of the internet should be spammed in front of everyone’s eyes for seven minutes before anyone is allowed to use a web browser — don’t believe anything you read on the internet.

[0]: there’s a running joke about how long this person takes to make new videos.

I figured your link would be this one:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JTfhYyTuT44

(Folding Ideas, "In Search of a Flat Earth")

He takes a couple of their claims seriously about what one will see when attempting particular experiments involving a very large lake, attempts them, sees the results one would expect if the Earth were curved, and reports this to some flat earth community forum, refining the experiment as they suggest ways he may have screwed it up, and continuing to find curvature (obviously).

The real story is how they react to contrary evidence delivered entirely on their terms, and where that community was heading four years ago (beware—I guess—that part also becomes necessarily "political").

[EDIT] I guess I buried the lede for this site's interest, which is that the video devotes a fair bit of time to how the Youtube "algorithm" took a little success for Flat Earth videos as a cue to aggressively promote them to people it identified as maybe liking them (those inclined to fall down that particular rabbit hole—which involves a lot more than just the specific belief that the earth is flat), but now flat earth is in decline, because that and other "algorithms" started sending the same folks to... Q-anon content instead.

Incidentally, there was a somewhat-big documentary on Flat Earth some years ago that included some folks from a flat earth convention trying some experiments very similar to the ones depicted in this video (involving visibility of objects across a large lake), with predictable outcomes.

> don’t believe anything you read on the internet

That's many years beyond usefulness now that governments and companies communicate official information through the internet. You might as well say "don't believe anything ever" which makes the advice useless.

It's fine that people believe false things like flat earth. Why so much pressure to stop that? False beliefs are the default for most people, and they actually serve a purpose. We're mostly not emotionless truth-seeking Spocks. We can have religion and other beliefs that improve our quality of life by providing a sense of belonging or importance, an identity, or a community. You wouldn't go around telling Jews that no, God didn't give the 10 commandments to Moses, stop believing unscientific rubbish just because you read about it in some scroll.

I don't think it helps to cancel them, probably hurts. It's not as if you have to either censor or send your highest-status scientists to debate them, and that exhausts the finite menu. In a diverse info ecosystem someone will have their comparative advantage on engaging with cranks. The important thing about overall ecosystem health is, is it reasonable in what it amplifies?

Scientific American hasn't seemed very healthy after the 80s. In the decades before, it was an unusual labor of love by one or two chief editors (I don't remember specifically).

> I don't think it helps to cancel them, probably hurts.

Who is actually being cancelled and for saying what?

This is what I find a little frustrating. There's very little censorship and when it does happen it's usually not against those that most loudly cry about censorship.

For example, did you know you can no longer use the Futurama Farnsworth quote on Facebook "we did in fact evolve from filthy monkey men"? Meanwhile, I've reported and had the report rejected nutters I know literally calling for the stoning of gay people using Bible quotes. (Lev 20;13).

I was answering a comment opposing a comment opposing cancelation.

FWIW the moment I started wondering if we were losing liberal norms actually was reading Dawkins in the 00s calling for scientists to coordinate against debating creationists. Like I was with him in being convinced even "scientific" creationism is powered by Christianity and not any good evidence from nature, and I guess I need to say I had absolutely no problem with any scientist choosing not to engage with any creationist. But there's something anti-science in a campaign to expel a belief from public debate, by a means other than better arguments. That can conceivably be a good thing in some case; but it's the opposite of science.

Relying on Facebook is a bad idea because it's a corporation operating under different pressures than healthy discourse, further trying to direct your attention in its own interest, applying resources it gains this way to modeling you. You can try to improve its moderation but besides the trouble you bring up, probably any success you can get that way will just seed a competing platform. I prefer to give my energy to an open protocol such as Bluesky's (admittedly I haven't looked at its protocol spec) -- unless you can take away everyone's personal computers, everyone's not going to live under your favorite monitor. An open protocol is compatible with choosing among competing moderators. (BTW the pre-web Xanadu vision included open-ended moderator choice, and how different system designs could have different social effects, and the importance of getting it right.)

You do realize the criticism of the Scientific American editor is mostly by people who don't read it, and believe the earth is 6000 years old.

It used to be all the science-y people on one side and Bible thumpers on the other... decades ago.

There has been something of a sea change.

> What has happened I think, is that there has been a great polarization of science as government and groups have used and twisted it to fit a political agenda.

Exactly. "In this house we believe ... science is real." is about the most unscientific sentiment possible. There, the word "science" exists to give the air of authority to a set of ideological and policy positions.

I always found that quote kind of funny. So the scientists who have views on political issues that are the extreme opposite of yours (because there are many such people)... what then exactly?

Your sentence has grammatical issues.

I assume you're implying that people who advocate for cultural support of science are hyper liberal and would be hostile to any science conducted by a hyper conservative. I reject this assertion.

"Trust the science" means that peer reviewed science and scientific consensus should carry weight, and too many people are anti-intellectual.

> I assume you're implying that people who [...]

Nope.

Scientists aren't people!

Science is a search for truth and fact but it is performed and funded by humans and institutions.

We could spin up a theorem generator that just starts from mathematical axioms and exhaustively recombines them to create theorem after theorem. This would create facts, but the process would be almost entirely useless. A pure undirected "search for truth and fact" does very little for us.

Researchers decide what problems to tackle. Funding organizations decide what research to fund. Researchers make choices about how to tackle these problems. Research labs are staffed depending on things like admission decisions and immigration decisions. Journals decide what papers to publish, not just on validity but on impact and novelty. Journals then charge money to access this research as part of a profit-driven business model.

All of these human elements bend the "search for truth" and a failure to recognize these institutions and their many historical analogues just means that you miss out on some rather important understanding when interacting with the literature.

I still feel the ideal should be a search for truth, even if human institutions do the work. I'm a fan of Feynman's stuff:

>...As a matter of fact, I can also define science another way: Science is the belief in the ignorance of experts. When someone says, "Science teaches such and such," he is using the word incorrectly.

>Science doesn't teach anything; experience teaches it. If they say to you, "Science has shown such and such," you might ask, "How does science show it? How did the scientists find out? How? What? Where?"

>It should not be "science has shown" but "this experiment, this effect, has shown." And you have as much right as anyone else, upon hearing about the experiments--but be patient and listen to all the evidence--to judge whether a sensible conclusion has been arrived at. https://feynman.com/science/what-is-science/

I always took that for granted but seems some don't.

> > It should not be "science has shown" but "this experiment, this effect, has shown." And you have as much right as anyone else, upon hearing about the experiments--but be patient and listen to all the evidence--to judge whether a sensible conclusion has been arrived at. https://feynman.com/science/what-is-science/

There are so many cases in which the interpretation of the data is difficult. There are many cases in which there are either experiments with seemingly conflicting data, and two different plausible interpretations of existing data. I consider myself highly intelligent and reasonably well informed and yet, were I the one setting policy, I would still need to rely on the opinions of experts in various fields to interpret what data we have on various issues.

Multiple problems here:

1. Science has always been political, this isn't new. Some of the first major experiments were performed in Nazi camps. Cancer treatment began with torturing Black Americans. The entire idea of ethics is political in nature.

2. Science is still the search of truth. If it doesn't match your truth, then that doesn't mean the science is wrong.

3. Challenging scientific conclusions IS encouraged, but there is also a danger to it. Look at Covid. In the US alone, 500,000 Americans died from Covid. Challenging social distancing, masks, and vaccinations costs lives. I mean literally costs lives. The people challenging this were doing it for political purposes, i.e. most of them had absolutely no idea what the science said or how it might be wrong.

>I mean literally costs lives

We have overpopulation anyway. And we don't have shortage of normies by any measure. In fact some social problems like monopolies are due to overabundance of normies.

okay

> that there has been a great polarization of science as government and groups have used and twisted it to fit a political agenda

This does match any reality I know of. What political agenda has government twisted science to?

The government is quite responsive to the science, and generates science, but the NCI and other bodies have little partisan politics, thigh of course the arguments in science get political just like any other group of people. It's just not Republican/Democrat politics.

> Challenging scientific conclusions should be encouraged not cancelled.

Scientific conclusions are challenged all the time. It is highly encouraged. Entire research programs get challenged to justify their existence. Should we really be running all these SNP chips for GWAS? Turns out that it wasn't a great investment, but it seemed promising at the time...

Too often people are doing two things, one good such as challenging science conclusions, and one bad such as lying or being dishonest or arguing in bad faith. And when they get critiqued for the bad one, they retreat to treating it as criticism of the good thing they were doing. I see it all the time.

> Challenging scientific conclusions should be encouraged not cancelled.

Vaccines are on the docket for cancellation, which to be fair, will last only as long as a swath of the population sees their kids incapacitated by some completely preventable virus infection. But do we really have to go through an epidemic (again!) to understand that the science of vaccines is solid?

There is such a thing as settled science.

There is also such a thing as people too uneducated and non-expert to understand what science is settled.

There should be such a thing as not listening to non-experts about settled science.

The science on vaccines is solid, but there are potential side effects (that's also solid science). So when it comes to, for example, giving kids the vaccines, we have to balance the likelihood of serious side effects with the necessity of preventing the disease. In the case of COVID, the disease's risk to kids is extremely low, but they are still vaccinated. That is a political decision, and it is perfectly reasonable to dispute it.

That's a particularly clear cut example. There are many more complex scenarios where "trust the scientific experts" is dubious because science has a limited domain of applicability. When you pretend that non-scientific decisions must be made on a scientific basis, people see through it and become sceptical.

> That is a political decision, and it is perfectly reasonable to dispute it.

"Political decision" as a euphemism for allowing non-experts to decide how to minimize deaths? The same non-experts who couldn't even get the Monty Hall problem right, let alone the complexity of medical probability and statistics of [false | true] [positives | negatives] in Bayesian scenarios?

Good luck with that.

There's the problem with naive utilitarianism. The experts want to minimize deaths across the population. I want to minimize the risk to my otherwise healthy children (hypothetically. I don't have children and I am vaccinated). These legitimate desires can and do conflict. Who has precedence is entirely political, not scientific.

And plenty of medical experts get the Monty Hall problem wrong.

> And plenty of medical experts get the Monty Hall problem wrong.

Then they're not experts on prob and stats in medicine, and you shouldn't choose them to guide policy making when prob and stats in medicine are relevant. The alternative is to choose those who aren't experts in prob and stats in medicine, which results in policy bred from ignorance of the relevant math and science.

Choosing people who are ignorant of the relevant math and science over those who are knowledgeable is certainly one way to make policy, and it seems that is what folks want, so I guess we'll see how well that it works out.

Not just search for truth and fact, but use these truths and facts to develop ways that benefit people. The meaning of "benefit" is a philosophical/political consideration.

> Not just search for truth and fact, but use these truths and facts to develop ways that benefit people.

Wait, when did "how to use these truths" become part of science?? How you use science to develop things that benefit people (or organizations) is normally called engineering! Science is normally concerned only with finding useful facts about the world. There are some exceptions, like when you're using the scientific method exactly to figure out what benefits people (or any living organism), for example, using pharmacology to develop drugs that help people. But I would argue that even then, the main concern of pharmacology is to figure out what kinds of drugs have what effects on humans in certain conditions - i.e. it fits perfectly into the definition of "searching for truth and facts".

How you apply that knowledge science gives you to solve problems that affect society is called policy - and policy, while can be analysed using the scientific method, is normally not itself science. It's hard to use the scientific method to study policy, though, because there are far too many factors involved in anything to do with large groups of people, and far too little room to do experiments on them.

Here you said it: "useful". The meaning of the word "useful" is a philosophical/political consideration.

"useful" should be replaced with "interesting" because we never know what will turn out to be useful, but by definition, we only look for things that interest us. And I disagree that's a philosophical or political consideration in most cases. It may be in some institutions, but I am sure most scientists will circumvent any restrictions imposed by their institutions in order to actually study what they themselves find interesting, even if under the covers of what their institutions want them to.

As a tangent: even if you're correct that what scientists decide or are allowed to research is mostly political, the facts they find are not, at least if the scientific method is being used properly. Facts are never racist. Facts do not have opinions. And science should look for true facts, not opinions. Hence, even if your focus is on things you find political, the scientific facts and hypothesis you end up with must not be.

>> I am sure most scientists will circumvent any restrictions imposed by their institutions in order to actually study what they themselves find interesting

All I can say is (－‸ლ)

People double down as part of human psychology. Some grasp their own biases much better than others. We should try to train people to be more self reflective and less biased politically. It does not correlate with education level so something is clearly broken in higher ed..

I sense this has to do with personality, namely high conscientiousness and low neuroticism. That’s not something that can be taught.

How do you know it doesn't correlate with education level? I'm not saying it does, but it certainly could. I was definitely exposed to more ideas, even conflicting ideas through formal education. That said, I've never been one with strongly held opinions.

You need autism to be more self reflective. Ar you sure it can be trained?

It's difficult for me to believe that higher education levels don't correlate to being more rational. Do you have any source on that?

The basic purpose of Reason magazine, since their early days supporting Holocaust denial and Apartheid, through to modern climate change denial is exactly the politicization of science. So this is massively hypocritical.

Here is a list of Soviet nobel prize laureates, courtesy of Wikipedia https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Russian_Nobel_laurea.... There are several in the sciences up to the year 1978.

I’m sure that many were committed Communists, Bolsheviks, perhaps Marxist-Leninists until their last breath. Perhaps there were “Tankies” and Trotskyists among the bunch. Perhaps there were many who recited the right thing, or longed for the restoration of Tsarist rule, perhaps some who ended up ended by colleagues who thought they’d subverted revolution. I haven’t read all the biographies.

Perhaps science can be conducted by people across a political spectrum, and perhaps that might be a good thing.

After Stalin had all the scientists he didn’t like executed, he allowed the ones who were useful for developing weapons to live. Truly inspiring.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Repression_of_science_in_the...

“Leave them in peace. We can always shoot them later.”

https://cerncourier.com/a/reviews-2/

I can't really speak to the author's credentials but they link to two of their own articles and seem to be sour that SciAm didn't publish their work under this out-going editor's direction.

In general though, it seems like publications such as SciAm are under a lot of pressure in this political environment. Maybe more than ever. I'm sure they've no doubt faced criticism from scientists that wanted to publish climate-denialist "science," over the last 40-some-odd years.

It seems like the folks clamouring for "neutrality," in science are those that were most often marginalized for their unscientific writing and claims. This whole environment of "both sides," and pseudo-scientific conspiracy theories, and alternative-facts must be absolutely exhausting for editors.

I hope SciAm manages to stay progressive and continue to publish good stuff.

I feel like you missed a big chunk of the article. The author points out a number of cases where SciAm published outright false or misleading information, which always echoed progressive activist talking points. This has nothing to do with publishing climate denialism or other pseudoscience, it's about not publishing poor information just because it aligns with a particular world view.

SciAm is hardly an isolated example of this. It is wild to me how many organizations have twisted themselves around to promote various trendy progressive social causes that have no connection to their actual mission over the past decade or so. Mozilla is the poster child for this in tech.

I used to shake my head at this stuff, finding it mildly annoying but not all that consequential. After seeing the results of the last election and what voters have been telling pollsters for years, it's clear that this sort of activism is a massive albatross weighing on every single liberal politician and cause.

Turns out the author has no scientific credentials of any kind. They've been criticized for having an anti-trans bias in their writing [0].

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jesse_Singal

It's obvious that he would be criticized for "having an anti-trans bias" because saying anything that doesn't directly support the 'progressive agenda' about trans issues is, to those activists, an "anti-trans bias."

Many trans people have an 'anti-trans bias,' by those same criteria.

I think his credentials speak for themselves. He cites, as expertise, two articles (in popular magazines mind you, not scientific journals) and a book he wrote. That makes him an expert on gender health issues?

He has no medical degree, no published research to speak of.

GLAAD reviewed one of the articles and catalogued it: https://glaad.org/gap/jesse-singal/

The conclusion and many points in the article hinge on his self-claimed expertise. There is no expertise.

The article doesn't rely on the author's own credentials at all -- it lays out a few pieces that came out under this Helmuth's watch and opines that those were pretty poor quality. It does not take a Ph.D to know that thinking the normal distribution is a racist idea, is a dumb take. His complaints about the trans-related stuff relies on logic (the article details the argument clearly and it's not an appeal to his own authority, only to logic).

The type of junk Helmuth allowed into Scientific American shows that the right-wing is not the only party who will amplify and push any nonsense that happens to agree with or support its pet causes, without the slightest regard for facts or real science.

> But what really caught my eye was SciAm's coverage of the youth gender medicine debate. This is one of the few scientific subjects on which I've established a modicum of expertise: I've written articles about it for major outlets like The Atlantic and The Economist, and am working on a book.

That’s the line where he flashes credentials that supposedly gives him credibility to critique SciAm’s coverage of gender health.

He makes the claim that SciAm’s progressive stance is dangerous to people. Wild claim from someone that hosts a podcast and wrote some terrible articles. What an expert.

His 'modicum of expertise' amounts to him having read Cass Review that the SciAm article was critiquing, which was something the SciAm contributor had clearly not done. Since the Cass Review was saying "WPATH and AAP guidelines are flawed and here's why" and the SciAm response was "Cass Review doesn't comport with WPATH and AAP guidelines"

So yes, I'll consider the analysis of someone who has read the document in question, over the hack who didn't even read or get it and just wants to parrot the Progressive Dogma by denouncing everything they disagree with, using appeals to authority (WPATH and AAP).

I'm a bit baffled by this comment, so much so that I find it difficult to believe we've read the same article. I don't see any indication in the article that the author ever submitted any work to SciAm, let alone that he's sore about not being published. None of the examples he cites have anything to do with climate denialism, nor is he defending any pseudo-scientific conspiracy theories. How is any of this responding to the article you're commenting on?

No, you're right. I was referring to the pandering of credentials the author mentioned by citing the articles they published in other magazines and the book they're writing. No mention of their PhD in Medicine and specialization in the field though. Was that omitted?

> I've written articles about it for major outlets like The Atlantic and The Economist, and am working on a book. I found SciAm's coverage to not just be stupid (JEDI) or insulting or uncharitable (the Wilson story), but actually a little bit dangerous.

You're right, it doesn't sound like they're sour about not being published in SciAm. They're unhappy with the topics SciAm report on and the content of them.

Looking a bit deeper, the author is a co-host of the Blocked and Reported podcast and has been criticized for having an anti-trans bias in his writing [0].

It doesn't seem that he's a doctor of any sort, a scientist of any kind.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jesse_Singal

If you don't know who Jesse Singal is then why are you commenting so freely on him? Your opinion of him has no value so why share it?

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).

It's true! Britain has no bears so we like any refrence to them to be removed from our books ensuring we never have to think about them.

Strangely enough, I read about a bear that was lurking around at Paddington Station.

But that's a Peruvian bear.

There were also rumours of a pooh bear in East Sussex.

Let me guess, he claims he's just a tourist, but had two 400lb suitcases.

The swallow may fly south with the sun, or the house martin or the plover seek warmer hot lands in winter, yet these are not strangers to our land.

There’s a version of a book on birds that doesn’t have the gannet in it.

(Monty Python reference)

And a book on trees that doesn't have the larch in it.

I need to find it again but it said something along the lines of:

"this chapter has been removed as it describes experimentation on live bears."

it then goes on to apologise and has a lovely passive aggressive:

"we would hope that British readers would not like to carry out such experiments on live animals"

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.

I just chose one example from the early years of science, and one modern case. Anyone can fill in countless cases of science being highly politicized in the intervening centuries.

> 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.

No, science is generally objective, but its results have political implications. To take the pandemic as an example. Virology and epidemiology came to a clear, objective, true conclusion: social distancing and vaccination would drastically reduce the death toll of the pandemic. However, because there are people who reject social distancing (e.g., people who run businesses) and vaccination (anti-vaxxers and opportunistic politicians who see that as an issue they can push), virology and epidemiology have become politically controversial. It's also politically convenient in the United States to distract from the government's own failure to effectively respond to the pandemic by pushing conspiracy theories about the virus coming from a lab in a scary foreign country (and if you don't accept that this is a conspiracy theory, I'm sorry, but you've fallen victim to the widespread propaganda on this issue in American media over the last few years, which is 100% at odds with the conclusions that the scientific community has reached). The problem isn't with virology or epidemiology themselves. The problem is with how the society and political system respond to science.

Yeah, scanning through the recently published articles it seems "Reason" has no problem with the politicisation of science if it means the slashing of govenment funding.

Reason is an explicitly political magazine that advocates for Libertarian ideas of small government.

A lot of criticism of SA seems to be from those who don't read the magazine. It is still mostly just thorough coverage of developments in physics, biology, engineering, and other pretty uncontroversial science topics and this coverage has not 'gone downhill'. It is a lot of work to do good reporting of an area of science by talking to a range of experts in that area and SA still does good work here. Some topics are politicized, but that doesn't mean you just don't report on the science in those areas. Almost everyone who thinks 'SA used to be good now it is woke' are either revealing they don't read it or just don't seem to like how the consensus in an area of research might now conflict with their worldview.

They do have an opinion section, like many journalism outlets, which sort of by definition have to be 'hot takes' (e.g. you don't publish opinion pieces that 99% of people will already agree with). Out of thousands it is seems hard to avoid having some bad ones (all major outlets seem to have opinion pieces that are dumb). Most of the flack they get seems to be from these dumb pieces, and it is sad that the entire brand gets tarred with it. You could argue that SA just shouldn't have opinion pieces at all, but ultimately opinion pieces are pretty good at drawing readers and SA is not a non-profit. Additionally, while there are some that overstep the research and are 'click-baity', some opinion pieces are thought-provoking in a valuable way. Nonetheless, perhaps it would be better to get rid of the opinions just to avoid hurting the reputation of the rest of the magazine, but running a journalism magazine is a tough business and it is easy for commenters on the internet to pop in and say stuff like this who don't actually have to run a magazine. I would rather they exist with occasional bad opinion pieces than not exist at all, as their coverage in general is still great.

This guy seems to really not like their coverage of science around gender non-conforming individuals, though I don't see why I should trust his representation of the research over theirs as he seems to have an agenda as well. He then cherry-picks a few examples of some bad opinion pieces not written by their journalists that overstepped the research and then paints the entire outlet with it, and that is frustrating because most of the science coverage reporting is still excellent.

The author of this article very (in)famously re-launched his career as a writer (prior to GNC youth he wrote mostly culture pieces) by misinterpreting a scientific paper on the subject he now claims to be an expert on. I don’t think he did this maliciously, but I do think, like many writers, he struggles to digest scientific literature accurately.

Which article and how did he misinterpret it?

I’m a casual, occasional listener to his podcast (Blocked and Reported) but don’t really know his origin story and am curious to learn more.

Back in 2016 he wrote an article in The Cut titled "What's Missing From the Conversation About Transgender Kids."[1] (which, incidentally, has since been silently corrected by The Cut's editors). It draws some pretty major conclusions from a single study [2] where he seems to overlook some pretty glaring issues that contradict his conclusion. [3]

Signal, to his credit, admits the error, although he goes on to argue it actually strengthens his argument (It does not IMO).

[1] https://web.archive.org/web/20171202080010/https://www.thecu...

[2] https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/23702447/

[3] https://www.emilygorcenski.com/post/jesse-singal-got-more-wr... and https://emilygorcenski.com/post/jesse-singal-still-got-more-...

You can read Singal's response to these criticisms here: https://jessesingal.substack.com/p/a-sorta-quick-response-to...

The criticisms of Singal's piece are pretty weak, and often resort to refuting things he never actually wrote. He explicitly notes that data is sparse - this is one of the most controversial research subjects - but it does indeed suggest a desistance rate of 50-60% absent medical intervention. Contrast that with the common claim that desistance in gender dysphoric children is a myth which is just totally contradicted by the available evidence.

There's a list of resources critical of Jesse Singal here: https://www.patreon.com/posts/20353892

(found via https://bsky.app/profile/quatoria.bsky.social/post/3layjy6zb... )

(Sharing because I've been trying to do my personal learning on this topic)

A lot of awful men on that list.

Andrea James the obsessive stalker and harrasser, Julia Serrano the abusive misogynist who thinks lesbians should be shamed for not wanting dick, Ana Valens the creep who openly fantasizes about raping women in breeding farms.

If these horrible males are angry at Singal then I can only assume he's doing something right.

> Singal has argued repeatedly that Zucker was fired without cause due to a witch hunt by trans activists (this will come up again)

And Singal was right in that regard. Zucker was awarded over half a million dollars in a defamation suit: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kenneth_Zucker#Settlement

I know that I and many others switched to American Scientist years ago. SA has definitely gone downhill since the 80's. I would describe it as as bit softer/popular when I made the switch. I have no experience in the last few years.

Looking at https://www.scientificamerican.com/ I see the following front page topics and articles:

- Nutrition: It’s Actually Healthier to Enjoy Holiday Foods without the Anxiety

- Climate Change: Climate Change Is Altering Animals' Colors

- Climate Change: An Off Day in Brooklyn—And on Uranus

- Cats: Miaou! Curly Tails Give Cats an ‘Accent’

- Games: Spellement

- Opinion: We Can Live without Fossil Fuels

- Games: Science Jigsaw

- Arts: Poem: ‘The First Bite’

Don't know if it's representative, but it doesn't surprise me at all and is exactly why I don't subscribe.

The titles are clickbaity, but based on a quick skim of the content of those articles it doesn't feel too removed from reading the print issue ~15 years ago. Especially if you look at the featured articles from the most recent online issue [1]

[1] https://www.scientificamerican.com/issue/sa/2024/12-01/

I grant that the horse one looks pretty solid and interesting.

But it's the choice of topics. SciAm has an extremely narrow view of what science is worth publicizing, one that aligns very closely with online causes du jour. Looking at the recent technology topic articles, I see: AI causes e-waste; turning a car into a guitar; AI uses too much water; misinformation is an epidemic; voting is secure; zoetropes; another e-waste story; UN should study effects of nuclear war; bird going extinct; another misinformation story; AI and fungus; AI and (yet again) misinformation.

I guess there's a market for this stuff, but I'm not in it.

The downhill slide was already underway by the 1990s. Readership was in a slow decline and the publishers turned to various marketing gimmicks to maintain solvency. More pictorial articles, more po-sci articles, cover wrappers suggesting that it was worth subscribing even if you didn't read the whole magazine etc. I stopped reading around 2000, when I bought an issue and noticed I had read the whole thing in under 4 hours rather than the usual 5-6. A comparison indicated they had changed the font size and line spacing slightly, so as to maintain the same page count but with about 15% less content.

I distinctly remember an article in the late 1990s (guessing 1998) which I read, but which I now can't find. It was about Y2K, and the bottom line was, we need more work to prevent disaster, but no matter how much is done, it will still be pretty awful.

I thought at the time he was exaggerating, and that Y2K was unlikely to be a big event. As everyone knows, a lot was done to fix the problem, and January 1, 2000 indeed turned out to be a non-event.

I cannot find the article now. I know I didn't dream it up, and I'm pretty certain it was in SciAm--I remember it had the usual sorts of graphs, illustrations, layout etc. as all SciAm articles did back then. If anyone can find it, I'd appreciate knowing. It was a turning point in my own reading of SciAm--I mostly gave it up after that, despite having devoured it up until 1980 or so.

The issue isn’t that Scientific American leans “pro-Democrat” and it is political. It always has, and that’s understandable.

The real problem is that the modern Democratic Party increasingly aligns with postmodernism, which is inherently anti-science (Postmodernism challenges the objectivity and universality of scientific knowledge, framing it as a social construct shaped by culture, power, and historical context, rather than an evidence-based pursuit of truth).

We have such low standards for republicans, it's amazing. We complain that democrats are increasingly acknowleding that science is done by humans and humans will tend to ask questions based on what phenomena they've encountered and what explanations they've been given in their lives up til then, but totally give the republicans a pass on catering to groups that deny global warming, evolution or even that the world is more than 6000 years old.

Tu quoque; Republicans harboring fringe beliefs in some cases isn't a response to Democrats' mainstream acceptance of beliefs that the scientific method doesn't accurately reflect reality.

This is not "some cases." This is core policy of the party. You can see major leaders within state and federal legislative and executive bodies actively denying climate change research on a daily basis.

So biological denialism is a morally superior position to hold, then? Democratic leaders can't ever seem to acknowledge biological differences between the sexes, certainly not with regards to competitive advantages.

As for it being "core policy", I'd need to a see a citation, otherwise it's conjecture. The 2024 GOP platform [1] doesn't mention climate change, global warming, IPCC, et al. once, whereas the DNC's platform [2] discusses it at length.

[1] https://ballotpedia.org/The_Republican_Party_Platform,_2024 [2] https://democrats.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/08/FINAL-MASTE...

> biological denialism

What is this? I would have thought that the idea that some people who are outwardly one sex have brain wiring for the other sex is quite plausible. Development is very messy.

The significant increase in non-binary gender identity and rapid onset gender dysphoria suggests there's a cultural factor at work. A 2021 systematic review found mixed results for transgender brain structures mirroring their self-identified sex, with most neuroanatomical measures mapping to their birth sex.

Though I agree with you that development is messy. We should be much more concerned about exposing children to endocrine disruptors, micro-plastics, and bizarre social dogmas.

> a cultural factor at work

For example, recognition of the existence of the syndrome and reduction in social stigma. Kind of like how the rate of homosexuality increases when you stop subjecting them to vivisection.

For historical precendent, rate of people in US identifying as left-handed went from 4% in 1900 to 12% in 1950, and remained constant since then.

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/FChMzOFVkAAKsgp?format=jpg

Nice example.

So a 3x increase over 50 years for left-handedness.

By comparison there's been a 40-50x increase in gender clinic patients in just 11 years from ~100 patients in 2011 to 5000 patients in 2022: https://segm.org/images/280UK_22.svg

I'm arguing that there's a qualitative analogy of an increase in rates eventually leading to a plateau, and you're turning it into a quantitative argument?

The point here is that if there's discrimination against certain characteristics, there will be individuals that will deny part of their identity to the outside world.

But discrimination against trans individuals has by most measures increased. Bathroom bills, many states categorized gender medicine in minors as child abuse, etc. Polls asking people of they agree that gender can be changed has decreased over time: https://www.pewresearch.org/social-trends/2022/06/28/america...

So whatever is causing trans identification to increase ~250x faster than left-handedness is happening despite increasing discrimination against trans individuals.

These aren't intended to unfairly discriminate against the trans-identified. The purpose is to protect female spaces (which males really have no right to enter), and prevent medical harm to children by doctors with gender identity ideological beliefs.

Actual discrimination would be things like, repealing laws that protect individuals with a trans identity from being refused housing or employment because of that identity (or expression thereof). As far as I know, no-one is pushing any bills that would do this.

Where is your worldview on ROGD coming from?

It's been a rather contentious topic, and sciam has even written about some of the issues: https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/evidence-undermin... ( https://archive.ph/N1nAR )

"The American Psychological Association and 61 other health care providers’ organizations signed a letter in 2021 denouncing the validity of rapid-onset gender dysphoria (ROGD) as a clinical diagnosis" -> https://www.caaps.co/rogd-statement

I do not believe a being could tell if it has a male or female wired brain without relying on some fictitious tropes (or call it stereotypes) about manliness or femininity. This is a constructivistic/social phenomenon.

Well there's two questions. One is whether it's possible for "inner" sex and "outer" sex to be in conflict. There's no reason to think this is impossible.

The other is whether a person suffering from this could tell something was wrong. They couldn't diagnose the problem in detail, but shouldn't they be able to tell, at some level, that something isn't right? Denying the latter just sounds like gaslighting to me.

You misunderstood. I said "without relying on some fictitious tropes". If you have these tropes internalized (which is a common thing apparently) the conflict between the idealized gender roles and physical reality is bound to happen.

I don't think I've ever seen anyone deny the plausibility of the brain being wired differently than the body. What I believe the poster is referring to, and which I've seen in the media many times, is denial that physiological sex-linked characteristics are fully expressed even if doesn't match the one the brain is wired for. If brain wiring can mismatch physiology, it demonstrably is not determinative of the biology the brain is attached to in any meaningful way.

I understand the motivation for this denialism: most social institutions that segregate by sex are motivated by the practical effects of physiological sex-linked characteristics, brain wiring isn't a relevant criterion for determining "sex" for these purposes. It is currently impossible for the physiology to match the brain wiring in such case as a matter of science. Since the social institutions around sex segregation are widely viewed to exist for good reason, it motivates denial that physiological sex-linked characteristics actually exist for people that want to be segregated according to their brain-wiring sex.

It is very common for left-leaning figures in the US to deny that trans women and girls possess any advantage over cis females in sports. In reality trans women still possess greater bone density, higher average height, higher red blood cell concentrations, higher VO2 max, more fast-twitch muscle fiber and more.

I think it is fair to say that through the nomination process, whoever is voted to run as the Republican nominee for president is considered to be the best representative for the party. Looking at the president-elect and all of the leaders of the party, saying they have "fringe beliefs in some cases" is severely downplaying it.

That's a naive way to see it. People vote _against_ the other candidate, against what they fear is worse. And, if the theory that the frontrunner is the best representation of the party holds true, it speaks quite poorly for the Democrats appointing Harris despite Biden winning the vote of his party, no?

And, again, tu quoque; even if the GOP was exhaustively comprised of reality-evading lunatics, voters and all, it wouldn't excuse stooping to their level -- the DNC's _explicit_ support of racial identitarianism, benevolent racism, and biological denialism run in direct opposition to this supposed moral high ground they tacitly hold.

> it speaks quite poorly for the Democrats appointing Harris despite Biden winning the vote of his party, no?

Yes it does. I agree fully.

> the DNC's _explicit_ support of racial identitarianism, benevolent racism, and biological denialism run in direct opposition to this supposed moral high ground they tacitly hold.

I don't think benevolent racism means what you think it means and no one is denying biology. Trans people aren't even denying biology. I would suggest you actually speak to a few trans people in real life.

umm.. Scientific American said that differences in athletic ability of men and women are not based in Biology.

I am definitely not the person to write a dissertation in support of trans people but the logic being used as I understand it is that male and female are not the same as man and woman. Whether I or anyone else agree with that is up in the air.

Man by definition is an adult human male and woman by definition is an adult human female. So there is that.

Just sticking with actual science here; how do you define "adult human male", how do you define "adult human female" .. and what do you label humans that don't meet either of your definitions?

I'm assuming you have a checklist of physical characteristics and genetic attributes in mind, sticking purely with that which can be measured, tested and observed and steering clear of fuzzy concepts.

Males are females are biological sex labels. It's how our bodies develop so we can reproduce. Even if our bodies don't develop properly or if we have developmental sex disorders we are all either male or female.

If you lookup biological adult, it's just someone who has completeled their reproductive development.

So Boy, Girl, Man and Woman are also sex labels.

Also we now know more about how sex is more then just genitalia. This is why we have Sex and a Biological Variable https://www.nature.com/articles/npp2016215

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/B97803...!

> Even if our bodies don't develop properly or if we have developmental sex disorders we are all either male or female.

That's not what the actual developmental science says though.

The strong all humans are either male OR female by { unprovided definition } is simply incorrect.

> If you lookup biological adult, it's just someone who has completeled their reproductive development.

Sure. Some are born and develop into biological adult males. Others are born and develop into biological adult females. And others yet again are born and grow into adults who are neither one nor the other.

Look it up .. start with "intersex".

See your own first link, for example, it's really sloppy, and yet:

    Although all cells have a sex, designated by the presence and dosage of X or Y chromosomes, which in most cases will be XX (female) or XY (male),

* all cells will have a sex (okay ...)

* most will be XX (female) OR XY (male) (... okay)

* ... crickets ...

Nothing said about those cells that are neither male nor female.

All that aside, you have dodged the question.

What definition do you have for male, for female, and what do you designate the remainder?

Are you even aware that people are born who are neither male nor female by any of the generally accepted physical and genetic attributes?

The comment this subthread branched from was discussing the differences in athletic ability.

From the intersection of developmental biology and sports science research we know how male physical advantage in competition arises, and which set of known "intersex" (DSD) conditions confer this. For example, 5-alpha reductase 2 deficiency does. Swyer syndrome does not.

World Athletics' policy document Eligibility Regulations for the Female Classification does a good job of implementing this research into a workable policy: https://worldathletics.org/download/download?filename=2ffb8b...

Rather than trying to label all edge cases "female" or "male", this pragmatic approach optimizes for fairness in competition instead.

The comment I replied to was this one: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42190601

As you can see it made no mention of athletics.

I was curious about the self referential circular definitions and enquired of a specific person what their understanding of development biology was.

Thankyou for your response, it might be better directed toward the person who apparently hasn't yet realised that such a thing as intersex categories and conditions even exist.

Understood, the comment I was referring to was this one a bit further up: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42188151

I responded to your comment because it was the most recent in the thread, but I agree that it would have perhaps made more sense as a reply to the other commenter.

Anyhow the broader point I think is worth making is that there is often a more context-specific approach, of which eligibility criteria for competitive sporting events is one example.

> What definition do you have for male, for female, and what do you designate the remainder?

I didn't dodge the question, you just don't like my answer

Here are the English definitions.

Male: of or denoting the sex that produces small, typically motile gametes, especially spermatozoa, with which a female may be fertilized or inseminated to produce offspring.

Female:of or denoting the sex that can bear offspring or produce eggs, distinguished biologically by the production of gametes (ova) that can be fertilized by male gametes. "a herd of female deer"

Now I know what you are going to say, what if they cannot create gametes? That doesn't change anything because even if your reproductive organs don't develop properly nor function properly it doesn't make you neither male nor female.

You still have many other characteristics that needed to be addressed. This is why we have Sex as a Biological Variable.

> Are you even aware that people are born who are neither male nor female by any of the generally accepted physical and genetic attributes?

That's not really true, people are either male or female but didn't develop properly. Doesn't mean that they are neither nor, people with DSDs are documented. I know there are groups trying to push away from the concept of DSDs but there is not a consensus. People have all sorts of development disorders, this is just one kind.

Now even if there were people who were of no sex, it doesn't mean we start changing sex labels for fully developed people because we now consider it a social construct. The people who follow Gender Theory like to use people with DSDs to push the idea that fully developed people can change their sex and they can't.

https://www.nas.org/academic-questions/33/2/in-humans-sex-is...

Your playing with words to try and get the idea of Biological sex thrown out is not going to work here.

> That's not really true,

Yes, it is true, whether you like it or not.

    "if the term intersex is to retain any meaning, the term should be restricted to those conditions in which chromosomal sex is inconsistent with phenotypic sex, or in which the phenotype is not classifiable as either male or female"

~ https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/0022449020955213...

> people are either male or female but didn't develop properly.

How do you classify that which is unclassifiable by experts in the field?

> Your [sic] playing with words to try ..

I'm not any of the experts in the field looking at natal development and debating the breadth of variation.

Your argument is not with myself but with the documented literature on the subject.

> Yes, it is true, whether you like it or not.

Some people disagree:

https://www.nas.org/academic-questions/33/2/in-humans-sex-is...

Why “Intersex” Conditions Do Not Invalidate the Sex Binary

But what about “intersex” individuals? Unfortunately, confusion and misunderstanding reign when it comes to their existence. Humans are indeed born with a variety of “intersex” conditions at low frequency, but that does not mean that these conditions are part of normal healthy variation. Humans are also born with a great variety of devastating congenital deformities and diseases, and if alien exozoologists were to write a description of Homo sapiens based on extensive observations of the population, such a description would never feature, for example, anencephaly, and neither would it include anything else but binary sex.

Extremely deleterious phenotypes, especially when their fitness is invariant with respect to environmental conditions, cannot be part of that description, as they are by definition actively eliminated from the population. The mathematics of natural selection is remorseless. For the human population, even an allele with an initial frequency as low as 0.01 and selection coefficient s = 0.05 is nearly ensured fixation. On the other hand, that should not be taken to mean that natural selection is all powerful. First, even if an allele is strongly deleterious, its frequency will not be zero, as it is constantly reintroduced by mutations at some rate µ. Second, alleles with small selective (dis)advantages are not ensured fixation. Genetic drift can lead to fixation of alleles with small selective coefficients irrespective of their effects, as long as s < ~1/Ne (Ne is the effective population size).

Therefore we cannot expect “perfection” from biological processes. Imagine that a biochemical reaction runs with a given accuracy in a finite population. The selective advantage of mutations improving its accuracy will generally be at most the fractional improvement that they confer. Thus it is not possible for selection to push the system towards absolute perfection as further fractional improvements are “invisible” to it if smaller than the selection barrier ~1/Ne. Errors are thus expected to occur everywhere, and indeed they do. This is why important genes get mutated, developmental processes get disrupted, and the results are newborns with very low fitness.

These facts bear on how we are to think about “intersex”' people. The great diversity of such conditions cannot be explored here in detail. These include Androgen Insensitivity Syndrome (feminization of males due to androgen receptor mutations), Klinefelter's syndrome (47,XXY karyotype), XX male syndrome (46, XX “males” due to translocation of the master regulator SRY to the X), Turner's syndrome (45,X0) and many others.

These conditions present with a variety of phenotypes intermediate between typical male and female features, but they have one crucial commonality—individuals afflicted are almost invariably sterile;20 on the few occasions where fertility is possible, the phenotypes are mild and it is hard to even call them “intersex.” Their evolutionary fitness is therefore as negative as fitness could possibly be short of being stillborn (s = -1 for sterile individuals). Importantly, these fitness reductions are invariant to environmental variables. It is possible for a condition that is a debilitating disease under some circumstances to be beneficial under others (e.g. sickle-cell anemia and malaria). But this does not apply to the inability to produce viable gametes which makes one unable to reproduce under all circumstances.

All “intersex” conditions, when examined, clearly arise from single-gene mutations or chromosomal aberrations on a genetic background that would have indisputably been producing male or female gametes had these mutations not occurred, and, rarely, due to chimerism (i.e. individuals made up of both male and female cells). True hermaphrodites possessing both sets of functional gonads and genitalia have never been observed in Homo sapiens.

Therefore the “intersex” argument against the sex binary is simply not valid. Intersex individuals exist only because of continuous de novo reintroduction of the relevant mutations in the population, recessive genes becoming unmasked, or disruptions of normal embryonic development.

Sex in mammals is on a fundamental level binary and immutable, and claims that “intersex'” individuals disprove that can only be made in the absence of any consideration of the biological nature of humans and how our evolutionary history has shaped our biology. Which brings us to the most worrying aspect of the widespread adoption of such denial

This person is not alone.

https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC10265381/

https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC5824932/

I know there is a ongoing social debate about this, and there are people withing the field who disagrees. So it's not like you are showing me anything I haven't already seen.

The idea that there is a consensus is not accurate. There are people who disagree and they have been writing about it.

Expect to see more.

404. But have you heard the term "bimodal distribution"?

I'm sorry but the text you quoted is nonsense. Alien exozoologists could very well write about Homo sapiens "rarely they are born without brains, and die quickly." They would be correct to do so. However, this is quite a minute and usually irrelevant feature of the species. If they go into enough detail, they would write it.

There are more transgender people born than anencephalic people (... if they can even be called that).

And sterile people aren't non-people. They are people, so a very detailed description of the species would say that some people are sterile, sometimes because they are intersex.

> All “intersex” conditions, when examined, clearly arise from single-gene mutations or chromosomal aberrations on a genetic background that would have indisputably been producing male or female gametes had these mutations not occurred

so what? this is meaningless. This is searching for plausible sounding arguments to justify a desired conclusion.

> Therefore the “intersex” argument against the sex binary is simply not valid. Intersex individuals exist

therefore sex is not completely binary. It doesn't matter why. You are reaching for plausible sounding arguments, that on closer inspection still make no sense. Some people are male, some are female, and some are neither, therefore, it is not true that all people are male or female. QED. This is very basic logic. Defying very basic logic is nonsense. You might as well argue that 1+1=3, we just haven't seen it yet.

> Sex in mammals is on a fundamental level binary and immutable

What would it take to disprove this for you? I have a feeling that if someone designed a gender change ray that could convert a human male into a human female, in all aspects including cellular genetics, genitals, and brain structure, you'd still say sex was immutable and the ray didn't really do that.

> claims that “intersex'” individuals disprove that can only be made in the absence of any consideration of the biological nature of humans

Claims that sex is strictly binary, rather than bimodal, can only be made while looking the emperor in the eye and saying his clothes are gorgeous. Intersex people exist, and they are not male or female - that's the definition. But you don't want to hear it, and would rather pretend they somehow don't count. That's the denial here.

Alternatively, perhaps you believe that sex is a property that is not shared by all people. That is, perhaps you believe that some people do not have a sex. Is this the case?

Keep in mind: just because something is on pubmed, doesn't make it true. "Trust the science" is bullshit, right?

> 404.

It seems they were trying to link to this article, but mangled the link: https://www.nas.org/academic-questions/33/2/in-humans-sex-is...

It's a thoughtful piece that discusses sex in a much broader and more fundamental biological context than just our human species.

It would be worth reading the whole thing rather than just the quoted section.

> Claims that sex is strictly binary, rather than bimodal, can only be made while looking the emperor in the eye and saying his clothes are gorgeous.

I think you may be confusing sex with sex-linked traits.

For example: testosterone levels. If you sample a randomly selected population of humans and plot this variable, it will show a bimodal distribution.

But this is because the sample contains two discrete populations that have an average difference between them in that variable: males with higher testosterone and females with lower testosterone.

So you will invent a property called sex that is not always based on facts and observations, but sometimes based on your own opinion just for the sake of making it always binary even when the facts aren't?

No, I'm not saying that. How did you come to that conclusion from reading my comment (and the linked article)?

That's because the person has no real answer.

None of the people pushing this concept does.

> I think it is fair to say that through the nomination process, whoever is voted to run as the Republican nominee for president is considered to be the best representative for the party.

It is not fair to say that at all. The primary system is highly undemocratic, and what’s more, the people who participate in it aren’t statistically representative of Republican voters as a whole.

Even if you are voting against someone, the person who you voting for is the person you find the most palatable of the options presented. I also don't think you can look at the de-facto leader of the party and say "in some cases" as if the president isn't a big case.

Democrats' mainstream acceptance of beliefs that the scientific method doesn't accurately reflect reality

No such belief exists. Recognizing the existence of bias in a science (with biased input data having detrimental effects on the reliability of the results) or observing the existence of methodological shortcomings is not the same as repudiating the method.

Nobody was talking about Republicans in this thread until you brought them up.

Criticizing Democrats doesn't necessarily mean one likes Republicans. The two poles of the idiosyncratic US political system aren't the only ideologies or worldviews that exist.

[flagged]

Filter bubbles are real. If you spend your time watching (low quality) videos with a bent (anti-feminist/transgender, e.g.) you begin to believe that is the majority discourse.

Its similar to homophobia - a small (tiny) portion of the population expresses "nominal" preference towards homosexuality, however, there is an outsized fear among those who feel threatened by the concept...

Well your argument holds all the same should you replace "anti-" with "pro-" etc.

As it should. Those were examples, point was repeated exposure to something doesn't make it more true, just makes you more brainwashed.

Unequivocally. Remember that the parties aren't diametric opposites, and are capable of evading reality simultaneously.

Yes, a portion of Democratic Party leadership has appeared to move away from science and reason in some cases.

One example that frustrated me as a taxpayer and parent with kids in school: here in California, it was Democratic policymakers who removed Algebra from high school curricula, arguing that it would help address disparities among minority students.

This is a pedagogy and social policy decision, not a scientific one. You can disagree with it, but it isn't like we have scientific research that incontrovertibly provides education policy recommendations to address social disparities.

Changing math curricula isn't denying math and reason itself.

How about insisting that puberty blockers are an effective treatment for gender dysphoria despite international reviews that fail to show a benefit? [0] And despite virtually every other first world nation no longer recommending the treatment? And refusing to publish NIH funded studies on puberty blockers when they fail to show they effectiveness you thought they would? Does that count as denying science and reason?

[0] https://www.nytimes.com/2024/05/13/health/hilary-cass-transg...

[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2024/10/23/science/puberty-blockers-...

There is definitely a small Faction of left wingers with unusual ideas. Generalizing that To a broader conclusion about democrats is wild.

I don’t think high school math is on the Democratic party platform in California. In any case, no one was advocating cutting out Algebra. The debate was about moving Algebra I from middle school to High School and removing Calculus from High School. I think delaying Algebra for all students is probably a bad idea. Removing Calculus from high school only makes sense if they replace it with something like Statistics.

The California school curriculum includes and has always included algebra.

Don't worry, you won't have to worry about what they teach your children in school anymore - Republicans are going to destroy the department of education.

Can you tell me what the Department of Education has measurably accomplished since its establishment in 1979? Inflation adjusted spending per student has increased by about 3X since then, and test scores have not improved, even falling in recent years. Financial aid for college has perversely led to vastly overinflated tuitions, while subsidizing many useless degrees.

These problems are not a simple matter of funding. One need only at California's High Speed Rail project. Costs have soared from early estimates of $15B to now more than $130B+, despite almost no track being laid over the last 15 years. This is in a one party state with complete Democrat control, so you can't blame Republicans.

Bureaucratic mismanagement and inefficiency are the overwhelming problems now.

I'm not even American, but if you think you can simply cut a budget to solve your problems, you're delusional. Americans are on average much more educated and skilled (in the labor market) than in 1979, obviously.

In my country, most colleges are state owned and free, I had an engineering degree for €600 per year. Skyrocketing tuitions in America is purely a result of profiteering, largely enabled by the republicans and not kept in check by the weak democrats.

But if you still think gutting your public services will improve anything, just look at what austerity did to the UK.

Can you point me to the high school where Algebra was removed? I know they were doing work on when to introduce Algebra I, but I've never seen any mention of the class being fully removed from a high school.

https://freedompact.co.uk/podcast/128-dr-gad-saad-the-war-on...

"Professor Saad’s latest book The Parasitic Mind: how infectious ideas are killing common sense takes a wonderful look at some of the ideas which are so prominent in society today. We discuss the granddaddy of ‘idea pathogens’ as Gad calls it Postmodernism, we discuss the fear of biology, ..., the war on science, truth and reason that we all have a stake in and much, much more."

A subset of the progressive wing stretches science to meet its ideology. One of the opeds in SciAm is a good example of that. Centrists (both liberal and conservative) tend to be a bit more grounded in direct reality.

I agree that postmodernism, or at least your definition of it, is so much nonsense (in the realm of hard sciences, at least - soft science unfortunately does suffer from human contextual bias issues).

I don't read SciAm (maybe that's an issue), but I'm a bit suspicious that this could be a political hit piece.

That being said, if any of the claims in the article are true (e.g. calling statistic normal distribution curves an affront to humanity), that would indeed be a travesty (that such makes it through editing).

I think a less impassioned, more objective take would also present e.g. the number of times a needlessly conservatively minded piece made it through editing.

I.e. is it that SciAm is suddenly biased unscientific drivel or is it that society representatively has become more extreme?

>but I'm a bit suspicious that this could be a political hit piece.

Reason is right-libertarian and has to occasionally shoot at least a few bullets in the direction of the opposing front on the culture war lest the conservative barrier troops[0] shoot them. Likewise there's a lot of right-wing authoritarians who try fishing for new suckers in the right-libertarian pool. This weird interplay between libertarians and authoritarians on the right side of the political compass has been a thing since at least when capital-L libertarian figures were talking about "paleoconservatives" and Ron Paul was paying ghostwriters to write all those hilariously racist newsletters back in the 90s.

[0] Barrier troops are soldiers in an army whose job it is to shoot at their own deserters.

As a libertarian whose thinking has gone through the whole spectrum of left-right and back again, the fundamental problem is that [pure] right libertarianism is inherently contradictory, despite its simplicity making it extremely attractive. A core principle of rightist thinking is an assumption that there is some bedrock of moral axioms, and as long as we follow them then the resulting situations must also be morally right by construction. This directly clashes with Gödel's famous results in logic, which show that complexity itself creates new logical contradictions. Rightest libertarians (eg the bulk of the Libertarian party, Constitutional fundamentalists, etc) are still running off the failed ideas from the 1910's that produced efforts like the Principia Mathematica.

The way I've come to see it, left and right essentially correspond to two modes of reasoning, inductive versus deductive - they are both required to get anywhere worthwhile. The current highly divisive political environment is essentially making everybody think with only half their brains. This is both lucrative (it feels good to have lazy answers validated rather than criticized), as well as disempowering (it keeps individuals from agreeing on substantive political opposition to ever-growing corporate authoritarianism).

Postmodernism has a bit of relevance for hard sciences, because relativity is known to be counterintuitive, and as a consequence theories will have absolutist bias. Consider Roger Penrose's Andromeda argument, where he tries to reason about synchronism in the context of special theory of relativity, but ends up assuming Galilean absolute synchronism, because Lorentz synchronism is counterintuitive.

Bad interpretations of data or theories are always a possibility, however that's only relevant to the interpretation.

Unless the data itself is fabricated, i.e. unscientific, the hard sciences are "hard" because they don't suffer from these flaws of interpretation (as much). There of course issues with observability, replicability, however these are issues that can be dealt largely without invoking any societal biases, aka through the scientific method.

Rejecting the scientific method completely because humans are involved at any step, is a form of absurd-ism, yes, we are not perfect, but our methods are a lot better than a) nothing b) your choice to reject hard science because it doesn't match your personal belief (hard bias).

It doesn't reject scientific method completely, but you also can't trivially ignore social dynamics, because scientific method routinely deals with issue simply by waiting for the old generation to go extinct, then consensus can be naturally reached.

I think you'll find upon inspection the hard sciences are based on consensus reached and not overturned for centuries, not generations.

If you were arguing with me in the 11th century perhaps you'd have a valid concern, at the point at which we've been successfully doing this for almost a whole millennia, I strongly disagree with your assertion(s).

In the past science waited to overturn a consensus, today it waits to reach a consensus.

Like climate change? Like support of masking up when COVID was killing more than a 1000 people a day? Like believing "conversion therapy" doesn't work and is actually harmful? Like understanding sex and gender and two things even though we use the same words to describe both? Like voter fraud is minimal (pop question: after the 2016 election Trump claimed there were more than 3 million illegal votes cast. As president he had all the resources in the world to investigate it, had a personal reason to identify it, had the duty as president to root it out. He formed a commission ... and nothing. Was was because he was negligent in his duties, tried but was incompetent, or was simply lying?)

> Like believing "conversion therapy" doesn't work and is actually harmful? Like understanding sex and gender and two things even though we use the same words to describe both?

Like believing puberty blockers are an effective treatment for gender dysphoria despite historical evidence being extremely weak, ignoring or condemning more modern, rigorous studies [0], and refusing to publish your own studies when they don't confirm your preconceived position [1].

You don't need to convince anyone that Republicans don't care about science. But many of us also see the ways in which the "trust the science" crowd throw actual science out the second it contradicts their position.

[0] https://www.nytimes.com/2024/05/13/health/hilary-cass-transg...

[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2024/10/23/science/puberty-blockers-...

Were you to read the comments of that article about the unpublished research, You could see that many people who I am sure identify as liberals agree that the scientists took the wrong action.

Though I admit that I understand why a researcher would hesitate, knowing that bigoted politicians and Evangelicals would use it as a cudgel against trans rights and trans people themselves.

The science of puberty blockers is clear to me: they prevent the unwanted development of secondary sex characteristics in adolescents and have a number of side effects that may or may not be tolerable for any particular individual.

What would you suggest is the proper treatment for trans children suffering gender dysphoria if they are denied puberty blockers and/or hormone replacement therapy? Do you think that forcing them to develop unwanted secondary sex characteristics is going to reduce their dysphoria? Do you think that you should be responsible for telling another a parent what they should or should not allow their child to do? By what criteria should you or the state be able to overrule a parent? Should a child be allowed any agency at all over their own body? And if not children, should adults?

I don't think that science can even begin to answer these questions and that it is a red herring to frame this debate in utilitarian scientific terms (e.g. science shows that puberty blockers don't statistically improve mental health and therefore should be banned). With this kind of science, we lose the unique individual human being which for me is the loss of everything that truly matters.

Many adults desist and detransition so why wouldn't children, if left to develop normally? The problem with blocking these dysphoric childrens' puberty, putting them on cross-sex hormones and, in some cases, surgically removing body parts, is that they're never given a chance to explore how they would feel as fully developed adults.

Even referring to them as "trans children" comes with the assumption that this is some inherent and unchanging quality rather than a temporary state. Why assume this without evidence?

It's reasonable to criticize people that take the ideas and concepts from postmodernism too far into nonsensical corners.

But postmodernism, as a philosophical and larger historical/analytical approach, is not some evil boogieman. Lots of things have been done based on purported science knowledge that was, with historical context and with a proper critical eye, complete nonsense at best, and evil at worst. It was quite easy to make phrenology look like science. Postmodernism studies how it is possible to make something look like science. It's a complicated topic with consequences for the framing and development of scientific knowledge. There's no reason to discredit scientific endeavor in totality because of that though, and, to be honest, those people are far more fringe in academia, for instance, than people realize. And just as well, properly framed, there is no reason to wholesale discredit the critiques made by postmodernism of the uses and abuses of scientific knowledge by scientific institutions, governments, individuals, and the ways that arose out of culture and historical context.

Postmodernism isn't anti-science, it's anti-modernism. Postmodernism doesn't care about science aside from the fact that it happens to make claims to objectivity, which postmodernism disdains. This is sort of like arguing that relativity is anti-science because it denies the existence of a privileged "objective" or "universal" reference frame.

To put it another way: if modernism was actually true and science was an inherently objective process that produced universal truths, then why do we have persistent and ongoing replication crisises in multiple scientific disciplines? Our answer has to come from postmodernism: the current scientific establishment values the production of papers as a way to fill magazines, and people with agendas to push (e.g. the American sugar lobby) will fund the production of scientific papers that produce the answer they want. If that makes sense to you, then you're a postmodernist.

Science has been rewarding politics (e.g. securing funding) over achieving objective truths. Objectivity is a modernist value, and proposing ways how to systemically change society to advance modernist values is something we've been doing for hundreds of years. On the other hand, postmodernism tends to criticize the pursuit of objectivity while embracing subjectivity.

Can you give an example of an evidence-based pursuit of truth that was not in any way shaped by culture, power, or historical context?

The discovery of the atom? Huge cross-continental diverse group of humans of varying levels of power and privilege running successive experiments that led to our current atomic model.

It seems to me like a lot of historical context would go into that discovery. You also mention power, privilege, and collaboration across continents.

All of these factors shape the process of doing science. I think it's an amazing (and beautiful!) thing that we can collaborate on such a scale.

Science is done by people, and I think it's silly to pretend that people can somehow operate in a way that's entirely removed from history and culture.

> It seems to me like a lot of historical context would go into that discovery […] it's silly to pretend that people can somehow operate in a way that's entirely removed from history and culture.

Certainly in terms of who was able to participate in the discovery, but I doubt the actual discovered structure was shaped much by the discoverers. Put another way, I would be absolutely fascinated to see other accurate greenfield formulations of an atomic model that do not resemble our current one which could have been invented by another set of possible discoverers enabled by fortune to pursue them. I think that the ideas defining the model comprise the “shape” of the discovery more than the discoverers themselves, who merely stumbled upon them and investigated.

Now talk about the crowd size at Trump's first inauguration, and the birth of the term "alternative facts".

Let's be real here, if there's one side that has an anti-science stance it's the republicans. They are pandering to (when they are not themselves) climate change deniers, evolution deniers, flat earthers, qanons... Those people don't vote democrat.

As for postmodernism, it is far from mainstream in academia, and you seem to have a very narrow idea of what it is. I can only recommend the following video (by an actual scientist!): https://youtu.be/ESEFUaEA7kk

??? Postmodernism does not deny the Germ Theory of Disease or Newtonian physics. You have some very flawed, Jordan Peterson-tainted ideas of what Postmodern theory is, especially in regard to physical sciences.

Sure, social sciences like anthropology and economics in which human actors are in play will have their "objectivity" challenged.

I wouldn't describe it as "pro-Democrat" - that would imply it embraces the Democrat governing agenda. For example, embracing more federal power compared to the Republican ideology of more state power. Which has nothing to do with science.

It's more so caught up in the liberal cultural agenda. Which Democrats align with. A square is a rectangle but a rectangle is not always a square.

I think _both_ conservatives and liberals have turned to postmodernist questioning of science. Just as conservatives question climate change science, liberals question biological sex science.

Both are detriments to society and show how we're not exactly moving forward culturally. But it seems the liberals, who tend to embrace a panpolitical ideology (where everything is political) are actively hurting established science. Thus Scientific American would be a much more useful and enduring resource - especially in the social media age - if it kept to science and didn't cross into politics.

The modern Democratic party doesn't believe that. Sure, there are movements in the party that probably believe that, but it's very much a minority view. Lets avoid trying to frame minority or fringe views as the mainline belief of either party.

I loved Scientific American as it was in the 1970s-80s, and was saddened to see what happened to it after around 2000(?), but I can see how having an editor like Helmuth would be a rational choice for the owners. The purpose of a commercial magazine is to generate income, and as Fox/CNN/NYT/Guardian realized, being objectively informative is a sub-optimal approach. I do wonder how we can ever again have something like the old Scientific American.

Relish the memory, it is gone and the civilization that supports such things is gone too. What we have today is a sad, sensationalist farce. We're entering a new Dark Age, and it is riding in on fascism.

My mom had subscribed to Scientific American for more than twenty years (maybe 30), but for this very reason stopped her subscription a few years ago. It had turned from informing its readers about science to political posturing. She was sad that she's lost a previously intellectually valuable resource.

I suspect we'll eventually get something like a Substack for Science author (editor) on a subscription model that will do long form pieces and invite SMEs to talk about their stuff.

To the "everything is political" crowd:

The complaint is not that SciAm writes about politics. It's that they write SCIENTIFIC NONSENSE when arguing for political causes.

Exhibit A: "the so-called normal distribution of statistics assumes that there are default humans who serve as the standard that the rest of us can be accurately measured against."

Is that nonsense? Isn't it just saying that normal distributions are misleading when multimodal distributions would be more accurate? The indignant tone is unnecessary but it's not wrong to say complex systems cannot be modeled with a simple normal distribution.

It is simply saying the assumption of a normal distribution is incorrect for the population, which without context of what particular data they were observing would be impossible to know if it is in fact nonsense.

So, quite sesnsical indeed but possibly, circumstantially incorrect? It seems like a non-controversial stance to take.

Perhaps something like that was the intention, but it's not what the written text says.

Normal Distribution is a mathematical concept used in probability theory and statistics. It has nothing to do with any concept of "default humans".

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Normal_distribution

If you read the whole paragraph, it's obvious what the writer intended to convey: that health research often assumes that there is one average, representative person, and everybody else is clustered around that person in a normal distribution. The author asserts that this is wrong, because people are dissimilar in more complex ways, and instead often fall into different clusters, rather than one bell curve.

In my opinion, the author's assertion is correct; we've seen in the past that research failed to find how medication affects women in specific ways, because that research was based on the premise that people are largely the same, and thus failed to specifically test the effects on each gender individually.

The sentence people quote out of context is, by itself, confusing and weird, and thus should not have been written that way. But in context, it's obvious what the writer intended to convey, and the intent is in no way anti-scientific.

I tend to agree, and go even further. The idea of averages and normal distribution means are grossly over-used in medicine and social discourse. They can sometimes be useful for population level discussions, but rarely personal healthcare or decision making.

Medicine and public policy is plagued by advice and recommendations for the average person, but the average person does not exist. 50% will be above average, and 50% will be below.

> Medicine and public policy is plagued by advice and recommendations for the average person

To be fair, this is often the fault of the media, pundits and politicians cherry-picking studies and losing significant nuance in the process. At the same time, there are too many papers which do a poor job of sufficiently highlighting uncertainty in their conclusions.

You are adding nuance to the underlying concept and failing to see how the wielders of the concept don't have that nuance.

Take BMI; first, i've seen arguments against BMI using the "there is no baseline normal" argument just like the original statement you quoted. Second, i've seen arguments that BMI as a concept is just invalid and rationales / facts that lend credence to the concept of BMI are somehow invalid. Finally, there's the inevitable ad hominem: it must be bigots who use the phrase BMI.

I don't think I'm adding any nuance, I'm explaining the context in which the quoted sentence was originally written. The nuance was already there, I just pointed it out, because it got lost when people selectively quoted that one sentence.

I agree that there are people who take any idea to its absurd extreme. I do not think the author of that article is one of those people.

> that health research often assumes that there is one average, representative person, and everybody else is clustered around that person in a normal distribution.

But complex clustering isn’t more or less true than the normal distribution in general, it just depends what you’re talking about.

That’s why railing against “the so-called normal distribution” comes across as inappropriate for a serious publication, it is suspiciously lacking nuance. Then one wonders how/why the nuance has gone missing. Politics masquerading as empiricism is an especially gross bait and switch.

Her main point was absolutely defensible. Making embarrassingly false statements should never have gotten past the editors of a scientific publication.

Honestly, just to protect the author who clearly did not have the background to be expected to get that statement entirely correct, which is truly fine. But not fine for the publication.

If they are science communicators and they are writing things that can be explained reasonably easily in such confusing and weird ways, shouldn't they be fired?

I don't believe the author of the article is employed by Scientific American. She just wrote an opinion piece for them.

Popular science has always promulgated culture.

If you're only complaining now, it's just because you don't like the culture SA is promulgating today.

I don't disagree that SA has a lot of nonsense in it, but that's a long trailing symptom. We've been in a time for a while now where easily observable facts are untrue and manufactured fictions are true, as long as it follows a self-serving narrative.

Helmuth became editor in chief of SA in 2020 -- well after reality stopped mattering pretty much anywhere.

No doubt a publisher trying to keep a traditional publication afloat in the internet age noticed. (And no doubt the publisher has noticed it's now time to flip the politics the other way, hence Helmuth is out.)

The funniest part was when she claimed the posts "do not reflect my beliefs". Her allies seem to know that isn't true. On BS there are plenty of congratulations for her willingness to say what so many others are thinking, etc.

1: https://www.npr.org/2024/11/15/nx-s1-5193258/scientific-amer...

I clicked on the links of the articles linked to by the author as "egregious" examples of Helmuth's editorial bias, and they're both clearly labeled _OPINION_. (Opinion articles are not scientific articles because they are __opinion__.)

May need to choose some better examples if the author wants to support his point.

Why does a scientific magazine have an Opinion section in the first place? Has it always? I would guess the number of Opinion pieces has gone up dramatically in the last decade.

It provides a valuable path to outside perspective? Generally you would expect some credentials and vetting in what opinion you post. But the idea seems fine? Good, even.

Probably because opinions are interesting to most people and people who read pop sci magazines want to read opinions that have more of a science/evidence bent then what they can get out of other magazines and/or newspapers.

> Why does a scientific magazine have an Opinion section in the first place?

Nature has an Opinion section. New Scientist does too. Most magazines do.

> I would guess the number of Opinion pieces has gone up dramatically in the last decade

Did you do any research on this or just throwing out random guesses?

> Did you do any research on this or just throwing out random guesses?

As I said, I said it was a guess. I tried chatgpt, but no help there. I was hoping that people here who are more regular SA readers than me would have a sense of this.

It is well-known that people do not discern reporting and opinion coverage. IMO this barrier is exacerbated in scientific publications, where science-like language is used throughout. It gives the sense that "science" is behind the opinion.

This may not sway science-savvy readers of the magazine, but when it is reported elsewhere ("Scientific American magazine says XYZ"), it surely misleads people. I'd rather science magazines stick to science, but that's just me.

> As I said, I said it was a guess. I tried chatgpt, but no help there.

"We've tried nothing and we're all out of ideas"

"Editorial bias" and "opinion article" aren't mutually exclusive.

Is there bias in what opinions SciAm chooses to print?

If that was the point the original article was trying to make then they should have provided evidence of that, rather than selecting a couple opinion articles to try to build a case for their own very clear ideological leanings.

There may or may not be editorial bias at SciAm -- no idea since I don't read it, and not really interested either way -- but that article was a shoddy piece.

>they're both clearly labeled _OPINION_. (Opinion articles are not scientific articles because they are __opinion__.)

People who supported Fox News during it's heyday used the same argument.

I really don't care if she went on a political rant on BlueSky. What I do care about is that SA has become a click-baity site without much depth. I don't know if she's responsible for that, though (I doubt that she alone made that happen).

If anyone is interested, there's some discussion of this piece on the subreddit of the Blocked and Reported podcast (which is co-hosted by Jesse Singal, the author of this article):

https://old.reddit.com/r/BlockedAndReported/comments/1gult0b...

https://www.reddit.com/r/BlockedAndReported/comments/1gult0b...

Oh boy, after 30 years we're finally getting a resurgence of the Science Wars!

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Science_wars

Edit: Also be sure to read the prequel

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lysenkoism

  Did you know that [...] the normal distribution—a vital and basic statistical concept—is inherently suspect? [...] That author also explained that "the so-called normal distribution of statistics assumes that there are default humans who serve as the standard that the rest of us can be accurately measured against." But the normal distribution doesn't make any such value judgments, and only someone lacking in basic education about stats—someone who definitely shouldn't be writing about the subject for a top magazine—could make such a claim.

This is Jesse Singal (Reason) throwing shade at Laura Helmuth (SciAm) for publishing a piece in which Monica McLemore allegedly claims that scientists shouldn't judge humans against a normal distribution. Singal thinks only morons would make that mistake.

This is why SciAm was "really bad" under Helmuth, not just "bad".

Does the author not understand the concept of "opinion piece"? Every "article" he takes issue with is NOT a scientific article, but an opinion piece.

A lot of people really don't understand the difference between science and opinion, and that's exactly what's gotten us into the trouble we're in today.

If you include enough opinion pieces on highly controversial subjects and always from the same perspective your readers will start noticing. Just because they are opinions it doesn't mean that people can't deem them ridiculous.

Sure, but the author gave us two examples over how many issues? He didn't come remotely close to making his point. :shrug:

In a different context, HN tends to have the same feelings about Scientific American, see: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29741171

I think there's an argument to be made that Scientific American shouldn't have opinion pieces that readers will misinterpret as scientific fact.

Especially when some other outlet reports "Scientific American says XYZ". Readers will absolutely treat this as if there are scientific underpinnings. They will give it more credence than a regular opinion piece. The vast majority of them will never know it was even an opinion piece in the first place.

I would guess that if you asked 100 random people who had heard of Scientific American, many/most would say that SA publishes science and has no Opinion section. Before this dustup, I would have been in that camp.

Do you not understand the opinion pieces are part of the problem too ?

Scientific American isn't a social media platform; by publishing these opinion pieces, they implicitly support them. Would you be ok if they published an opinion piece bashing evolution and defending creationism?

> by publishing these opinion pieces, they implicitly support them

This would seem to be true if they tend to run opinion pieces that are all from one "side". If they ran pieces that espouse conflicting viewpoints, it would not imply that they support all of the opinion pieces they publish.

From the look of it, they stick to one team. They wouldn't be taking this heat if they had a broader diversity of thought.

Depends on what you consider diversity of thought. "Bashing evolution" is not diversity of thought, it is crackpottery. Diversity of thought exists in opinions about, e.g. what evolutionary mechanisms are most important, how to interpret old evidence, what are the best opportunities for new research... A Creationist will look at that and call it "all one team" because none of them believe the universe is only 5000 years old, but that's nonsense. It's important to keep an open mind, but not so open your brain falls out.

I expect them to publish op/ed pieces they believe their subscribers will find interesting. As long as they're clearer labeled as opinion, what's the problem? Op/ed pieces have been part of journalism pretty much forever.

Major news orgs publish op-eds they disagree with all the time. They label them as opinion.

It's actually unfortunate if publications decide only to publish things they agree with because that fails to acknowledge they could be wrong.

Evolution and creationism are settled wars (as far as science is concerned) and wouldn't be interesting to readers. It would be interesting to read a serious assessment of, say, the Covid lab leak theory.

> by publishing these opinion pieces, they implicitly support them.

Not at all. Especially if the articles are from guest writers and not the typical editors.

So?

Should it be impossible to have a rigorous scientific method for reporting and peer review in the news section, while advocating for certain actions or perspectives in the opinion page?

If someone sends me a Wall Street Journal news article that reports on facts, I can trust it, even if their opinion page is intellectually bankrupt.

Opinion pieces in scientific magazine should be based on the facts, and not just on opinions.

There was one slogan that was repeated during COVID that perfectly encapsulates the degeneration and capture of science: "Follow the science".

That's not how science works. Religions are "followed". Science is based on questioning and skepticism and falsifiability.

Vaccine denial's conclusions are so woefully unscientific that one can excuse the lack of technical precision in the synthesis of a pro-vaccination slogan.

There are legitimate reasons to be concerned over the COVID vaccines that have nothing to do with 'vaccine denial' [1]. What does 'vaccine denial' even mean? I've never met anyone who denies the existence of vaccines.

[1] Such as the elevated cardio vascular risk for young men that exceeded their risk from COVID.

If we know that [1] is true, then we know it because of science. So believing it is not against trusting the science.

What does this have to do with 'trusting the science'. I'm wondering what the phrase 'vaccine denial' means.

> What does 'vaccine denial' even mean?

It's a shorthand for "science denial" about vaccines.

See also: The belief that vaccines cause autism.

True, but practically speaking: on the flip-side, basically nobody affected by the pandemic had the resources to execute on hypothesis-testing during the pandemic. There wasn't anything else they could do but decide what sources they trusted and follow them.

People saying that didn't mean it as "obey the science," they meant, "follow the science to the conclusions it leads you to."

For example, people would ask public health officials what they thought about things, and the data wouldn't be sufficient to say with certainty. So they said they'd follow the science, meaning "we'll make a decision based on data."

You can criticize a lot of unscientific decisions that people made after saying that, but you've misinterpreted the phrase.

> People saying that didn't mean it as "obey the science," they meant, "follow the science to the conclusions it leads you to."

People saying that absolutely meant "obey the science" to the point that a substantial number of them [4] wanted to incarcerate and deprive of their livelihood anyone that didn't obey their idea of science.

- https://edition.cnn.com/2020/03/31/us/violating-coronavirus-...

- https://www.forbes.com/sites/alexandrasternlicht/2020/04/06/...

- https://oaklandpostonline.com/31966/features/my-familys-smal...

[4] https://www.statista.com/chart/23458/support-for-future-lock...

You're making an enormous leap from "follow the science" to health policy and then again to legal consequences of violating local laws.

No one said, "'The Science' told us to arrest people for going to church!" The science did (and does) say that a huge amount of the spread of Covid was due to church attendance (and gyms, concerts, and clubs) at the time, particularly because of rapid singing/breathing and close quarters in those settings.

What people decide to do with that isn't scientific. It's local policy.

When you have a system where people are legally entitled to free health care (as they are in emergencies in the US), then the government should have a right to tell them to cut out unnecessary activities in an extreme crisis that had depleted local medical resources. It's just as easy to hold religious services on Zoom.

I would have preferred that when people were caught violating these laws, they were allowed to continue, but only if they signed a document forfeiting their right to emergency medical care.

> You're making an enormous leap from "follow the science" to health policy and then again to legal consequences of violating local laws.

You are trying to mince words there.

Can you please explain how it is possible to "obey the science" (which these people called for) from a purely political "health policy" perspective but from not "legal consequences" perspective?

What are the "health policy" policies that are to be implemented to "obey the science" (as they were asking for), that don't demand any "legal consequences"?

P.S.: Also, your suggestion of denying aid to these people is just totalitarian, actually. Let's do the same about obese people, then: that would cut health spending by more than half for everyone else.

Every piece called out here is clearly labeled "opinion" - did they even read the normal news and analysis sections? Countless newspapers and outlets and actual scientific journals have opinion/editorial sections that are generally very well firewalled from the factual content. You could collect the worst hot takes from a few years of nearly any site with a dedicated opinion page and pretend that it has gone downhill. But that this the whole point of having a separate opinion section — so opinions have a place to go, and are not slipped into factual reporting. And many opinion pieces are submitted by others or solicited as a way to show a view that the newsroom doesn't or can't espouse.

Whether the EIC of SciAm overstepped with her own editorializing is probably not something we as outsiders can really say, given the complexities of running a newsroom. I would caution people against taking this superficial judgment too seriously.

The linked article itself is an opinion piece.

Reason does interesting stuff, sure, but no mistake it has a bias and that is a right centre libertarian view that loads factual content toward a predetermined conconclusion that individual free thinkers trump all.

As such they take part in a current conservative habit of demonising "Science" to undermine results that bear on, say, environmental health, climate change, on so on that might result in slowing down a libertarian vision of industry.

I still read their copy, I'm a broad ingestor of content, but no one should be blind to their lean either.

I agree people should be aware of the bias of their sources (all of them), but there's no reason for anyone to be mistaken about Reason. (Please forgive the wording, I couldn't think of better.)

Unlike many other sources, Reason doesn't pretend to be neutral. They admit:

"Reason is the nation's leading libertarian magazine."

https://reason.com/about/

Does libertarianism take a position on transgender issues? (This seems to be one focus area of the article.) I can see the author has a strong view but I don't know how libertarianism informs it.

Libertarianism theoretically could go either way. Theoretically, do what you want with your bodies.

However, libertarianias as they exist tend to be socially conservative - somehow they end up agreeing with GOP position on social issues. In this case, convervatives hate trans people, so libertarians too.

Libertarians, at least the ones that subscribe to Reason, are not socially conservative. Just read a few articles and this is very apparent.

The 2024 Libertarian Party Presidential candidate was a pro-trans gay man.

> The 2024 Libertarian Party Presidential candidate was a pro-trans gay man.

And is pro-choice (but anti-government funding for abortion). And Reason seems positive about him: https://reason.com/2024/11/06/chase-oliver-calls-libertarian...

> exist tend to be socially conservative - somehow they end up agreeing with GOP position on social issues. In this case, convervatives hate trans people, so libertarians too

Maybe I'm in the minority, but I think you're conflating a few groups that I see as distinct:

Republicans vs. conservatives, and

(Holding various views about the best public policies regarding transgender issues) vs. (hating transgender persons)

The anti-trans outrage was rather major aspect of public life in last two years or so. Manufactured from the conservative groups that set politicizes for GOP, the ones that set the agenda. As far as public political life goes, these things are quite related and quite large source of votes for republican party. And it is very consistent - range goes somewhere between "not talking about it at all" to "being vocal in the outrage". However, I have yet to see politicians or public intellectuals on that side of spectrum to defend trans people or defend policies that makes life easier for trans people.

And just about last thing that is productive is to play again the euphemism game where we pretend that side of political spectrum does not mean what they say when it sounds ugly. We played it with abortions and it turned out, yep, they wanted to make them illegal and actually succeeded.

I hope this view is "people are free to do whatever they want", because if libertarianism is only about ownership freedom, it would be the less consistent ideology ever.

Any serious libertarian would say it (like most things) is absolutely none of the government's concern, at least with regards to consenting adults. There's probably a range of views when it comes to kids, though. Conversely, they wouldn't be interested in having the government policing the treatment of trans people between private parties, so they'd oppose things like legislation that protects them (or anyone) from discrimination in hiring, as an example.

FWIW, the author - Jesse Singal - is a writer I've followed for a while. I like him a lot - I find him level-headed and intellectually honest. I don't think he'd characterize himself as a libertarian rather than a liberal, despite being published by Reason here. He's just a science writer who ended up on the "trans kids healthcare" beat and has written about it extensively. I think he'd characterize his position as just "a lot of medical treatments for kids are being pushed on [in his opinion] flimsy science for [in his opinion] ideological reasons"; and he'd say that this is a scientific position rather than a political one. Of course he takes a lot of crap for this, and of course he's also attracted a fanbase of bozos for this. But his writing, generally, deserves better than either.

Libertarians have a "my body my choice" position for things like raw milk and vaccines, and a "no you shouldn't be allowed that" position for abortion and hormones, because they've ended up on the rightwing side of the culture war.

Are you saying the linked is meant to demonize science? The impression I got was that he was doing the exact opposite: saying that SciAm's editorial direction was harming the public perception of science, which could have far-reaching effects. I don't see that as an anti-science stance.

The author's little trans tirade is a great example, and you can start with his "I'm something of a medical expert" line. Pure ideology.

I can't find where the author writes "I'm something of a medical expert". But for myself, I'm not up to date on the research. Does this article misrepresent the current state of scientific understanding?

> Most importantly, [the article] falsely claimed that there is solid evidence youth gender medicine ameliorates adolescent suicidality, when we absolutely do not know that to any degree of certainty.

There's solid evidence youth gender medicine ameliorates suicidality. Cherry picking from a single study is dishonest.

And unscientific.

To be clear - the accusation isn't SciAm was politicised, but that it was politicised in an ideologically unacceptable way.

I doubt we'd hear a squeak of complaint if a new editor started promoting crackpot opinion pieces about how all research should be funded by markets instead of governments (because governments shouldn't exist), or that libertarianism is the highest form of rationality.

I'll take its deeply-felt concern for science and reason seriously when it starts calling out RFK Jr for being unscientific. (Prediction: this will never happen.)

Did we read the same article? It literally has a section calling out RFK Jr, as follows:

> If experts aren't to be trusted, charlatans and cranks will step into the vacuum. To mangle a line from Archer, "Do you want a world where RFK Jr. is the head of HHS? That's how you get a world where RFK Jr. is appointed head of HHS."

What is this, if not an explicit call-out? I don't agree with or see a need to defend Reason very often, but what more do you want from them, here?

> I doubt we'd hear a squeak […]

Perhaps, especially in a dialogue specifically about scientific, reasoning and factual quality, we should avoid arguments based on counterfactual conjectures. A type of argument so weak it facilitates any viewpoint.

If you have even weak evidence, better to reference that.

> There's solid evidence youth gender medicine ameliorates suicidality.

Not at all true, there is no solid evidence of this. That's why it's so controversial, because ideologues are pushing for these pharmaceutical and surgical interventions on children despite the paucity of evidence.

> ideologues are pushing for these pharmaceutical and surgical interventions on children despite the paucity of evidence.

And you're pushing anti-trans propaganda that surgical interventions are happening on children despite paucity of evidence that it's happening. Not to mention lumping together puberty blockers with surgery, which you should not.

> And you're pushing anti-trans propaganda that surgical interventions are happening on children despite paucity of evidence that it's happening

It is well documented that it's happening.

See for example https://www.reuters.com/investigates/special-report/usa-tran..., specifically the section titled "U.S. patients ages 13-17 undergoing mastectomy with a prior gender dysphoria diagnosis".

That's not propaganda, it's data from medical insurance claims. There is other evidence too, including peer-reviewed research published in medical journals, and recordings of clinicians discussing this.

It’s become something of a cliche to see this exchange: “it never happens”, followed by clear evidence of it happening. One wonders if it ever leads to the person questioning what other misconceptions they’ve been fed.

It's mainly the parents pushing for medical intervention. Keep in mind that the impetus is generally a suicide attempt or self-mutilation by their 10 year old.

There's nothing fun or trendy or exciting about this for child or family. Deeply embarrassing, far worse than getting your first hernia check if your memory goes back that far.

The one thing we absolutely did. not. need. through all of this were politicians and the peanut gallery weighing in on a private medical situation while ignoring the point of our effort.

Nothing in this article, and none of the comments here mention the life of the child in question. Too busy scoring points to think about reality or humanity in any way. What do you think that looks like from my perspective?

Yes, it absolutely does.

The Cass Review mentioned was composed by a group of authors who are well-known to be opposed to trans healthcare, its methodology and conclusions are heavily criticized by subject experts (basically, "there is no evidence if you ignore all the evidence"), and even Cass herself has stated after publication that it is flawed. It does not represent the current scientific understanding of trans healthcare, so criticizing SciAm and even calling it "dangerous" for pointing this out is rather dubious.

The Cass Review was written primarily for political reasons. It isn't a peer-reviewed article written by neutral subject experts, and it should not be treated as such. The fact that Reason treats it as ground truth and ignores all the subject experts opposing it should say enough about their view on science.

I don't think what you're saying is true. I'm unaware of any indication that Hilary Cass for example is opposed to trans healthcare, and indeed she's explicitly stated that she agrees some young people benefit from it.

Video with references talking about Cass.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zI57lFn_vWk

This video correctly states that the Cass Review explicitly supported trans healthcare in general. It does not seem to describe any particular author of the review who is opposed to trans healthcare. The host notes that Cass met with people who do oppose trans healthcare - but wouldn't it be problematic for a review of a new field of medical science to categorically exclude people who think it's bunk?

Not quite "medical expert" but the author does establish (or attempt to) as a leading figure on this topic in paragraph 11:

"This is one of the few scientific subjects on which I've established a modicum of expertise"

Long way from medical expert but it does imply a higher-level understanding of the science here. Whether writing a few articles makes someone an expert is up to the individual to decide.

"This is one of the few scientific subjects on which I've established a modicum of expertise"

It doesn't make it clear that the author's issue appears to be solely with the editorial opinion pieces and thus feeds into trending mythology that "(modern) science is bad", has replication, DEI, woke, etc. crisis.

This is the "old science" good, "new science" bad leaning that lends itself to ignoring climate costs and anything else that libertarians of various shades might object to.

What does diversity and trans and such have to do with climate science? They seem to be entirely separate topics.

You have to understand the current US culture context to understand the answer to that question.

Right wing propaganda outlets will often link topic like these with farcical statements similar to “from the people that brought you men in women’s’ bathrooms (trans) comes a demand that you get rid of your gas stove (climate change, indoor air health).”

You'd honestly have to ask the people that dislike modern science for it's acceptance of diversity, discussion of intersex genetics, publishing of climate science papers, and so forth.

They're vocal enough in forums about the place, near as I can tell these things are all harbingers of the decline and death of science as they know it.

The examples given in the article are quite egregious, and the authors of those pieces are not notable.

SciAm nonetheless made the decision that those particular opinions should be published under their banner, and it’s not clear on what basis that decision was made other than editorial discretion.

If an editor of a science magazine chose to publish op-eds about how 5G causes cancer and then went on a Twitter rant along those lines that impugns her credibility and judgment as a whole. Similarly here.

I'm unsure that helps things? Maybe if some of the excerpts were jokes? The criticism of JEDI is particularly laughable. If sad. I say that as someone that finds the acronym cringe worthy.

So, yeah, I agree that the standards are lower in these sections. I question if they are non existent.

"I'm not questioning your standards; I'm denying their existence entirely."

> Every piece called out here is clearly labeled "opinion"

True if one stopped reading half-way through.

Opinion: Astrology should be seriously considered...

That label doesn't give carte blanche to publish non-scientific nonsense. Does it?

Well, that sounds like a very interesting theme to study scientifically indeed: what makes astrology such a resilient and widespread cultural practice in contemporary citizens?

Statistically there are absolutely robust correlations between month of birth and certain traits, but because of stuff like age-at-starting-school not voodoo about the stars. So it's not surprising people keep noticing such patterns, they're just incorrect at identifying the root causes.

The opinion pieces in pretty much every major newspaper are mixed in with the “factual” content, so for the average person reading, there is no difference. See for example “top links” sections, which include both.

Not true, this is not labeled anywhere I can see as opinion, but does include an editors note to a suicide helpline, and a correction...

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/what-are-puberty-...

What isn’t factual in this article? Is it political because it discusses puberty blockers and transgender adolescents?

I think GP agrees it is factual. It is also called out in the OP ("contained countless errors and misinterpretations").

So it's a counterexample to the claim "Every piece called out here is clearly labeled 'opinion'"

One part that isn’t factual is the statement on safety of GnRHs which cites their use in treating precocious puberty, which is a completely different indication and treatment (age of treatment, length of treatment, purpose of treatment), and does not consider the impact on psychosexual development, nor consider the impact on desistance of non-trans kids. The “safe and reversible” narrative originates in medical consensus amongst doctors and activists, not evidence from scientific enquiry. The difference between consensus-based medicine and evidence-based medicine eludes most participants in this debate.

The statement regarding precocious puberty is entirely factual, and the statement linking that claim to supplying the same hormones to trans kids is linked to an article containing more detail (including a discussion of possible downsides and links to actual papers). I'd agree wholeheartedly that the difference between consensus and evidence-based medicine eludes most participants in the debate, but frankly that seems to apply far more to the side of the debate whose higher quality analysis is of the form of "it appears the systematic studies the other side have done might exhibit researcher bias, so rather than do our own retrospective on the same research subjects we'll just move for speedy consensus to ban the practice altogether"

It is certainly not factual to claim that a drug which is safe in treatment X (precocious puberty) is also safe in treatment Y (gender dysphoria). The article conflates both as “puberty delaying treatments”, as if the learning from one is completely transferable to the other. It is not. The differences I mentioned are material.

The “side” (scare quotes, for there are multiple positions available, not just those that come through the lens of US politics) with the higher quality analysis is that expressed in the Cass Review, which does not call for a ban, but rather for clinical trials and a data linkage study (for which data linking adult outcomes to pediatric gender interventions has so far been withheld by the relevant clinics - draw your own conclusions about why they would not want that to be surfaced).

The differences may well be material, but as I mentioned in the post above it's simply false to claim SA conflate the two when they link (multiple times) to an article looking at trans people specifically and also mention that they are healthy and safe when prescribed to other young people for other reasons. An article which links to an article discussing outcomes of a drug in young people that also mentions below that it's routinely and uncontroversially prescribed in old people would not be factually inaccurate, even though young people and old people are evidently not identical and it is not impossible the two have different outcomes.

The Cass Review itself offers no evidence the blockers are dangerous or inevitably irreversible (or if one takes a less cautious approach, cause patients more problems with irreversibility than not using them), merely finding that only two papers providing evidence for the treatment being safe and optimal were of "high quality" with others being of "moderate" quality or "low" quality and calling for another trial. It did not find higher quality papers drawing opposing conclusions. People more knowledgeable and cynical than me have suggested that treatments for other, less politically-charged but complex conditions may also suffer from the literature that supports clinicians preferred approach being of "moderate" quality but seldom face shutdown as a result. The side that trumpeted this conclusion (because it very much is political, even in the UK) delightedly concluded that as the favourably-disposed evidence mostly fell short of excellence, all gender affirming care must be shut down permanently. Perhaps you view things differently and would very much like to see the new clinics opened and a clinical trial designed to Ms Cass' liking devised, but it's safe to say most of the people trumpeting it as the last word in the debate would not.

When reading the article I do get the impression they try to downplay the potential risks.

quote 1: “These puberty-pausing medications are widely used in many different populations and safely so,” McNamara says.

quote 2: “From an ethical and a legal perspective, this is a benign medication,” Giordano says. She is puzzled by the extra scrutiny these treatments receive, considering their benefits and limited risks. “There are no sound clinical, ethical or legal reasons for denying them to those in need,” she says.

quote 3: Like any medication, GnRHas carry the potential for adverse effects.

Now if you read one of the studies they link (https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC7497424/).

quote: "Arguments against the use of GnRHa that have been raised include possible long-term adverse effects on health, psychological, and sexual functioning (Laidlaw, Cretella, & Donovan, 2019; Richards, Maxwell, & McCune, 2019; Vrouenraets et al., 2015)."

I really feel like they overstate the strength of their positions with the articles they cite. All of them show clear limitations of the results which clearly show we need more data.

I don't think Scientific American are exactly hiding that they hold a position on the issue. But I don't think that they've misrepresented that study, which is an observational study looking for evidence of whether there's any truth to those sorts of arguments (the citations appears to be two letters to the editor and an ethics paper...) which didn't find them, mainly because there weren't many dropouts to study.

It absolutely does offer that evidence. Blockers are indeed irreversible, they can lead to infertility and inability to orgasm depending on the length of time they're taken. Even shorter periods of puberty blockers will change height, muscle, and skeletal development.

Evidence based medicine doesn't mean that we simply give people treatments unless they're proven to be harmful. It means we don't give treatments unless we know that the effects are positive.

The UK is far from alone in pausing medicalization of gender dysphoric children. This is the case throughout pretty much all of the European continent at this point, prescription of puberty blockers and cross sex hormones is either banned or exclusively permitted as part of clinical trials - which means patients are explicitly told that this is experimental treatment, and the outcomes of patients needs to be tracked and published.

> Even shorter periods of puberty blockers will change height, muscle, and skeletal development.

All of which are desired outcomes from the point of view of the patient at the time they request the puberty blockers, and for the duration of the time they keep taking them[1]. You don't conclude an otoplasty is harmful because the patient has less ear afterwards, but you might conclude the practice of otoplasty in minors was harmful if regret was a common outcome. And we know that the proportion of children who choose to cease gender-related treatment, like the proportion of children regretting elective otoplasties, is non-zero[2]. But what Cass absolutely didn't find was evidence to support opponents' presumption that the regret was somehow disproportionate. It just concluded the existing papers on the topic lacked the evidential qualities of some other areas of medical research.

So sure, I'm going to agree there's a good case for raising the quality bar of the existing body of scientific research and doing so carefully, there absolutely is. But that's quite different from concluding that the evidence that is there points to frequency of unwanted side effects seldom found in treatments deemed safe and reversible.

[1]or more specifically, the desired outcome is to prevent more rapid and less reversible physiological changes the patient expressly doesn't want to happen. [2]and in some respects elective otoplasty on minors is more complex: your ears don't rapidly and irreversibly grow if a clinic suggests putting body image aside and deferring the decision until adulthood, and the effects of the surgery are instant, rather than the result of a sustained process where the default is your ear reverting back to roughly the way it would have been was unless you commit to it for an extended period of time.

No, I don't think patients want to have brittle bones that are much more likely to break. I don't think patients wanted to never experience an orgasm. These are not desired outcomes. These are unintended negative side effects of preventing natural puberty.

Again, the claim is that puberty blockers are reversible. A natal male patient that is unsure of their identity and takes puberty blockers for some time then ceases treatment will on average be shorter than if he had never taken blockers. They are not reversible. The effects of puberty blockers are permanent.

The Cass Review found that rates into regretted transition were very limited because they didn't follow up with patients for long periods of time. In particular, the youth gender clinics in the UK didn't follow up with any patients after the age of 18. So when they say that they measured an incredibly low rate of regret, understand that this is a low percentage of patients that reported regret by the age of 18. Someone who started to regret it at 19 or in their 20s is not counted. What the Cass Review found was that bodies like WPATH and AAP were claiming low rates of regret when the evidence base for that claim was extremely weak.

Evidence based medicine doesn't mean we just adopt any anything goes stance until it's been proven that treatment is harmful. Evidence based medicine means we don't give treatment until we have evidence that treat confers good outcomes - at least not outside of a research setting.

I don't think patients who want to be addressed as a women particularly wish to end up 6'4" tall with broad shoulders, but those are unintended side effects of unwanted puberty for a significant number of people currently requesting blockers.

So being smaller is literally an intended effect of choosing blockers. And the relatively small proportion of natal male patients that cease treatment go through puberty, hence the primary effect is not irreversible. Being statistically slightly smaller in stature wouldn't typically be classed as a harmful side effect of any other course of treatment, particularly where the purpose of the treatment was to ensure those choosing to continue successfully avoid more drastic and completely irreversible changes in stature before making a decision on hormones which actually are extremely difficult to reverse. Since we're insisting that WPATH and the AAP's evidence base is a bit thin, I'm sure I'm going to be wowed by the list of citations you produce for puberty blockers causing significant harm in the form of "brittle bones that are much likely to break"...

The Cass Review found that a children's clinic didn't conduct followup exercises with adults and didn't regard other followup studies involving adult cohorts as conclusive. I haven't disputed that, or that medicine is typically more cautious than other sciences. What I am disputing is that the Cass Report concluded that puberty blockers were dangerous and irreversible when prescribed to people with gender dysphoria. I mean, if she actually believed that had been established, she wouldn't be recommending trials, right...

> I don't think patients who want to be addressed as a women particularly wish to end up 6'4" tall with broad shoulders, but those are unintended side effects of unwanted puberty for a significant number of people currently requesting blockers.

For the third time your claim was that puberty blockers are reversible. This is false. If this hypothetical child decided to stop taking puberty blockers, the impact on height would not be reversed. He would not reach the same height if he took blockers and stopped than if he never took blockers at all. Puberty blockers are not reversible.

And again, impacts on bone density and inability to achieve orgasm are most certainly not desired and these side effects go entirely unmentioned in your response. I don't know why you imply there's no research on these side effects:

https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC9578106/#:~:text=Re....

> Results consistently indicate a negative impact of long-term puberty suppression on bone mineral density, especially at the lumbar spine, which is only partially restored after sex steroid administration. Trans girls are more vulnerable than trans boys for compromised bone health.

https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC9886596/#:~:text=Pu....

> Puberty blockers, cross-sex hormones and genital surgery also pose risks to sexual function, particularly the physiological capacity for arousal and orgasm. It is important to be aware there is a dearth of research studying the impact of GAT on GD youth’s sexual function, but I provide a brief discussion of this important topic. Estrogen use in transwomen is associated with decreased sexual desire and erectile dysfunction and testosterone for transmen may lead to vaginal atrophy and dyspareunia

I'm not sure why you think that bringing up a survey showing moderately reduced bone density following long term puberty suppression and transition (sonething actually referenced by Scientific American, along with a note the cause/effect wasn't settled given that gender dysphoria sufferers also tend to have smaller bone structure than average before starting treatment, plausibly due due exercise effects) is evidence of "brittle bones that break more often" being a significant risk factor, which is your actual claim. For the third time, my point is that the Cass Report concluded that the evidence base that found the treatment safe and regret rates low didn't meet the highest possible bar for quality and coverage, and did not offer supporting evidence of the greater merit of claims made to promote the idea that puberty blockers were unsafe when used for gender dysphoria, relative to other treatments or other use of the same treatment, such as wild insinuations about bone-breaking being a common side effect of their temporary use...

For similar reasons, studies which shows erectile dysfunction is not uncommon in patients who have chosen to continue treatment using oestrogen, (universally agreed to have irreversible consequences; it's literally the point of using puberty blockers rather than going straight to sex hormones) is not a high standard of evidence that using puberty blockers for a few months aged 11 is significantly less reversible than using for a year or two aged nine. The actual claim being made: that the treatment is reversible in the sense that children are able to come off it and go through puberty, isn't really being contested here either.

> The actual claim being made: that the treatment is reversible in the sense that children are able to come off it and go through puberty, isn't really being contested here either.

By this logic cross sex hormones are reversible too: someone can stop taking artificial estrogen and stop taking anti-androgens and their body will resume production of natural hormones. You can come off cross sex hormones just like you can come off puberty blockers, under your interpretation of the word "reversible". But that's obviously not what people are talking about when they describe treatment and reversible.

Puberty blockers do indeed leave permanent effects. Yes, you can go off puberty blockers. But years of skipped puberty will have permanent effects. Puberty blockers are as reversible as cross sex hormones: yes, you can stop taking them and resume your body's normal hormone production but the time spent altering hormones will have permanent effects.

The descriptions of puberty blockers promulgated by activist groups like mermaids were so misinformed that the UK government has to force them to change their language: https://www.theguardian.com/society/2024/oct/24/trans-childr...

> The watchdog asked Mermaids to review its position on puberty blockers, particularly a section on its website stating that the effects of the treatment were reversible. The Cass review found that the evidence base on puberty blockers was “weak”; puberty blockers will now only be prescribed as part of a NHS clinical trial. Mermaids has removed text stating that puberty blockers are an “internationally recognised safe, reversible healthcare option”.

Parents were told for over a decade that puberty blockers were just like a pause button on puberty. Unpause, and puberty would play out and leave their child just like if they had never gone on blockers. This is not the case, and the unfortunate reality is that many parents consented to treatment on account of misinformation.

Correctly so, as it is fact and not opinion.

Why do opinions need a place to go? Why can't we just demonize professionals who lack the ability to report factual content without mixing in their opinions as unfit to be writing?

When I was in my 20s, I believed you.

Now that I'm in my 30s, I think we need a nanny police state making sure everyone is rational.

You can't make people rational after their education, that's the whole insanity of all this: education is the key, critical thought, not creating gullible fools. But religion and many political ideologies depend upon gullible people or they would not exist, so the powerful members of those tribes impel society (for the children!) to denigrate education to produce morons. The United States is filled with them, they may have graduate degrees but they can't logically identify a con man.

Simple advertising too. It is a constant reinforcer of subconscious anti-rational thought.

Even if you imagine you never buy anything due to exposure to advertising, advertising is still hammering away, with its manipulative motivated based impressions on our minds.

If some source of information is worth consuming, at least for me it is worth paying to consume without advertisements if that is an option.

The fact that YouTube video advertising isn’t scratching the chalkboard level unacceptable to many people is all the evidence I need to know they have been deeply impacted by ad programming.

I agree that there seems to be, on the whole, a downward trend of educated, critically thinking populace. The statistics and anecdotes align to make this clear. But I struggle to pick the cause. Certainly I don’t buy into the idea that there are rooms of politicians and school board members discussing how to keep the population uneducated.

Behind every outcome is an incentive. So what do you think is the incentive that’s behind the decline?

Realize first that there is no single incentive, there is a diversity of incentives to "let others do it", "let others worry about it" and various other variations of "let others...". A nearly helpless person is good for business, a frightened with money person is also good for business, and a reasoned careful, informed consumer is not good for business. These basic truths end up running nearly all of society, which creates the drive to prevent consumers from ever becoming discriminating informed and critically aware in virtually all things they are not paid to be "the expert".

I love and hate this quote by Carl Sagan in 1995

I have a foreboding of an America in my children's or grandchildren's time -- when the United States is a service and information economy; when nearly all the manufacturing industries have slipped away to other countries; when awesome technological powers are in the hands of a very few, and no one representing the public interest can even grasp the issues; when the people have lost the ability to set their own agendas or knowledgeably question those in authority; when, clutching our crystals and nervously consulting our horoscopes, our critical faculties in decline, unable to distinguish between what feels good and what's true, we slide, almost without noticing, back into superstition and darkness...

The dumbing down of American is most evident in the slow decay of substantive content in the enormously influential media, the 30 second sound bites (now down to 10 seconds or less), lowest common denominator programming, credulous presentations on pseudoscience and superstition, but especially a kind of celebration of ignorance”

I don’t think “prophet” was to a title he aspired to, but like other insightful forward thinkers, he managed to be one.

I think this is a universal law of human nature.

Or maybe that cycle of the inferior by circumstance work hard to become the superior and displace the complacent superior. “history is filled with the sound of silken slippers going downstairs and wooden shoes coming up.”.

Because expert opinions are sometimes the only data available. "What will computer architecture look like in 20 years?" Clearly there's no factual content to answer that question, but I would argue that it's still an interesting question to ask an expert.

Warp Drive is impossible? So never ever write about it or you are an evil person spreading false information?

Speculation is also about looking to the future, 'what might be possible'. These are opinions.

And. 'A Lot' of people confuse raw data with 'facts'. Every single paper or news report is taking 'raw data' and 'figuring out what it means'.

So, there is always bias, but also it is impossible to report anything without trying to 'infer' information out of the raw data. There is no such thing as 'just report the facts'.

We also maybe have to deal with the common misconception that a fact proceeds somehow from an absolute objective perspective. But as far as humans are concerned, there are only human points of views grounded in human cognition and human interests. Some human points of views might try to encompass more than the direct individual own experience might otherwise limit to, sure, but that is still human endeavor.

Fact and factitious have a common Latin root for a reason.

Even the carefully engineered autonomous probe will only gather data according to some human conceptions of what matter to be recorded or dismissed, what should be considered signal rather than noise.

> there are only human points of views grounded in human cognition and human interests.

“Only”? No.

The entire point of having a scientific approach, an ever longer list of ways to weed out mistakes and misperceptions, is that raw human cognition can be improved upon.

Repeatable results, independently reproduced results, peer review, control elements, effect isolation, … the list is actually very long.

Not every one of the methods we have collected applies to every step in knowledge, but every step we take can be validated by as many of them as apply.

And new ways of falsifying false conclusions continue to accumulate.

Informed opinion, clearly labeled so, on interesting but non-controversial non-ideological topics can be great instigators of curiosity.

What might have come before the Big Bang?

Do quantum superpositions really collapse somehow based on some as yet uncharacterized law, or does our universe produce a web of alternate futures, still connected but where straightforward links are quickly statistically and irreversible obscured?

There is a science friendly basis for interesting opinions of particular experts, in areas of disagreement or inconclusive answers, when clearly labeled as opinion, whose opinion, and why that experts opinion is of special interest.

Also, opinion on the state of science education, funding or other science relevant non-scientific topics, with all due modesty of certainty makes good sense.

But injecting ideological opinions, and poorly or selectively reasoned ones, or unestablished conjectures falsely posed as scientific truth, into a format that claims to be representative of science based information, is a tragedy level disservice.

Not to mention, with respect to Scientific American in particular, a betrayal of many decades of higher standards, work and reputation.

> Not to mention, with respect to Scientific American in particular, a betrayal of many decades of higher standards, work and reputation.

It's hard to deny science itself is under attack by the same people who try to establish alternative facts and truths based on what's politically convenient to them, even if nothing of that is backed by objective reality. Science will always be a force pushing against such agendas.

How is the best way to serve the higher standards of SciAm? Would it be ignoring the elephant in the room, this new shiny fake reality where vaccines cause autism, the Earth is flat, that scientists have been hiding perpetual motion machines from the public? Or would it be to risk being labeled "biased" or "political" and actively label and fight against these anti-science movements?

Science is politics. It is the strong belief that there is one single objective reality, that anyone with the proper tools can observe and verify, and that going against these cornerstones for political expediency is wrong and, ultimately, against the interests of our species.

Science can touch on politics, but that doesn’t mean science is coextensive with politics. You selected examples where science bears on politics, but Helmuth’s fixation wasn’t on how many people believe vaccines cause autism. As demonstrated by her closing screed, it was about non-falsifiable moral assertions (“sexism,” “racism,” and the “moral arc of the universe”).

Indeed, the point of the Reason article is that if scientists want to have credibility on questions where their expertise applies, they should avoid opining in their official capacity on political questions where their expertise doesn’t apply.

Science has much to say about politically important issues like climate change and vaccines! But people will blow off those assertions if scientists lend the imprimatur of their authority to advance social causes, for example by opining that it’s “racist” to vote to deport illegal immigrants.

>What might have come before the Big Bang?

Singularity.

'Singularity' is just a placeholder for 'we have no idea what's going on here'.

Huh? AFAIK singularity is a dense object of zero size.

Infinitely dense, which is a math term for "some other realm of existence that makes no sense in our physical world".

It may not have all properties you want, but it can have properties appropriate to its state, makes perfect sense to me, why not. Also it's not infinite density, it's zero size, infinities don't exist. Mass is a property of inertial motion, singularity doesn't have inertial motion, thus no mass.

If taking infinite density and an infinitesimal point seriously resulted in a clear and consistent ability to model it, then it would be as you say.

But that isn't what happens. Division by zero and other mathematical breakdowns occur, meaning that whatever actually happens is not in fact the same laws operating in an extreme situation. The laws don't actually work.

This is further backed up by the fact that we have two models with which to model the "singularity". Quantum mechanics and general relativity. They both break down, but in inconsistent ways. So clearly our equations don't work in that situation.

In addition, both from theory and experiment, there is strong evidence that space and time have a minimal length, the Planck unit of space and time. You can't get mass on a point if that understanding is true, because it will always involve unit distance connections.

Finally, uncooperative singularities like these have been found in scientific models many times, and the result has always been that the addition or adjustment of our models resolved mathematical mayhem. The mayhem just indicated the models were incomplete for the situation.

A toy example is Newton's force of gravity between two masses, F = Gm1m2/d^2. The force being a constant times the product of masses divided by the square of their distances.

This model implies that at a distance of zero the force is infinite. Yet that creates mathematical problems, modeling problems, and we never see it happen.

That mess is easily cleaned up with the realization that as the distance between the centers of a mass of m1 and m2 falls under the radius of one or both, r1 and r2, the forces of any mass of m1 and m2 outside distance d now cancel out. So as the position of two masses converge, the force of gravity actually goes to zero, not infinity. Newton's Law was still a good model for non-relativistic gravity forces, but needed to take account of more information to work in that particular case without blowing in a "singularity".

TLDR; where math blows up you can't just accept the model as operating in an extreme situation, because the model generates incoherent, inconclusive, undefined and inconsistent results. But the problem isn't magical, mysterious, or evidence of something unknowable. It is just evidence that our math and models don't yet capture everthing relevant to the breakdown case. It is a clue pointing toward something more for us to learn.

>interesting but non-controversial non-ideological topics

this category is itself hopelessly controversial and ideologically delineated, as you have demonstrated. not to mention this is type of "stay in your lane" or argument is generally deployed by defenders of the status quo against dissenters.

>falsely posed as scientific truth, into a format that claims to be representative of science based information

but this didn't happen.

look, scientific american is a general-audience science magazine, not a journal for serious scientific inquiry. it has an editorial remit for commentary and exploration of themes and trends related or adjacent to science. you may not like the opinions or ideologies expressed in the opinion pieces they published, but they are clearly labeled opinion and in the opinion section. it is completely appropriate and dare i say non-controversial. it really seems like you just disagree with their selection of opinion pieces.

Should a publication with science in its name publish opinions with obviously (to a scientifically skeptical mind) incorrect factual statements?

When we see opinions leaning very consistently one way at a publication it invariably turns out their non opinion pieces have some of that bias.

That bias always includes ignoring scientific accuracy in favor of political ideals.

You re making it sound as if every opinion is valid to go in there. For the same reason why they wouldn't publish eugenicist opinions, they should shy away from obvious cringebait.

Afaik science has not yet ran out of much more interesting opinions than the ones mentioned

> For example, did you know that "Denial of Evolution Is a Form of White Supremacy"?

Yes, because I read Inherit the Wind in middle school.

Thank you for some historical context.

Inherit the Wind uses the historical case of the Scopes Monkey Trial to discuss the contemporary McCarthyism, neither of which is particularly closely tied to white supremacy?

Ugh. I'm sorry, but could you please explain yourself? I also read Inherit the Wind in middle school, and my understanding is that it fictionalized the (true) story of the "Scopes/Monkey Trial", which was an ideological conflict between science and religion. It's been over 50 years, and maybe I'm so pure that I disregarded any racial context, but I don't remember any.

How does "White Supremacy" come into the story, or the denial of evolution as a whole?

As a whole?

White supremacists hate the idea that they could have had non-white ancestors. Belief in a white Adam & Eve is much more in line with their world view. Non-whites were created by "the Curse of Ham". https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Curse_of_Ham

As usual, when a "Christian" wants to be un-Christian, they do it by mining the Old Testament.

Surely you understand the difference between "Some X believe Y" and "Y is a form of X". Examples of the former pattern do not prove the latter.

Even if we correct the logic here, and change the conclusion to something like "All people who dismiss evolution are white supremacists", that would still be disproven by counterexamples, like the many non-white people who don't believe in evolution.

"Acceptance of evolution was lower [than in the US] in ... Singapore (59%), India (56%), Brazil (54%), and Malaysia (43%)"

https://ncse.ngo/acceptance-evolution-twenty-countries

I just gave a connection white supremacy and evolution denial, not trying to prove any absolutes. Everything you are saying seemed kinda obvious and thus I didn't mention it.

I apologize if I misunderstood. I thought your comment was related to the statement being discussed in this chain. ("Denial of Evolution Is a Form of White Supremacy")

Biological evolution was butting heads with the dying concept of social evolution at the time, and that conflict provides illuminating subtext to the trial and book.

Which is another interesting aspect of the political use of science: that people will cherry-pick and bend all they can in ways that support their policies.

Pretty sure "scientific racism" owes more to pop versions of evolutionary theory than it does to a near-Eastern religion that endows all people with immortal souls, spreads the faith in all languages following Pentacost, tells parables about Samaritans, and makes a point of adding Galatians to its sacred book.

Hilarious!

The while message of the article is to trash talk the departing editor accusing her of political left bias... which in it self (the trash talking) is a political statement from the conservative side.

To the author of the article: you are no better than her...

Can you reconcile that view with the paragraph at the end?

>That doesn't mean the editor needs to be apolitical or that there's no role for SciAm to chime in on social justice issues in an informed manner, with the requisite level of humility and caution. It simply means that Scientific American needs to get back to its roots—explaining the universe's wonders to its readers, not lecturing them about how society should be ordered or distorting politically inconvenient findings.

He explicitly states he is ok with bias.

No need to reconcile because one thing does not excuse the other.

If I go complaining that you go around beating people up, and that is why I will go and beat you up, and at the end I claim that it is ok because I agree with hitting people is ok doesn't excuse my action.

Also, stating the obvious (SA needs to get back to its roots) serves in this case as a straw man argument, the point was how bad an inexcusable was the editor behavior, not what the roots of SA should be.

This article is closer to the son of the president in the "Don't look up" movie than anything else. It tries to push the previous editor to a square of just do scientific work... but there is a point, in defense of the editor, where people claiming that the earth is flat need to be push back. Objective truth needs to prevail regardless of how people feel about it politically, and it is ok, in my book, to defend that

But there is nothing about that.

The point of the article is that SA can't sacrifice science to push propaganda. That's it.

Like this point of yours:

>but there is a point, in defense of the editor, where people claiming that the earth is flat need to be push back. Objective truth needs to prevail regardless of how people feel about it politically, and it is ok, in my book, to defend that

Is true, for the article, not for the editor. That's his whole point.

And my point is that:

1. Defending science as objective truth is not propaganda, so the editor did not engage un such.

2. The article it self is not about science, but it is weasel propaganda on it self because accusing of propaganda to the editor is a form of propaganda that is presented as "reasonable" but the intended effect is to try to call propaganda what is not.

I genuinely have no clue what you are talking about.

>1. Defending science as objective truth is not propaganda, so the editor did not engage un such.

A headline like "Why the Term 'JEDI' Is Problematic for Describing Programs That Promote Justice, Equity, Diversity and Inclusion." has absolutely, completely nothing to do with "defending science as objective truth". Within the article political views are pushed, with science being largely irrelevant to the case.

>2. The article it self is not about science, but it is weasel propaganda on it self because accusing of propaganda to the editor is a form of propaganda that is presented as "reasonable" but the intended effect is to try to call propaganda what is not.

The article does not attempt to be seen "about science" at any point. It's not weaseling at any point, it's point is made very clearly. It even makes the point that propaganda isn't necessarily wrong

Have you even read the article?

To be honest, even 18 years ago, long before this editor in chief, I found Scientific American rather ideological. Maybe it got more obvious over time, but I don’t see its recent tone categorically different.

I agree. This editor may well have been a current-day culmination of a trend that started some time ago. I stopped my own print subscription to SciAm once the articles started to ostensibly push certain sociopolitical viewpoints in the guise of science journalism. This was well before the editor being discussed was editor enough so I never knew this person existed.

While this editor may have crossed some redlines, I am doubtful this change in represents a genuine philosophical shift at the magazine.

True. SciAm has been broken for a long time. The same can be said for most magazines, but SciAm being broken probably just hurts more for our crowd.

Any examples? I'm in the same boat as you, and while I agree with the premise, I don't recall anything as egregious as the examples from the article:

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/denial-of-evoluti...

https://archive.is/H8hJw

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/why-the-term-jedi...

https://archive.is/oMzz7

From my own impression back then, it was less political but more subtly ideological. Truth be told, I have my own ideology as well. Some things that I remember were an article that used a trolley problem of throwing someone in the way to save five as the “obvious rational” choice; and how the covers would often try to link entanglement or dark matter to consciousness. It was numerous little things like that.

Bias might emerge as much in choice of topics to cover as in the tone of the coverage. On X, someone mentioned that Wired’s coverage in the past 5-10 years is striking for how little it discusses SpaceX, for example.

SciAm was transformative to my life, I think. My father brought home a stack of them, maybe a couple year's worth, for me when I was twelve or so. I read them over and over again during my teens, slowly puzzling understanding out of the articles that were initially so far beyond me. Learned more from that stack of magazines than some years of high school.

But that was in the 80s. For the last couple of decades, Scientific American just makes me sad. Crap I wouldn't bother reading.

In the early 70's I loved The Amateur Scientist, "conducted" by C. L. Stong. Great articles, with real technical details, giving you a real chance to build real equipment. To pick one article at random, from February 1972: "A Simple Laser Interferometer, an Inexpensive Infrared Viewer and Simulated Chromatograms". Very, very cool.

There's nothing like that out there now.

Back when I was 11 or 12, in the early '70s, one of my father's friends who was training for medical school left a box of Scientific Americans in our loft. I discovered them and would spent hours and hours poring over them trying to understand the articles and soaking up the air of unbounded optimism which I now realise was derived from the Moon landings. This was a major factor in pulling me towards science and maths. Later, at university, I came to realise that all SciAm articles are to some extent oversimplifications and that you should really go to original sources for true understanding. However, at that age they were just what I needed.

The problem is >40 years old. I was a subscriber in the early 1980's (when SciAm was still quite good), and recall them publishing one of Carl Sagan's articles on the dangers of nuclear winter.

Whatever the correctness of Carl's science, he was an astronomer. Not a subject-matter expert. And the the article was very clearly ideological. In an era when the political winds in Washington were blowing hard in the other direction.

I was rather younger then, but still recall thinking that SciAm's approach had thrown away any chance of appealing to the Washington decision-makers, controlling the nuclear weapons, for the feel-good (& maybe profit) of appealing to the left. Which seemed hard to reconcile with them actually believing the results they published, saying that humanity could be wiped out.

Yup, I don't like the trend of publishing more and more articles written by journalists instead of by the very researchers working on the subject. There is a huge difference in quality between the two type of articles. Ones can be quickly skimmed, the others must be read.

You’re absolutely right. Nuclear was an emotional topic that caused many many otherwise grounded scientists to lose it. SDI was another.

SciAm's approach had thrown away any chance of appealing to the Washington decision-makers, controlling the nuclear weapons

It seems to have worked, though - the biggest nuclear war skeptic in that administration was Ronald Reagan and he's one of the world's most successful nuclear arms controllers and disarmers, whatever one may think of the rest of his politics and policies.

> It seems to have worked, though...

Did it? Or did Reagan have clear memories of WWII - when he was 30-ish years old - and the horrific level of death and devastation which even conventional bombing had inflicted upon Europe and Japan? "I don't want any American city to end up like Hamburg, Dresden, Tokyo, or Hiroshima" was a perfectly acceptable right-wing value.

My read is that Reagan understood the difference between talking big & tough, and actually starting a war. He obviously had a taste for proxy wars, but conflicts with direct US involvement were very few and small on his watch.

Did it? Or did Reagan have clear memories of WWII - when he was 30-ish years old - and the horrific level of death and devastation which even conventional bombing had inflicted upon Europe and Japan?

Yes it did. The influence of media and popular depictions of nuclear war on Reagan is very well documented. His experience of WWII was working on propaganda materials, not exposure to the devastation of war. He was convinced nuclear war was likely civilization-ending, an actual Armageddon. In this he was at odds with the bulk of his administration and US nuclear doctrine. His attitudes and interactions with Gorbachov on these issues are also surprisingly well documented.

I sympathize with her. There's a big movement in this country that defines itself largely by opposing what its perceived enemies support. When science (or culture) makes a reasonably sound assertion, and it's met with an opposition that wields rhetoric like a weapon with no regard for rationality, it's tempting to fight fire with fire. And when the victims of that opposition are among the most marginalized in society, it's easy to feel like you have the moral high ground.

Maybe in culture it's ok to fight dirty and stretch some truths in order to force newer perspectives into the zeitgeist. Maybe it's even neccesary when the opposition is willing to lie outright, and loudly, as a first resort. But that doesn't work with science. Even if the motivations are pure, it's destined to backfire. It should backfire. Science itself is under assault and losing its ability to hold together some semblance of a shared reality. If people start to believe that science is just as corruptible as journalism because of shitty science journalists, we're fucked.

It’s misguided and toxic to center your worldview around the “most marginalized” or to think that focusing on them somehow gives you the moral high ground or frees you from the obligation to play by the meta-rules of society and its institutions. Or to think that your worldview somehow has a monopoly on helping marginalized people. You invoke “rationality” but as Spock would say, “the needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few.”

I trust you’ll maintain that view if and/or when you become a marginalized group, and the dominant group shifts the meta-rules of society and its institutions in ways you don’t like?

This view usually strikes me as hypocritical because it’s almost always paired with a paranoia of becoming a marginalized group and a belief that maintaining majority status for their group is “right” in some way.

It’s easy to quote Spock when you make sure that you’re always part of “the many” and never part of “the few”.

"Marginalized" groups have not been helped in any way by any of this. Lumping everyone together into a group who is not a white straight man diminishes everyone's individual material problems into a generic "marginalization," and unfairly centralizes white straight men. It's something that wealthy powerful people do in order not to have to discuss their wealth and power, and the fact that they all grew up in sundown towns.

This wave of wealthy white people screaming "bigot" at other white people without health care hasn't raised the condition of the descendants of slaves at all. Instead it's been an expansion of welfare for well-off white women and affluent immigrants. Everybody has been oppressed like black people except for the descendants of slaves, and everybody has been stuck in a caste system except for Dalits.

"Marginalized" people want to be addressed as individual humans with material problems like other humans. Instead a bunch of people so wealthy and comfortable that they are almost completely detached from the material world and have never missed a meal treat everyone like symbols and try to read the world like literary critics.

> It’s easy to quote Spock when you make sure that you’re always part of “the many” and never part of “the few”.

Assuming that everyone you're talking to is "the many" is not good. Your argument should work no matter who you happen to be talking to.

Refusing to address the shared material hardships diffuses responsibility to the point where the hardships can be dismissed. There are too many branches on that tree to address, which makes it very easy to just do nothing. No one but celebrities get their individual hardships addressed, it just doesn’t scale to this size of a country.

> Assuming that everyone you're talking to is "the many" is not good. Your argument should work no matter who you happen to be talking to.

I don’t think it’s a wild presumption that most people in the few aren’t terribly excited about being asked to pay the cost for the many again. “Please lock us in another generation of poverty” is not a political slogan I hear very often. If that’s what you want to stand on, go ahead I suppose, it’s a free country.

Not to mention the fact that heterosexual, cis-gendered, christian, male is about a quarter of the US population[1], so categorizing it broadly as "many" vs "few" is already over-simplifying.

Intersectionality was intended to add nuance to discussions of discrimination (e.g. a black woman's experience is not reduced to "sexism" plus "racism"), but it seems to have popularly had the opposite effect of reducing everybody to a demographic venn-diagram.

1: If you exclude "male" and "christian" from the criteria, you do end up with a majority. If you switch "christian" to "protestant" then you make the minority even more stark, but anti-Catholic sentiment among protestants has significantly declined over the past few decades, so I don't think that historical division of categories makes sense anymore.

That’s an invitation to think emotionally rather than rationally. (And not that it matters, but I recall white people literally crying back in 2016 that a certain president would put me and my kids in an internment camp. I’m glad I kept thinking rationally rather than emoting.)

Not to mention that Spock is consenting to his fate in taking on the role of "the few... or even the one." He's clearly rationalizing, not stating a universal constant.

Agreed and also it's rarely the case that the "most marginalized" who are elevated in public discourse genuinely are the most marginalized. More often it's just invoked to make some untrue political point. Kind of like how accusations of genocide are thrown around so freely these days. Typically it's rhetoric with very little substance.

>“the needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few.”

The brewer, the baker and the candle stick maker need a new kidney, liver and heart. Thank you for volunteering to be killed so we can harvest your organs and keep the many alive.

Alternatively don't base your world view on a TV show from the 1960s.

Even in the movie's own terms, that's an ethical aphorism spoken by a character to justify his act of self sacrifice, and to comfort a great friend that he's coming to his unfortunate end on his own terms and for his own reasons and, in Spock's way, as an act of love, in a sense.

It's not, like, "go shit on minorities if it makes the majority's utility-units increase".

There was a story in Analog a few years ago called "Dibs" if I recall the title correctly about a world that worked like that.

Whenever someone could be saved by a transplant they would find possible donors and send them a notification that one of their organs could save someone. Usually after a few weeks the potential donor would get notification that the person who needed the organ has died. During the time between those two notifications the dying person was said to have dibs on the organ.

Occasionally someone would get a second notification about someone having dibs on another one of the organs while someone already had dibs on one of their organs. Again what usually is that those people would die soon and the person would go back to nobody having dibs on any of their organs.

Sometimes though a person with people having dibs on two of their organs would get notified that a third person now had dibs on one of their organs. That was enough that the needs of the many thing kicked in and they were required to give up those organs, which would usually be fatal.

That Spock quote is from Star Trek II, Wrath of Khan. Later, in Star Trek IV, The Voyage Home Chekov is in grave danger but to rescue him would put their mission at risk which would endanger many more people. This conversation occurs:

      UHURA'S VOICE
  They report his condition as critical;
  he is not expected to survive.
  
      BONES
  Jim, you've got to let me go in there!
  Don't leave him in the hands of
  Twentieth Century medicine.
  
      KIRK
  (already decided, but:)
  What do you think, Spock?
  
      SPOCK
  Admiral, may I suggest that Dr.
  McCoy is correct. We must help
  Chekov.
  
      KIRK
  (testing)
  Is that the logical thing to do,
  Spock...?
  
      SPOCK
  No, Admiral... But is the human
  thing to do.
  
      KIRK
  (takes a beat)
  Right.

Spock's entire character was the marriage of purely logical Vulcans and emotional humans and the necessity of having both. You fundamentally don't understand Star Trek's themes.

> Maybe in culture it's ok to fight dirty and stretch some truths in order to force newer perspectives into the zeitgeist. Maybe it's even neccesary when the opposition is willing to lie outright, and loudly, as a first resort. But that doesn't work with science. Even if the motivations are pure, it's destined to backfire. It should backfire. Science itself is under assault and losing its ability to hold together some semblance of a shared reality.

The number of times one contradicts oneself in just a few words here, with such a lack of self-awareness, is amazing.

The magazine in question is a science-aligned publication. Given the current public discourse, it's no surprise that science-aligned opinions will be attacked. The current public discourse is (gleefully, tribalistically) misinformed, misguided, and hell-bent on social fragmentation.

Watch the bonds between citizens and reality dissolve in real time.

> Watch the bonds between citizens and reality dissolve in real time.

I've never thought our generations would need to fight this war again... Big brain and opposable thumbs are overrated.

The problem, to me, is that today at least in the US there are a lot of areas where there are truths to criticisms, but then the response to it is gratuitous and equally problematic.

This article struck me sort of similarly. Reason is an outlet I have a certain amount of respect for in general, but this article came across to me as more politically over the top in a way that the outgoing EIC's writing ever did. They would have done more good by simply highlighting the actual state of medical gender intervention research and leaving at that (it sounds like they have done this in fact, but they would have been better off as such). Even then it's complicated — I have friends who work in the field, and when faced with things like the Cass report basically point out that evidence of intervention effect or absence of an effect isn't the same thing as what decision will reduce harm the most in individual cases, and there's a lot of misconceptions about what's actually involved in gender-focused interventions. What's lost in these discussions is that medical care is not the same as science per se, it's about optimizing utility functions or something for individuals.

At some level this sort of critique over the Scientific American editor covering political topics seems a little precious and disingenuous. As others have pointed out, science has and always will be political, whether people want to admit those leanings or not. Pretending that it's somehow "above" politics is disingenuous and narcissistic, and leads to exactly the sorts of problems the author claims to care about. These more political topics have also become mainstream in science in general, and it would be a bit weird for an EIC at someplace like Scientific American to just pretend the discussions aren't happening. Is she guilty of bad writing? Maybe, but it is meant to be a popular science publication, and rants like this hardly seem like an appropriate response to bad writing.

> movement in this country that defines itself largely by opposing what its perceived enemies support

I think that some of the more devious politicians realized that a "partitioning" of beliefs creates populations of in-groups and out-groups which are then manipulated against each other. Many "basic" facts are getting challenged just to create the controversy. Controversy reinforces tribalism, which in turn makes people more controllable.

It's interesting how we see positions we agree with as just common sense while the positions we strongly disagree with as "overtly political".

I grew up in the 1980s reading SciAm and still getting old issues out of the library so I remember the legendary monthly columnists such Martin Gardener and C.L. Strong and his illustrator Roger Haywood. They tried the likes of Jearl Walker and Richard Hofstader but they never found anyone who could fill those shoes.

They went from a beautiful spot color printing to the same process color everybody else used. Got bought by a German publishing conglomerate. Looking back I can already see the signs of physics "jumping the shark" because of the articles that came out in the early 1980s that conflated inflation and the Higgs field because... I guess you could in the early 1980s.

I did my PhD and then got settled in the software business and did not pay a lot of attention to SciAm, especially because they never had a particularly porous paywall. I did notice the stupid "woke" editorials a few years before the right-wing trolls noticed them. I had lost interest long before then.

Susa Faludi wrote a book about the "backlash" to the feminist movement which had actually accomplished something. Unfortunately there are a lot of people today who believe in struggle for the sake of struggle and will fall behind a standard that will maximize their experience of backlash without doing anything to help their situation (e.g. bloomberg businessweek runs gushing articles about Bernard Arnault and $3000 a night hotel rooms and $600 bottles of wine but you know they're on the right side of the barricades because they always write "black" with a capital b)

It is a selfish meme though and very much likes the backlash because the existence of the backlash confirms their world view.

I read Scientific American from time to time. It's not what the Reason author claims it is. It's a popular, non-specialist science magazine that reaches out to the public (mostly through Dentist's office waiting rooms). It's OK for it to have a political point of view.

I see this a lot lately. Someone takes issue with something(s) in a magazine or journal and tries to burn them to a crisp because of it. Even on here, folks periodically roast Quanta magazine for something that's not exactly right from a subject matter expert perspective. It's a perfectly good magazine, also for the general public (perhaps a little more high-brow than Sci-Am).

The Reason article takes a very rigid and persnickety point of view, which is common in libertarian arguments. It's like the kind of rhetoric you hear from insufferable debate-club enthusiasts in high-school and college.

> It's not what the Reason author claims it is.

The article literally describes Scientific American as "the leading popular science magazine". What exactly did the author mis-claim?

> It's OK for it to have a political point of view.

Not if that political point of view is anti-science, as others have elsewhere described in this comment page (post-modernism).

> The Reason article takes a very rigid and persnickety point of view, which is common in libertarian arguments.

I'm not a libertarian, But I also have no idea what you're talking about with the "rigid" and "persnickety" descriptions.

> It's like the kind of rhetoric you hear from insufferable debate-club enthusiasts in high-school and college.

I think it's a real problem when a popular science magazine doesn't just get the detailed facts wrong, but takes on a point of view that is hostile to objective scientific inquiry in general, and also attempts to inject poisonous identity politics into subjects as banal as the normal distribution or Star Wars.

I agree. You're right.

On science reporting, Scientific American has been on par with Wired or Technology Review for more than a decade. SciAm wasn't mutated/destroyed by a few recent opinion pieces. (Whether those pieces were unhinged or not. I can't force myself to go and check, because see above.)

I wish my dentist had Sci-Am in the waiting room.

But seriously, those rants quoted in the article about normal distributions and the use of the acronym "JEDI" are really, really, pathetic. A science magazine needs to be science first and politics second. Anyone who wants to reverse that should work for a different rag.

I mean, the normal distribution point is fairly compelling.

If you actually read the piece, it's pretty clear that modeling medicine/health with a normal distribution is generally not great. It's not complaining about normal distributions, it's complaining about their application in health sciences.

And in that context... it's a compelling and reasonable argument, and a lot of negative health outcomes result from applying "average" results to a specific person.

I mean, the US Air Force figured this out 80 years ago...

https://www.thestar.com/news/insight/when-u-s-air-force-disc...

---

No comment on the "JEDI" thing. I haven't read the article so no idea if it's as unreasonable as it sounds.

I would suggest that this piece as written by Reason is ultimately garbage, though. Which should surprise very few folks.

It's not even what's "published in the magazine" as such, they take issue with opinion pieces saying stuff like "the complicated legacy of E.O. Wilson". It's news to me that disagreeing with part of the work of someone in behavioural psychology (of all things) is "setting aflame the edifice of science", but here we are...

The instructions for opinion and analysis articles used to say:

“We look for fact-based arguments. Therefore, if you are making scientific claims—aside from those that are essentially universally accepted (e.g., evolution by natural selection explains the diversity of life on Earth; vaccines do not cause autism; the Earth is about 93 million miles from the Sun) we ask you to link to original scientific research in reputable journals or assertions from reputable science-oriented institutions. Using secondary sources such as news reports or advocacy organizations that do not do actual research is not sufficient.”

Now it says just “You should back up claims with evidence.” but opinion doesn’t mean anything goes.

https://www.scientificamerican.com/page/submission-instructi...

Trust in institutions is at an all time low. The last thing we need is for these institutions to veer away from their goals to push a political agenda. Good riddance to her.

I used to love Popular Science but these magazines all died 20 years ago. Science reporting was the first type of journalism to go, much easier to write clickbait about current events. Remember Scientific American already endorsed Biden last election which was a wtf moment.

> Remember Scientific American already endorsed Biden last election which was a wtf moment.

In his first term the Trump administration tried to massively cut scientific and medical research, tried to change the rules for the board of outside scientists that review EPA decisions for scientific soundness to not allow academic scientists so that it would only consist of scientists working for the industries that the EPA regulates, tried to make it so that most peer reviewed medical research that showed products causing health problems could not be considered by the EPA when deciding if a chemical should be banned, tried to massively increase taxes on graduate students in STEM fields, wanted to stop NASA from doing Earth science, and let's not forget repeatedly claiming climate change is a hoax. I'm sure I'm forgetting several more.

I don't expect my technical publications to have an opinion on things politicians do that have nothing to do with the fields they cover, but when politicians start doing things directly concerning those fields I don't see how it is a WTF moment for them to comment.

I'm sure I'm forgetting several more.

Like putting a climate science denier in charge of NOAA as he was reluctantly heading out the door.

https://www.npr.org/2020/09/12/912301325/longtime-climate-sc...

So he could publish a piece under the official NOAA logo to try and gain legitimacy.

Looking at all the latest insane picks, can't wait to see what toon he install this go around.

Why do you find it a "wtf moment" that a scientific magazine would endorse the opposition candidate to one threatening to all but destroy federal funding for most scientific research in the country?

It seems clear to me that this would be the most appropriate circumstance for such an endorsement.

Interestingly the only people who are not supposed to “push a political agenda” are usually accused of being “woke” in one of the next sentences. “Keeping politics out” brought the US - and the world - Trump, two times. Most things in life are political.

>“Keeping politics out” brought the US - and the world - Trump, two times.

Given the degree to which Trump benefits from anti-establishment sentiment, I'd like you to ponder if putting politics absolutely everywhere might very well be what got Trump elected twice. I find the idea that there just isn't enough political message completely incompatible with current reality.

If you don‘t seriously talk about politics but consider it sports and entertainment and about “winning”, you get Dr. Oz and RFKjr to decide about your health and Matt Gaetz overseeing justice.

Politics is everywhere and it has to be everywhere but politics is not Joe Rogan or Fox news. That‘s propaganda.

I believe we are living in an interesting time (yeah, that kind of 'interesting time"). Decades from now, given a historical context, I suspect a lot of the headlines like this one will be viewed very differently.

There are no apolitical institutions. You would see that more clearly when visiting (or god forbid living in) a dictatorship or totalitarian regime, where all institutions are either brought in line with the regime or abolished. And I do mean all including gardening clubs.

Enjoy institutions having the freedom to express political opinions, it is not guaranteed to last.

"Everything is political" is such a boring tautology.

Everything exists within the political climate of modern society. Institutions are forced to navigate the political landscape in which they exist.

But that does not make the institutions political in nature. There is absolutely nothing political about studying the mating patterns of beetles or the composition of rocks.

When people say that SA is being political, they mean that SA is using science to thinly veil their political activism. That's very different from your definition of "political"

The word “political” is rife with confusion. Careful discussion requires slowing down long enough to make sure different people are talking about the same thing.

One of my favorite definitions of politics is the set of non-violent ways of resolving disagreements, whether interpersonal, organizational, or governmental.

Others may reserve the word politics to only apply to governmental issues, campaigning, elections, coalition building, etc.

P.S. Language is our primary method of communication. Ponder this: why are people so bad at it? Do people really not understand that symbols can have different meanings? Do they forget? Do they want to get peeved because they want to think that other people don’t know what words mean?

> "Everything is political" is such a boring tautology.

1. The comment above didn’t say “Everything is political”.

2. "Everything is political" isn’t true. One might say that many things are influenced by politics; that’s fine, but downstream influence is neither pure single-factor causality nor equality.

3. "Everything is political" isn’t a tautology either.

Support for #2 and #3: There are things in the universe that existed prior to (and independent of) politics, like the Earth. There are phenomena influenced by politics but not inherently political, such as the phenomena of global warming or measuring the level of inflation. What to do about global warming or inflation is political, if you are lucky, meaning you have some persuasive influence at all (not the case in a dictatorship) and/or don’t have to resort to violence.

I believe you're nit-picking instead of interacting with the content of my comment.

OP did not literally say "Everything is political", they said "There are no apolitical institutions". Which is functionally the same thing. "Everything is political" is a common phrase used to express a common school of thought, [1] for example. I was interacting with this school of thought directly in my comment.

I agree with you that "Everything is political" is not true. But tpm is arguing the opposite.

"Everything is political" is a trivially true statement when using tpm's definition of "political", which is the point I was trying to get across. tpm is claiming that any institution which interacts with the government in any way is political in nature. This means that even the rocks and trees and oceans are political, because they are at the mercy of government policy.

I am arguing against this definition of "political".

[1] https://daily.jstor.org/paul-krugman-everything-is-political...

> tpm is claiming that any institution which interacts with the government in any way is political in nature

I am arguing that any institution is political by its very existence. Even if the true nature of the institutions is hidden by the current regime, as it is often the case in the West.

The funniest thing, of course, is that we are arguing under an article containing a political attack in the political magazine Reason, published by the political Reason Foundation. That's not the ideal starting point if you want to prove the possibility of apoliticalness of anything.

Can you define "institution" and "political" for me, then?

I would argue that there is nothing political about a local bakery, for example. Just a dude making some cakes. He may occasionally be forced to interact with the government, but his bakery as an institution has nothing at all to do with government organizations or political theory. By its nature, a bakery is apolitical.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Institution is as good as any. I would not consider a small (one person or family) bakery an institution. A large one (measured by number of employees etc) would be an institution, and defining the threshold is not important here.

Political - relating to the government or public affairs of a country

Okay. And your argument is that a large bakery is fundamentally related to government affairs? What about the nature of a large bakery is political?

My argument is that every institution is political whether it wants or not. Bakery is very obviously political because everyone tends to eat food and as such food is an evergreen political theme. Perhaps this is more visible in some countries than others, for example in a neighboring country the price of butter is a quite common item in TV news (really), and it's not a poor country.

But also other than that, a few years ago there were some articles about a bakery that refused to bake a wedding cake for gays, and it was a public affair for a few weeks. Is that political enough for you?

I just think we are talking about different things. I hear what you are saying, but I don't think that bakeries being tangentially related to politically charged topics make them a political institution. Bakeries also handle and store money, but that doesn't make them a bank. etc. The nature of bakeries as an institution is not political - they are not concerned with the organization of government and policies. They may interact with the government but that doesn't make it a political institution.

This started as a discussion about whether not-primarily-political institutions (like Scientific American) should have and publish political opinions. It was started by an attack of a political institution (Reason) saying they should not. That attack itself makes the target politically relevant.

Bakeries are in a similar position. Once an owner declines to serve a customer based on his (owner or customer) political leaning, it's politically relevant. If a politican attack bakers because (he feels that) the bread price is too high, it's politically relevant. I think there was an American civil rights movement in the 60's which was in a great part about equal access to services for all ethnicities. Was that not political?

> they are not concerned with the organization of government and policies

'or public affairs'. You wanted a definition and then you are ignoring it?

I read tpm's core points as (1) all institutions are downstream of politics (meaning government, whatever its form) and (2) Therefore, don't take institutions for granted; they rely on compatible upstream governance. I think tpm most wanted to impress the second point upon readers.

When reading dahfizz's comment ""Everything is political" is such a boring tautology."... (a) I didn't see how a point being boring has any bearing on tpm's second point; (b) So I couldn't tell if dahfizz agreed or disagreed with tpm's second point; (c) As a result, dahfizz's comment felt nit-picky to me.

Meta-commentary: It would seem that dahfizz and I both feel like the other is being nitpicky. It seems to me this is a signal that some kind of breakdown is happening on at the conversational level.

Here, I'm thinking out loud. Are "Everything is political" and "There are no apolitical institutions" are functionally the same thing?

When I read "everything is political", I interpret that as meaning "all human interactions involve power relations, competing interests, and/or resource allocation".

When I read "there are no apolitical institutions", I interpret that as meaning "all institutions are downstream of politics (meaning government, whatever its form)".

I think it is useful to differentiate between the two phrases and their meanings. But of course they are closely related. Beyond each of us understanding what the other means, I'm not sure we're making specific enough claims to warrant litigating if "they are functionally the same". It seems like a contextual and subjective choice of where to draw a line. Feel free to say more if I'm missing something.

> There is absolutely nothing political about studying the mating patterns of beetles or the composition of rocks.

Well, what about studying the mating patterns of humans, studying the decisions to abort, studying the decisions to change gender? Still not at all political in your country? Then, who decides if a study gets funding, who decides if it is ethical, who decides if the results can get published? It's all political decisions around the 'pure' science, which is why I mention different political regimes where stuff like this is often completely explicit unlike in more free societies where it may look like it's free of politics.

> they mean that SA is using science to thinly veil their political activism

And they should be glad, not complaining. Everyone is using their position for political activism, business owners, unions, all sorts of organisations, churches etc. There is no reason SA shouldn't do that. Of course they only complain because they don't agree with SA.

Scientific research is apolitical. Even the act of studying abortion or transgenderism is not inherently political.

Just because scientists have to occasionally interact with political institutions does not make Science itself a political institution. Science is fundamentally apolitical.

What does politicized science look like, exactly? TFA seems to link to several opinion pieces, which aren't science, so I'm a little unclear.

I don't believe anyone here believes that scientific research is political. But how a society funds, publishes, and integrates scientific research is deeply political.

> When people say that SA is being political, they mean that SA is using science to thinly veil their political activism. That's very different from your definition of "political"

Could you provide some examples? TFA seems to link to opinion pieces at Scientific American and not actual research, so I'm a little unclear.

"There is absolutely nothing political about studying the mating patterns of beetles"

It will be used as an example of how we are wasting tax money by politicians. It will be used as an example of how homosexuality is natural by one side, and then it will be used as an example of how science is used to "groom" children by the other. There will be fights about whether it should be in school books, and then some states will ban all school books that mention that research, and then publishers will be forced to remove it to still have enough of a market for their books. The authors will be called out on Twitter and receive death threats, their university will cut their funding to avoid the controversy, some students will complain about it, and then that will be used to show how universities indoctrinate our kids.

And so on.

That's what "everything is political" means. When people say things like "get politics out of x," they really mean "make x match my politics", because there's no such thing as "no politics."

The important distinction is that it is possible, and should be the expectation, that you can study beetles and publish the results without any sort of political motivation or bias.

In that sense, it is perfectly possible and reasonable to "take the politics" out of scientific research. Simply do the research and publish the results. There absolutely is a thing as "no politics".

Once the results are out in the world, politicians and pundits are going to talk about it. That doesn't make the science itself a political act.

"Simply do the research and publish the results"

And then you don't get any grants anymore.

>> "Simply do the research and publish the results"

> And then you don't get any grants anymore.

This is exaggerated to make a point, which I interpret as: savvy researchers are mindful of how to conduct their work and communicate their results so they get more grants in the future. To what degree does this distort or corrupt an ideal research process? This is complicated. Political economists often frame this as a principal-agent problem. Organizational theorists discuss concepts such as resource dependence. (What other concepts would you include?)

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Principal–agent_problem

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Resource_dependence_theory

Yes, neutrality is an important principle: we want a study to proceed without outside influence.

Yet, there is an additional point worth mentioning: to the extent public money is allocated to e.g. study beetles, it is downstream of a political process. Meaning, there was allocation of resources that allows the study to proceed.

But denial of evolution is linked to white supremacy. A rejection of the biological links between white people and colored people helps to justify discrimination based on skin color. And non-believers in evolution often share other backwards views.

As for the the bell curve, I'd encourage you to read her article first, befire forming an opinion from disingenuous caricature of what was said in it. She doesn't deny the usefulness of the concept, just points to some harmful and pseudoscientific ways it is/was used. Think phrenology for example.

Reason is a heavily biased right-wing website, as you can see on the articles on the front page. This doesn't necessarily invalidate everything coming from them, but take it with a grain of salt at least, and go form your own opinion based on her articles, instead of the mockery they wrote to make a point about "the woke political agenda controlling academia".

I've always understood denial of evolution's primary reason is that it contradicts scripture. I've never heard it associated with white supremacy until today.

>But denial of evolution is linked to white supremacy. A rejection of the biological links between white people and colored people helps to justify discrimination based on skin color. And non-believers in evolution often share other backwards views.

How do you know this?

Here is a link to an international meta-analysis that finds a link between disbelief in evolution and general bigotry: https://psycnet.apa.org/doiLanding?doi=10.1037%2Fpspi0000391

White supremacy, at least in the United States, finds many of its members (not all, of course) in evangelical circles.

>But denial of evolution is linked to white supremacy.

Acceptance of evolution also leads to white supremacy. One only need to read what Victorian Eugenicists had to say about colored people.

So if both accepting and rejecting evolution are linked to white supremacy it stands to reason that neither is the causal factor.

Of course they are white supremacists that believe in evolution...

Here is a big, international meta-analysis that finds a link between both views: https://psycnet.apa.org/doiLanding?doi=10.1037%2Fpspi0000391

What an odd study to support the idea of white sumrpemacy when 2/3rds of the population sampled isn't Western or white according to white supremacists.

White supremacy and other kinds of racisms. Non-whites can be racist too, you know?

I feel like I'm wasting my time. What do you want to convince me of? That disbelief in evolution is not correlated to white supremacy? What a weird hill to die on. Minds infected with weird ideas tend to believe in multiple ones at the same time, it's not hard to accept.

>Minds infected with weird ideas tend to believe in multiple ones at the same time, it's not hard to accept.

Irony thy name is thrance.

It's the name of a character in a book, it's got nothing to do with it. I'm cis.

You're insane, I gave you a giant study that proves my point, and you engage in baseless attack to refuse the outcome, are you a white supremacist?

I could also give you a meta-study that proves transition is the only real cure to gender dysphoria, but I'm afraid you're too far gone. Come back when you have decided to live in reality.

And the invention of the keyboard is linked to online bullying.

There is a point in which the relation is so far-fetched and non-causal that it doesn't make any sense to mention it, and the link between evolution denial and white supremacy absolutely crosses that line.

White supremacy is also linked to the sun rising up each morning, detergent and open borders. None of them relevant.

I'll give you the link I gave the other: https://psycnet.apa.org/doiLanding?doi=10.1037%2Fpspi0000391

This is a large meta-study finding a link between white supremacy and disbelief in evolution.

The link isn't hard to see either, white supremacists are primarily found in qanon and other right wing conspiracy bubbles. They are more susceptible to believe in bullshit than tolerant people, like creationism.

Both can be causes of an underlying problem, not necessarily origin and consequence.

Is not a surprise that stupid people is generally stupid in more than one field. Somebody believing white supremacy has a previous mental condition that makes him/her blind to obvious contradictions in that speech. Thus, will be probably less capable to grasp complex concepts like evolution (or will choose to ignore it by a different motivation, like greed).

I'm sorry, but reason magazine has personally made my life difficult by participating in medical gaslighting. There may be something to some of this, but I'm not inclined to trust them at face value.

Is there any particular basis for this statement, or do you prefer to leave it unsubstantiated?

The Reason article blurs the distinction between SciAm's opinion pieces and its factual (or putatively factual) reporting. That's disconcerting. "Opinion piece" objectively means "free bullshit zone". Reason is usually much more responsible than this.

SciAm has of course fallen into terrible disrepair. But that happened long ago and the cause wasn't BS in the editorials. Who even reads editorials in a science magazine?

I was a Young Libertarian in my day and I recognize the urge to blame lunatics who disagree with my politics for everything wrong in the world. But this particular case isn't convincing. It died and then the loonies moved in, not the other way around.

> The Reason article blurs the distinction between SciAm's opinion pieces and its factual (or putatively factual) reporting.

How are readers to know the difference?

Sorry, I can't tell whether this is sarcasm or not. If it's a genuine question, the articles are labelled.

You can't expect people to read past the title, cmon now.

Labeled by whom, and following what set of rules or guidelines? Are those rules agreed upon and enforced in some way? What are the consequences for breaking those rules?

> Labeled by whom, and following what set of rules or guidelines?

Ostensibly, the staff. More specifically, editors and leadership.

> Are those rules agreed upon and enforced in some way?

Editorials were labeled to distinguish scientific findings, distilled to simple language for a larger audience, from opinion pieces and what-ifs. This evaporated over time.

> What are the consequences for breaking those rules?

The content wasn't published.

Asking inane questions with simple answers, that are readily available, is not productive.

You're not thinking deeply enough about the problem, which is annoying because I'm addressing the main thrust of the original article.

Staff/editors/leadership cannot be trusted to label correctly if they are serving their own agendas. This is a real problem when we're looking to science to guide sociopolitical decision making, e.g. during a pandemic, or in childcare, or with the environment.

> You're not thinking deeply enough about the problem,

> Staff/editors/leadership cannot be trusted to label correctly if they are serving their own agendas. This is a real problem when we're looking to science to guide sociopolitical decision making,

...or you know, you could have stated what you meant instead of asking questions you didn't care about for your own reasons.

None of what you say applies to a publication any more than other forms of communication. There is a lot of philosophical rambling in these threads.

I do care about my questions which are germane to the point of the article. I'm not being philosophical or obtuse; "who watches the watchers" is a common consideration in dealing with accountability and truth, and is indeed a core value of the scientific method.

Scientific publications don't get to free themselves from that obligation if they want to be regarded as either.

> Staff/editors/leadership cannot be trusted to label correctly if they are serving their own agendas

This can be boiled down to "nobody can be trusted to do anything", which is technically true.

The question is, is there evidence of motives leading to actual misbehavior? Having a nonzero motive to misbehave isn't the same as that.

It can be boiled down to incentive alignment - though a lot of people (falsely) believe that incentives can (or should) be tuned for social good.

> is there evidence of motives leading to actual misbehavior?

Yes. Having a 'very strong opinion' is a strong indicator that a publication concerned with science has gone off the rails.

> It can be boiled down to incentive alignment

Sure, if "it" here means your opinion of what's important.

Incentive alignment and misalignment isn't evidence of wrongdoing, though.

> Having a 'very strong opinion' is a strong indicator that a publication concerned with science has gone off the rails.

Interesting opinion. I thank you for it and respectfully disagree.

Having reliable sources for scientific news and a high standard for truth therein is obviously important, moral, and good. Your opinion is wrong.

> Having reliable sources for scientific news and a high standard for truth therein is obviously important, moral, and good.

I'm glad we could find shared ground here. I wholeheartedly agree, even if I respectfully disagree with your totally unrelated very strong opinion that "Having a 'very strong opinion' is a strong indicator that a publication concerned with science has gone off the rails"

It is vitally important that scientists put their duty above their burning desire to have a 'hot take', especially in medicine and public health.

This shouldn't be controversial.

It's weird we're at the point where there are a decent number of adults who have likely never read an actual magazine.

So the articles themselves have no opinions? They don't make conclusions and use carefully chosen words to sway the reader?

Other than to simplify the concepts for a subjectively "inclined" reader, no. Language is not mathematics. There is no perfection in the area of communication. This is not an insightful observation.

Scientific America aimed to be informative and useful in context of that information, when I was a reader (80s).

> There is no perfection in the area of communication.

Bull puckey. I can be precise in my estimate, and contextual in my language.

"We believe x to be generally true because of y chance of likelihood" while not precise in conclusion, it is precise in its intent, which is to communicate a degree of certainty and to convey integrity of thought.

This is commonsense science writing that even the plebs can understand.

> blurs the distinction between SciAm's opinion pieces and its factual (or putatively factual) reporting.

To me, based on the content and context, the main quote written by the departing editor the article cited was clearly an opinion (or editor's column) piece and not part of SciAm's science reporting.

While this article didn't focus on it, the biggest factor when the editor-in-charge of a publication is biased isn't what is written but rather what never appears at all. An editor's curation and broad editorial guidance is subtle day-to-day yet has enormous impact over time. I've read accounts of newsroom reporters talking about editorial bias and it's remarkable how each individual biased decision is almost undetectable and, in fact, in some cases the biased editor may not even realize their bias is cumulatively shifting coverage.

> the biggest factor when the editor-in-charge of a publication is biased

The editor-in-charge, and indeed every human being, is always biased. There will always be articles that don't make the cut and there is always going to be some criterion by which a decision is made. Some biases are more disruptive than others. Publicly acknowledged biases can be easily accounted for. You don't want an unbiased editor-in-charge, they're really just a person whose biases you don't recognize.

> The editor-in-charge, and indeed every human being, is always biased

> You don't want an unbiased editor-in-charge, they're really just a person whose biases you don't recognize.

These 2 truths are hard for some to digest, and they also diffuse the next step they want to implement: thumbing the scales to "Fix the political bias in science" by installing 'neutral' (to them) individuals to swing science rightwards.

Of course, it's not really about the science itself, it's about using science as a new front in the culture wars.

> it's about using science as a new front in the culture wars.

Indeed. The sad thing is I suspect a large number of those contributing to the 'culture war' biases often do so unknowingly (which doesn't make it any less wrong).

Mainstream science reporting is somewhat different in that poor reporting typically falls into two groups: culture war adjacent topics and "everything else." The problems on the culture war side are pretty well-understood but the "everything else" side, while less 'bad' on a per instance basis, still has a big impact because it's so pervasive. I include in this the near-universal tendency of mainstream media to either bury, under-report or ignore nuance, error bars and virtually all other kinds of uncertainty in science reporting. I'm sure the reporters and their editors feel all that uncertainty makes the story less exciting (and less newsworthy) while explaining nuance makes it 'boring'. Unfortunately, not including those things often makes the story misleading.

I've seen some of their science articles veer into political assertions.

I can't read it at all, so I have no reason to disagree.

> I was a Young Libertarian in my day and I recognize the urge to blame lunatics who disagree with my politics

Reason is obviously a libertarian magazine, but the author is certainly not a libertarian.

Most of the Reason article's criticism is of its factual reporting. The JEDI thing is indeed an opinion piece (and it's legitimate to criticize a magazine for its opinion pieces being stupid), but the puberty blocker stuff (not linked directly from the article, but it's at https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/what-are-puberty-... ) was an article, not an opinion piece.

> "Opinion piece" objectively means "free bullshit zone".

I'm not a fan of Michael Shermer, but he claims SciAm demanded a complete revision of a column, and then later rejected one of his columns, right before getting rid of him entirely. So there's at least some rules about what opinions they're willing to publish, and that was under the previous editor-in-chief (as in the one before the one the article is about). The opinions that make it to press are curated, so if there's something off about them, the editors should be held responsible, and the op-eds don't have a different editor-in-chief than the main articles.

> Who even reads editorials in a science magazine?

I see no reason not to consider them as a significant part of the magazine's image. If the articles were all the same but the editorials were all written by, e.g. young earth creationists about their views, wouldn't what they put in that "free bullshit zone" shape your perception of the whole?

The comment section under the article on Reason’s website explains a lot of what drives their own editorial choices, this article included. It made a few perfectly valid points while twisting backwards to arrive at its very preconceived conclusions, and gave their readers a much-desired hit of satisfaction that they could point to something and claim there personal perspectives had been proven out as a systemic reality. As per usual, the truth is buried somewhere in the lacking nuance.

Don't be mistaken, Science and politics are intertwined and have been for a long time. Talk to any lead scientist who has to secure funding for their project and they ll tell you how its all political. So I dont see a problem with science magazine editors taking a political stance.

The Right tends to harp on this purist view from time to time while ignoring their own house of glass. For them, it's ok for for example, WSJ to be a completely biased in one direction. They dont complain about skewed viewpoints then. They will also defend famous podcasters for providing a platform pseudo science people with agendas. But as soon as a science magazine editor takes a stand, they flip out.

only a problem when it leads to publishing obviously false statements and never correcting them, such as the "The so-called normal distribution of statistics assumes that there are default humans who serve as the standard that the rest of us can be accurately measured".

Does the following phenomenon have a name?

Open an article about the detrimental politicization of something, click to the social media profile of the offender and you know with high certainty the exact kind of poster they are and posts they make/repost.

Yes, it's called bias.

It's accurate, so by definition it cannot be bias.

It's a cognitive bias, since we remember the events that match our expectations and don't keep track of experiment over time.

This is a rather large assumption. I have had plenty of times when I thought I had noticed a trend of some sort and turned out to be mistaken, and so stopped relying on the heuristic. Insisting that everyone is biased (as opposed to observing that anyone can be) is a good way to filter out unexpected and perhaps unwelcome observations.

You perceive it to be accurate, that doesn't mean it is accurate. Furthermore, these sorts of things are highly subject to post-rationalization. Did you write down on a piece of paper what you expected before you clicked? Or did you just click and think to yourself "yup, that's what I expected"?

This sounds like what you would expect to see if everything subject to politicisation is politicised in a direction opposed by the same "kind of poster". I imagine you could observe the same sort of predictability if you looked at the social media profiles of anyone writing an article that politicization of something is actually unproblematic or good.

When it is this easy to delineate and stereotype those for and those against a measure, the appropriate word is polarisation.

This whole debate is surrealist.

Bigotry and intolerance are fundamentally irrational and illogical, so the so-called "left-bias" of science is just science being itself.

Now the comments in this HN page and the reason.com article are completely ignoring that, and only considering everything through a political filter.

Is "intolerance" objectively defined?

Easy enough: make matter things that have no reason to matter.

Like what the skin color has to do with how good your physician is? Nothing.

Science is smart enough to propose the adequate metrics, in this case it does absolutely not include melanin.

> Like what the skin color has to do with how good your physician is? Nothing.

Unfortunately, this is not the case. Malpractice and disciplinary rates among Black and Latin physicians are higher: https://www.library.ca.gov/wp-content/uploads/2021/08/Medica...

> After controlling for a number of other variables, Latino/a and Black physicians were both more likely to receive complaints and more likely to see those complaints escalate to investigations. Latino/a physicians were also more likely to see those investigations result in disciplinary outcomes. On the other hand, some other minority physicians — in particular Asian physicians — actually saw reduced likelihoods of receiving complaints, or of those complaints escalating to investigations. These observations remained even after controlling for age, gender, board certification, and number of hours spent on patient care.

Now do it outside the country, and I anticipate the results don't replicate, meaning your cited study probably fails replication.

I'm not sure what you mean by this. Let's imagine MCAT scores directly determine malpractice rates. If one country practices race based affirmative action in medical school applications, and another country does not the we should expect the former to see a disparity but not the latter.

Why would we expect this trend to replicate across countries which have different medical training systems?

Same as my other comment.

Don't use a proxy.

Is it defensible to claim that men don't commit more violent crime than women? Sure, men are convicted of violent crimes at a higher rates, but convictions for violent crimes is just a proxy for the true violent crime rate. If we want to make th claim that there's a disparity here we shouldn't use a proxy.

Of course, that logic doesn't work because convictions for crime is a pretty good proxy. If I want to discredit it, I'd have to actually explain why convictions for violent crime don't correspond to the true crime rates. If you have cause to think that malpractice lawsuits and disciplinary actions are not a good proxy for poorly administered medical care, I'm all ears.

We agree to disagree.

Btw, criminal conviction related to the profession is not a proxy, it is really one of the things that matter, measured directly. So you're mixing concepts.

> criminal conviction related to the profession is not a proxy,

Yes, it is a proxy. Some people commit crimes but aren't charged or convicted. Some people are falsely convicted. Convictions of crimes absolutely are a proxy for committing crimes.

Until a few years ago, if my physician was educated in the United States and were Asian American they had to have a measurably better academic track record to overcome anti-Asian bias in university admissions. Does that mean they are a better physician? Probably not - in my experience the difference between good and bad in a medical context is patience and care, not knowledge. However it’s not absurd to make the opposite claim.

Similarly, there is a body of scholarship that suggests that black physicians trust black patients more than white physicians trust black patients. If I am black, does the color of my physician matter when I talk about something hurting? The evidence suggests that it might.

The fundamental flaw in basing your moral philosophy in measurable metrics is that metrics are noisy and that noise will often undermine your point. Instead, you should be making a purely moral point: my doctor’s skin color shouldn't matter and I will act to make the world I live in more similar to this ideal. That moral point is the driving force behind the civil rights progress that has been made.

(EDIT: I had not read thoroughly your comment, see my PS below for a direct reply.)

Your point is to use a proxy for the variable that really matters.

Unfortunately that proxy is neither reliable, nor has good impact on the society in general.

It is better to just use the pertinent variables directly without a proxy.

Your physician is good if e.g. they have also a research formation, if their patients are satisfied and have a good recovering rate for illnesses that promise recovery, etc.

PS: ok, I see that you also point to variable trust from the patient to the physician based on superficial criteria. I hope that can change in the near future when everybody has the mindset "the appearance is not what matters". The patients themselves will benefit from growing their openmindedness.

It's left leaning universities that push for affirmative action policies, which do judge people based on their melanin.

That is intended to be a transient mechanism, to evolve towards a more balanced status quo after it has ended.

Deciding "what matters" isn't a question of science, it is a question of dominance and self-interest. You seem intent on dominating others and denying their legitimate self-interests.

What matters is a matter of causality, which is inside the realm of science.

I don't think this applies to the particular problems being discussed. Certainly it's irrational to discriminate (as you say in a related comment), but the examples discussed in the article are not cases of Scientific American simply declaring that principle, but rather making other errors, or proclaiming a rather different political point of view.

(If you think the "social justice" movement is simply about -- or even supports -- the nondiscrimination principle you mention in a related comment, you are mistaken! And if you support it because you support that principle, I recommend looking more into what the SJers actually believe, because you may find that you're not in as close agreement with them as you assumed you were...)

>Bigotry and intolerance are fundamentally irrational and illogical, so the so-called "left-bias" of science is just science being itself.

TIL science ignores sex differences in body strength and endurance, racial differences in average IQ, the Putnam study on diversity and social capital, racial differences in aggression and their link to violent crime, and studies on the effects (irreversible) puberty blockers have on kids, among other things.

You can dislike these results, you can tell me I'm a bigot for even bringing them up, but you cannot correctly dispute them on the grounds of scientific inquiry. The fact that Scientific American would even try, as they have now for years, tells you all you need to know about their attachment to reality.

The fact that many variables are correlated doesn't condone using any of them as an evaluation criteria.

See my other comment on stat proxies.

"In the process, SciAm played a small but important role in the self-immolation of scientific authority—a terrible event whose fallout we'll be living with for a long time."

Which is it - small or important? All that seems like a bit much.

For want of a nail the shoe was lost. For want of a shoe the horse was lost. For want of a horse the rider was lost. For want of a rider the message was lost. For want of a message the battle was lost. For want of a battle the kingdom was lost.

Was the nail small or important?

Why does a person want a nail and then lose a shoe? Why does a person want a shoe and then lose a horse? Why does a person want a message but lose the rider? Why does a person want a message and lose the battle? Why does a person want a battle but lose the kingdom?

I don’t understand the point or reference being made.

They're talking about a horseshoe on a horse which was being used to deliver an important message

There are too many leaps of abstraction, which to me, proves the missing horseshoe nail is irrelevant in the big picture. Too many other things could have transpired positively for the kingdom in a space so expansive. It’s classic scapegoating. “Bro my controller totally didn’t work that time! We would’ve won the match otherwise I promise.”

Tbh it seems entirely plausible to me that a messenger being unable to deliver an important message could have an outsized effect on that outcome of a battle. What if they're letting their side know about a surprise attack?

Seems also plausible that risks might apply to the messenger that wouldn’t apply to the troops in garrison—that is, the thousands of other horseshoe nails in inventory could have gone unmissed or doomed a less important horse.

It's an ancient proverb demonstrating early understanding of complex systems. Not an in depth philosophical argument.

However there are plenty of real life examples of a single small detail causing outsize impact. See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alaska_Airlines_Flight_261

It's kind of absurd to think otherwise.

A more robust treatment of risk factors in both ideas.

You want to ask whether the system needs to be tracking nail quality if the kingdom relies on nails that much. You also want to be asking why critical information is being sent by only one messenger.

"For want of" is a preposition meaning "because of the absence of"

https://en.m.wiktionary.org/wiki/for_want_of#English

“for want of” in this context means “because of not having” or “for lack of”

It’s an older way of writing English. But not like super old. Basically the kingdom was lost because of 1 missing nail.

It’s so contrived and yet needs so many leaps of abstraction that I don’t think it makes its point well at all. “Bro my controller totally didn’t work that time! We would’ve won the match otherwise I promise.” Do you really think it was the controller that lost the match?

It is a well-known proverb that is centuries old [1]: it's essentially a canonical way of refering to the concept of something small having big consequences.

Proverbs are often contrived (e.g., "Those who live in glass houses should not throw stones" - who lives in a glass house?).

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/For_Want_of_a_Nail

I hate everything about this, thank you for sharing the context

If a tiny problem can cascade like that, it seems that there’s a systemic logistics issue going on here, the problem wasn’t the nail it was some high-level problem in the overall organization.

One nail is small and unimportant but the general problem of getting enough nails is a big important one.

And anyway, the messenger also could have been shot, the horse could also have tripped on a rock, the battle could have been lost even with the message getting through. If their plan hinges on everything going right, the kingdom has put themselves in a position where they don’t have any small problems, just big ones.

I think the argument the poster is making is as root cause analysis.

The root cause of the messenger failing was the missing nail. Sure it could have been many other things, but in this case it was the nail. And if it was a pitched battle that was narrowly lost by one message, sure, they could have won or lost because of a dozen other factors, but in this case it was the missing message. There are likely many other important things to worry about, but in the system as it is today, it failed for want of a nail.

Plenty of large engineering outages were because of single keystroke typos. Should these systems be less prone to human error? Of course. Are they? Some of them are, but right now some of them aren't.

The point being made is that small things can be important if other things go wrong. We should fix the other things, but often they are much harder to fix than the small thing. And really, we should care about both, since humans are capable of that.

If you look at the problem as a swiss cheese model and not just a teleological propagation from one root cause, then there are many things that need fixing, not just a cobbler being short one nail.

You can't really blame one magazine going lame on the whole culture going bad, yet there is a way that's contagious.

Maybe it's like cheese because culture goes bad the way cheese goes bad?

This is a very well thought-out comment. I commend you for it.

Sometimes the problem really is tiny. Ill look for the link, but I read an article about how Valve, the company, was saved by an intern.

I think details matter.

See https://80.lv/articles/valve-steam-the-entire-pc-gaming-indu...

> I think details matter

For me, this is the moral of horseshoe nail story. It's something I preach to my team - details matter. I’ll add that unfortunately we often don’t know which details will matter ahead of time.

It was a data point not a horse shoe in a critical chain of events. I think people will get a taste of promoting “alternative facts”when it comes to the current “let’s hit the reset button” crowd. then they will regret it and maybe reassess “alternative facts” like government grand schemes to create autism with vaccines and “make America fat” like are being touted. Most Americans need to only look in the mirror to see the source of their life’s problems.

That's "systemic" thinking (a la "systemic" racism). Which makes it political. TFA would have us avoid such thinking.

you can be small role yet still provide significant contributions. Or are you just upset about the content of the article?

have you ever heard of a lynchpin? They're small and usually extremely important. For example, lynchpins hold the backhoe on to the back of my tractor.

In fact, lynchpins are so small and important that the term is used when there's something that is small but so important that missing it would ruin a project, because the lynchpin ties it all together into a cohesive whole.

Also the replies to my sibling have me confused if i am even awake... who hasn't heard "for want of a nail"?

What a strange bit of pedantry. 'Small but powerful' is a very common phrase that I don't really see any problem with.

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