The ethical principle at issue here shouldn’t be hard: “Do your job.” Unfortunately, it is apparently too hard for the scientists and researchers at Scientific American. Just as American journalism, sports teams, the entertainment industry–ethicists!— and others have been unable to resist the siren song of political activism, the once reliable and trustworthy general consumption science magazine so essential to my early education in the subject has capitulated to wokeness and now feels that its mission of exploring and explaining science to non-scientists includes political and partisan advocacy.
Will going woke mean, as the saying goes, that “S.A.” (as its friends call it) will “go broke”? Time will tell. This kind of beach of trust, integrity and mission, however, deserves to be fatal.
This week, the magazine unveiled its criticism of news media reporting on the campus pro-Hamas demonstrations. Science! In fact, the article is little more than a standard progressive rationalization of the protests. It is transparently presented with rhetoric that suggests legitimate scientific inquiry, (“For over a decade, my research has extensively explored…”) but the author isn’t a scientist. She’s a professor of journalism; more to the point, she’s a black community activist journalist clearly in the intersectionality and advocacy journalism camps:
“Danielle Brown, Ph.D. is the 1855 Community and Urban Journalism Professor and an associate professor in the School of Journalism. She is also the founding director of the LIFT Project — an engaged research effort aimed at identifying networks of trusted messengers in Black communities in the Midwest to 1) understand their effects on civic and democratic life; 2) create, network, and allocate resources needed to inform Black communities better; and 3) build new opportunities for sustainable reparative narrative change….”
Not that there’s anything wrong with that, but what—the hell-–is she writing in Scientific American for, and why did the magazine’s editors publish what she wrote? Easy: everybody’s obsessed with politics, and like the kid with the thick glasses and the good grades who gets picked last on a sandlot baseball team, they want to play, even if they have nothing useful to contribute.
As with so many bad things, Scientific American’s ethics rot began with the random death of a life-time hood who was overdosing on fentanyl and resisting arrest, under the knee of a bad cop in Minnesota. Science! That annus horribilus, 2020, the magazine broke with its long-time policy and endorsed a Presidential candidate (guess who!) because “the 2020 election is literally a matter of life and death.” Literally! Well, I guess English isn’t technically a science. The publication went “all in” in 2022, devoting an entire “collectors edition” to “science for social justice.”
City-Journal documents the descent of S.A. into politics and progressive activism in “Unscientific American: Science journalism surrenders to progressive ideology.” The tale is both damning and depressing. The magazine long included a column by Michael Shermer that explored the tension between religion, culture and science, something he is extremely qualified to do as a trained theologian, psychologist and scientist. [Bias alert: he is one of my favorite writers.] Shermer is a science historian, a specialist in exposing pseudo-science, the executive director of The Skeptics Society, and founding publisher of Skeptic magazine. The column came to an end when, as Shermer explains it, his “heterodox approach”to the world, meaning apolitical, was perceived as hostile to the “right” views.
He submitted a column about the “fallacy of excluded exceptions,” in which people perceive a pattern of causal links between factors but ignore counterexamples that don’t fit the pattern. Shermer used a pop culture phenomenon (this is one of the reasons I like his writing), the myth of the “horror-film curse” which holds that bad luck tends to haunt actors who appear in horror movies. It’s easily debunked, so Shermer went on to include a more consequential example: the belief that sexually abused children grow up to become sexual abusers themselves. The evidence shows that “most sexually abused children do not grow up to abuse their own children” and that “most abusive parents were not abused as children.” Shermer’s effort to correct a common misconception criticized by his editors as too much facts and not enough social responsibility. It might be read as downplaying the seriousness of abuse, he was told. Even raising the topic might be too traumatic for victims. Reluctantly, they published the column
Then Shermer really spit into the metaphorical woke wind. He submitted a column examining the gradual decline of discrimination against racial minorities, gays, and other groups. (That is a verifiable fact.) His editors objected, telling him that saying that “everything is wonderful and everyone should stop whining doesn’t really work.” Shermer wasn’t saying that “everything is wonderful,” but the editors’ reaction is a dead canary in the mine: revealing an inconvenient fact “doesn’t work”? The column’s argument that that intersectional theory, which assigns people into aggregate identity groups based on race, sex, and other immutable characteristics, “is a perverse inversion” of Martin Luther King’s dream of a color-blind society was the final straw. Shermer was fired and his column terminated.
The City-Journal piece reveals that Scientific American, like so many other institutions, began taking a dive when a DEI hire and activist took over the leadership of the magazine. Though Laura Helmuth was hired in April of 2020, before the George Floyd Freakout reached epic proportions. (Her editorial experience had most recently included the Washington Post, which should have been a red flag), S.A. was soon publishing articles like “Modern Mathematics Confronts Its White, Patriarchal Past,” “The Racist Roots of Fighting Obesity,” “Why the Term ‘JEDI’ Is Problematic for Describing Programs That Promote Justice, Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion.”
Analyzing the causes of the corruption in his old stomping ground, Shermer told City-Journal that science journalism has been warped by the postmodern worldview that all facts are “relative or culturally determined,” meaning that “everything is a narrative that has to reflect some political side.” The new style of science journalism takes the form of advocacy, with science writers’ goal being to push readers toward a politically correct and progressive-certified opinion.
“Lately journalists have been behaving more like lawyers,” Shermer said, “marshaling evidence in favor of their own view and ignoring anything that doesn’t help their argument.”
Terrific. The City-Journal essay’s author, James Meigs, concludes gloomily that “without a return to the core principles of science—and the broader tradition of fact-based discourse and debate—our society risks drifting onto the rocks of irrationality.”
Once, not too long ago, Scientific American saw its mission as preventing that. Now it appears determined to encourage it.
Ethics Alarms 
I’m reading a biography of the German composer Richard Strauss. By today’s standards, he would be problematic. I’m frankly surprised he hasn’t been canceled yet (though it would be a shame should it occur). As it happens, this morning, I read about the incident in which he wrote to the Jewish writer, Stefan Zweig, who was the librettist for a work Strauss was composing, in which Strauss claimed to be apolitical.
The letter was opened and read by the Gestapo and resulted in him being forced out of a position as head of the Reich Music Chamber.
The author points out the one of the ideological components of Nazism was that the culture had to be brought in line with the regime. ”Once the State had decided all art to be a means to a political end the only possible response, whether social or cultural, had to be politicized; in Nazi Germany, therefore, everything had a political aspect, and it was down to individuals to choose between reality or denial.” page 316 “Richard Strauss”, Matthew Boyden.
In fact, science had to be suborned to the ideology of the regime in Germany, too (as well as in Soviet Russia where research had to conclude what Stalin said it had to conclude, a pox on the facts). Hence, the ridiculous experiments to change eye color in complete denial of genetics.
This is how totalitarian regimes work. All culture, all art, all education, all news coverage – and all science – must conform to the ideology of the State.
A.M. Golden,
I have mentioned Saul Friedlander’s work in here before (his two-part “Nazi Germany and the Jews”), and he would completely agree with what you wrote.
It’s one of the words cited in the bibliography, in fact.
Thanks for the link to the JEDI article. It makes some of the pseudo-intellectual crap I read in my own work look profound by comparison, and I’d been too long without emitting a derisive snort.
I couldn’t bring myself to read about the white patriarchy associated with mathematics, however. Even masochism has its limits.
How do you spell a derisive snort? It would be useful to know.
I think we might need an acronym instead; they seem to be all the rage.
Well, some of this is true. Much of our work in modern mathematics has been the result of men in Western Society. The same is true of all of modern science. In their worldview, it can’t be true that a small group of (gasp) Christians of the caucasian variety could have had such an effect on the modern world. If it is true, then it must be a bad thing and needs to be destroyed. Their multiculturalism is a lie, and the truth has to be treated as a crime.
Curmie wrote (delightfully, I might add), “I’d been too long without emitting a derisive snort.”
My cure: I begin each morning with derisive snort, in response to a world gone berserk. Next, after turning off the alarm system, I open the front door, step casually on to the porch, look around, wave my fist in the air and declare, “Damn you! Damn you all to Hell!”
jvb
PS: Remy does not quite grasp my morning outcries, and nor does the HOA, for that matter. This afternoon, I received a “Cease and Desist” letter from them, threatening legal action if I continue.
As an undergraduate, my technical writing professor gave us a manuscript he reviewed years earlier. In in, the authors documented the yield of a chemical reaction based on the phases of the moon. I don’t know how they realized they had such a correlation, but they did. The authors were intrigued, so they convinced a different research group on a different continent to try it and THEY found the same correlation. The authors had no proposed mechanism for the phenomenon.
The question before us: “Do you publish it”? Every single student in the class answered ‘yes’, because they have the data. All they are publishing is the data. Even though there is no know or even proposed mechanism to account for this, they have data. Shouldn’t they be allowed to publish even if people think it is impossible? Isn’t this the same pushback that suppressed the kinetic-molecular theory of gases for 200 years? What if someone discovers a property that could explain this? They will need data like this to support it and suppressing the data because we don’t understand it would confound that research. He told us that the editor refused to publish it.
Thanks Dr. Nordmann for such an interesting exercise.
SA is part of my youthful education. As a student at Brooklyn Technical High School, once a “magnet school” of the NYC educational system, for the scientifc education of boys, we were required to subscribe. I recall the front cover depicting the DNA model of Watson and Crick. Of course that was when SA was scientific. I imagine today that same discovery would not be allowed to be published because it does not fit the ideolgy of transgenderism and other societal aberrations.
SA was definitely in decline before 2020. Try to find any scientific objectivity about gun control in its pages from the 2010s.
Then there was the paradox of “gendered brains”. It’s quite well-known that there are a number of measurements, whether biological markers like the size of certain brain structures, or the results of certain cognitive tests, that show a distinctly bimodal distribution by gender, with varying degrees of overlap in the tails. SA has two different kinds of articles on this. There were the ones trying to push gender equality, which insisted that the overlap in the tails demonstrated there was no such thing as a “gendered brain”, and ignored the clearly divergent group means. Then there were the “Born this way” articles that argued measurements of gay or trans subjects showed they had the brains of the opposite gender, when we had just been told there was no such thing.
This is exactly like militant islamists buying out Ms. Magazine or ym and publishing articles about how Allah created women to serve men and how WEestern women were whores who deserve to be beaten.
https://forum.pafoa.org/showthread.php?t=380110&p=4515750#post4515750
It’s one thing to have theoretical science or history of science become woke, but another kettle of fish when the applied sciences become woke. Medicine? Engineering? Agriculture? Power? Come on guys, let’s keep our eye on the ball, eh?