Self-censorship is the other half of this problem. How many of us here have self censored our writing out of fear of painting a bullseye on our backs? The more you have to lose, the more cautious you are. If you’ve spent a lifetime studying a certain field, building a business or becoming a well know expert, you risk having it all taken away if you provoke the ire of the mob. And the mob has nothing to lose and everything to gain by targeting well known public figures.
The result is that absurd ideas enter the public psyche and not one expert will risk their career by contradicting them.
The democratization of publishing is an exciting breakthrough in all of human history. I’d rather have it than not. But this post-truth era that is emerging is worrying.
Woke culture had a purpose but it has become a victim of its own success. The author of the SA article clearly wants to carve out science as biased by the mere fact of asserting that all genes are not equal. They seem to think we are all perfectly one as capable as the other in all things. That is insanity. It leads to a spiral of blame and anxiety as we see ourselves as nothing but victims of the world at large and that we're helpless to do anything about it.
I see small, walled groups with vibrant and varied discussion re-emerging. I hear about new small groups/chats constantly; I'm a party to several. Discussion within is without fear of consequence, ideas are discussed objectively and in earnest. Disagreements are expected and welcome. Sometimes tempers flare but mutual respect is not lost and empathy is high. The soup of the day is candor, and it's delicious.
It's a matter of time until the bullseye fear is replaced with anger and gives way to courage, and until the mob annoys enough people as to lose any persuasion or power it currently holds. It'll take time, but history shows that change is inevitable.
Your comment has me wondering about history and whether such previous drastic changes in communication technology have also brought waves of censorship, both by others and by ourselves. For example, with radio, the telephone, or even the printing press. In other words, not only the ability to publish/broadcast, but to have people reply to your publishing or broadcasting. I also wonder if we somehow adapt to it as we learn these new ways to communicate.
I tend not to self censor too much (though I do on certain topics, where people are ready too jump). I get banned on pretty much every reddit sub that has any kind of political element to it now.
Scientific American has been in decline since their 2003 hit pieces against environmentalist Bjorn Lomberg. All ad-hominem attacks, no science or logic.
Sadly this has infected other publications: Last week The Economist did not do an official obituary of E.O. Wilson, they did a drag queen instead. Wilson was relegated to a four paragraph notice in the science section.
Wilson was badly attacked by Marxists in the 1970's for his book on ants, Sociobiology.
It's not Scientific American. It's every medium. The NYT of 2022 is not the NYT of the past, and WP is not the WP of Watergate. And it goes beyond the ideological issues.
In fact, the same declining quality (though not with the same specifics of course) is the case in every industry where they're fighting for increasingly thinner profit margins.
It was the same back in the day (as far back as Mark Twain, Hearst/"Kane" and the first newspapers), where it was all about political and magnate influence to please some sponsor or another, and cheap writing to get people to buy papers.
If journalism had a veneer that it wasn't about the bottom line, that was when money were plenty, because there was a brief (not that innocent, but much better than before and after) period, say between 1940 and 2000), when:
(a) consumer spending got big
(b) advertising budgets grew
(c) while still having no "per page view" metric available,
(d) and before the race-to-the-bottom of the online era, as there weren't hundreds of thousands of competing news sources plus every amateur with a website plus social media plus 24/7 tv
that gave print journalists the luxury of working independently and with more prestige.
Popular journalism has never NOT been biased and at worse absolutely awful for those without power. For that reason, freedom of speech and diverse outlets are important. For whatever reason, people just don’t know much about the history of journalism.
This is accurate, and I'll add this issue also isn't necessarily about "woke culture" at all - the decision makers at these media companies are latching on to memes they think will drive viewership, and in doing so are amplifying questionable voices and poorly-thought-out content, because those decision makers can't tell the difference and likely don't care.
Being "woke" initially just meant acknowledgement of existing social stratification, and was a meme/label just like being a "Chad" or a "Karen". It was a simple state of being, which has been blown out of proportion by the trends OP outlined. Everything gets bastardized and watered down to the point where it isn't the same thing at all anymore. Now, were seeing amplification of people screaming "that's racist" at everything. I think most things deserve scrutiny, bit I agree the bar for that scrutiny needs to be much higher than the SA article.
I agree corporate journalism is a pathetic shell of its former self that can only race bait to get clicks. But I do think there is some good journalism going on in the independent scene. For example, Glenn Greenwald still puts out good investigative journalism, and there is a lot of good content on substack as well. I think this is the future, it just makes sense. In the past, journalists had to group into big organizations as you needed a lot of infrastructure to get the message out - printing presses, delivery workers, etc. Now with the internet all you really need is a single person.
It's just capitalism at work. The period between 1940 and 2000, roughly, is when white men had the most disposable income. Unsurprisingly, most media was produced for them, specifically. Now, white men have a very small piece of the disposable income pie. And, we see lots of diversity in media and big media companies trying to appeal to the widest demographic.
So, I'm guessing that Scientific American's readership just changed, and they went with what sells.
Something like 15 years ago I was at a conference and happened to sit at lunch table with a top editor of Scientific American. (Maybe the top one at the time, I don't remember.) I had been an enthusiastic subscriber for many years and still subscribed at that point, although I was concerned that it seemed to be dumbing itself down.
I mentioned that to the editor. I forget the exact words I used, but they were an attempt to be diplomatic, and she replied with something to the effect that the magazine had to have an audience. That was not encouraging. It had had an audience for more than 100 years just as it was.
The dumbing down continued until I couldn't enjoy it at all anymore, and I finally cancelled my subscription. That was a sad day. Now get my science news from r/science.
Let me ask you: would you expect the quality/tone/curation of r/science to hold up 50 years from now? Would you be surprised if, in 50 years, r/science didn't have the special sauce it has now?
All things are ephemeral, especially in media. We're just marketed at to believe otherwise.
In the 70s I was an avid SciAm reader. I loved the monthly "Amateur Scientist" column, "conducted" by C. L. Stong. Lots of detailed technical info about how to make a seismometer, a nitrogen laser, an electron microscope, antibubbles, etc. etc. etc.
I have the Amateur Scientist 3.0 CD-ROM, including columns from 1928 to 2001, and I just pulled out an October 1974 column, "Electrostatic Motors Are Powered By Electric Field of the Earth". I remember reading it at the time and noticing that one motor diagram had a commutator drawn so that it shorted the supply for half of the rotation. I wrote a (probably precocious and annoying) letter to C. L. Stong alerting him of the problem, signing it as "Dan Griscom, Age 12". Mr. Stong wrote back, confirming that I was right, and signing it as "C. L. Stong, Age 72". (Still have the letter...)
The latest episode was about the nanoarchitecture of butterfly wings, which is a fascinating topic.
A researcher mimicked the nano structure onto a piece of metal, a disk the size of a nickel, which is so hydrophobic that two disks close to each other would float, as it had essentially a bubble trapped between them.
The subtext of the show was about "combating climate change". So the narrator ludicrously suggests that it could be used to create floating cities because global water levels are rising.
The problem with NOVA in this TikTok era is the hour long format that was designed for broadcast TV.
A topic with 10 minutes of material is stretched into 45 minutes with unnecessary drama and reenactments as filler.
Like the kids say these days 'Ain't nobody got time for that'. I'd rather watch a 10 min video on Youtube that covers the same topic.
That might be silly, but its not downright misrepresenting concepts the way this article is complaining about, e.g.
> “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."
On another episode, "The Universe Revealed: Big Bang", the presenters said:
"Somewhere there was a first planet that formed in the entire universe. We'll never know about it. We'll never know when it formed or what its fate was. But it formed somewhere!"
Reposting my comment from the E.O. Wilson thread from a couple of weeks ago,
"As a reader of the magazine for the past 35 years or so, Scientific American, the print publication, has devolved into what Popular Science was about 20 years ago. Sensationalist headlines, writing geared towards a much lower reading comprehension level and the introduction of politics and opinion in various articles.
A sad state of affairs for a once great publication, unfortunately.
However, the mantle has been taken up by online publications such as Quanta, Aeon, Edge and Nautilus, as well as various science authors on Medium and Substack."
I definitely have been reading a lot more from alternative sources such as the ones you mentioned. I also would say that the democratization of journalism is really important today because of the politicization of so many institutions, including virtually all traditional media outlets like Scientific American. The threat to heterodox thinking isn’t especially new either - Quillette recently reposted an interview of E.O. Wilson from 2009 by Alice Dreger that feels prescient in its coverage of the social/political dynamics that we see continuing today and underpinning recent hit pieces written about Wilson (https://quillette.com/2021/12/29/speaking-with-e-o-wilson/).
A lot of domain-specific publications have become insufferably political; they are trading on their previous reputations but are now so ideological that they're basically worthless. A few that come to mind are Wired, MIT Technology Review, Vanity Fair, and Rolling Stone.
> “Why are string theorists calling for an end to empiricism rather than an end to racial hegemony? I believe the answer is that knowledge production in physics is contingent on the ascribed identities of the physicists.”
This one and most of the other quotes sound like they were written by some AI.
What can I put in my house today that will let my children discover science and physics the way Scientific American let me discover them as a teenager?
I keep hoping that we reach and pass Peak Woke, but I think we're still not there. Journalism (capital J) has been thoroughly damaged by it, as is evident in so many magazines, newspapers, sites, channels, etc.
I'm optimistic that there will be a renaissance of objective Journalism, and eager for it to happen.
Scientific American is a publication, not someone's Facebook page. The writing gets Scientific American's legitimacy when they publish it and it reduces Scientific American's legitimacy if it's of poor quality. Editor-In-Chiefs should remember that 'it's an opinion piece' isn't a valid defense to separate the work from the publication or argue against a poor quality writing. They shouldn't publish the piece if the work doesn't represent the views of the publication or meet the quality of work expected.
Sometimes I feel like we've forgotten what a reputation is and how they work. At the very least, it seems we've decided that opinions are functionally equivalent facts.
Sure but it's still a garbage article. Not all opinions are equal or equally well supported. Having an opinion based on nothing but cringe and woke-ism isn't really one worth reading.
Its not unlike the travesty that has befallen our once informative channels: natgeo, discovery, animal planet...though perhaps not quite as extreme. And the National Geographic magazine has been obsessing over woke politics for a decade now as well. Its a damn shame to lose these institutions to such blatant politicking.
Across society we seem to be regressing to the lowest common denominator. Entertainment, education, consumer goods, advertisement...this can't be sustainable.
"Purposive" is a word that I've never seen used before, but it's actually in the dictionary, and one of the meanings is as a synonym of the more usual "purposeful": https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/purposive
The original article is unspeakably bad, a shameful incoherent diatribe from an apparently professional academic. Not least because it is bizarrely self-obsessed, the author cites her own research in a complete non sequitur and links to a lecture where she apparently asked Craig Venter a question…
I had this same experience trying to find some good science magazines for my 14yr old. They are quite interested in genetics and I looked and looked and none of the available magazines were any good.
I think that looking at the advertisements in the magazines tells you what part of the problem is. They are aimed at a fairly old demographic and probably the one remaining that still buys magazines.
The other significant issue is ads. No-one wants to spend ad money on ads that do not provide the type stats that Facebook and Google do. Before the internet the relationship between an ad campaign and increased sales wasn't causal. Maybe the ads worked. Maybe they didn't.
Now advertisers have far more information about the success of their campaigns and much, much more control over how ads are targeted.
So why would anyone do print or newspaper ads?
So magazines and newspapers are left with a diminishing pool of advertisers who target a declining demographic.
"Focusing on weight—or health behaviors—puts the burden on the individual, deflecting attention from the more pernicious problem: systemic injustice."
Sounds like when I was a kid and said "the devil made me do it". Taking responsibility for our (in)actions is a necessary prerequisite for being an adult.
[+] [-] mmaunder|4 years ago|reply
The result is that absurd ideas enter the public psyche and not one expert will risk their career by contradicting them.
The democratization of publishing is an exciting breakthrough in all of human history. I’d rather have it than not. But this post-truth era that is emerging is worrying.
[+] [-] stjohnswarts|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] andrew_|4 years ago|reply
It's a matter of time until the bullseye fear is replaced with anger and gives way to courage, and until the mob annoys enough people as to lose any persuasion or power it currently holds. It'll take time, but history shows that change is inevitable.
[+] [-] jimkleiber|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] collyw|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] RachelF|4 years ago|reply
Sadly this has infected other publications: Last week The Economist did not do an official obituary of E.O. Wilson, they did a drag queen instead. Wilson was relegated to a four paragraph notice in the science section.
Wilson was badly attacked by Marxists in the 1970's for his book on ants, Sociobiology.
[+] [-] coldtea|4 years ago|reply
In fact, the same declining quality (though not with the same specifics of course) is the case in every industry where they're fighting for increasingly thinner profit margins.
It was the same back in the day (as far back as Mark Twain, Hearst/"Kane" and the first newspapers), where it was all about political and magnate influence to please some sponsor or another, and cheap writing to get people to buy papers.
If journalism had a veneer that it wasn't about the bottom line, that was when money were plenty, because there was a brief (not that innocent, but much better than before and after) period, say between 1940 and 2000), when:
(a) consumer spending got big
(b) advertising budgets grew
(c) while still having no "per page view" metric available,
(d) and before the race-to-the-bottom of the online era, as there weren't hundreds of thousands of competing news sources plus every amateur with a website plus social media plus 24/7 tv
that gave print journalists the luxury of working independently and with more prestige.
[+] [-] jollofricepeas|4 years ago|reply
Popular journalism has never NOT been biased and at worse absolutely awful for those without power. For that reason, freedom of speech and diverse outlets are important. For whatever reason, people just don’t know much about the history of journalism.
- Yellow journalism is a thing and was responsible for riots, murders and possibly a war: https://www.history.com/news/spanish-american-war-yellow-jou...
- The press of the US South openly advocated and encouraged lynchings: https://www.poynter.org/maligned-in-black-white/
- The LA Times apologized for its stereotypical poor chronicling of issues facing people of color: https://www.latimes.com/opinion/story/2020-09-27/los-angeles...
- The Kansas City Star has apologized for its reporting of minorities: https://eji.org/news/missouri-newspaper-confronts-and-apolog...
[+] [-] scrozart|4 years ago|reply
Being "woke" initially just meant acknowledgement of existing social stratification, and was a meme/label just like being a "Chad" or a "Karen". It was a simple state of being, which has been blown out of proportion by the trends OP outlined. Everything gets bastardized and watered down to the point where it isn't the same thing at all anymore. Now, were seeing amplification of people screaming "that's racist" at everything. I think most things deserve scrutiny, bit I agree the bar for that scrutiny needs to be much higher than the SA article.
[+] [-] uejfiweun|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] entropicgravity|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] afpx|4 years ago|reply
So, I'm guessing that Scientific American's readership just changed, and they went with what sells.
[+] [-] garyrob|4 years ago|reply
I mentioned that to the editor. I forget the exact words I used, but they were an attempt to be diplomatic, and she replied with something to the effect that the magazine had to have an audience. That was not encouraging. It had had an audience for more than 100 years just as it was.
The dumbing down continued until I couldn't enjoy it at all anymore, and I finally cancelled my subscription. That was a sad day. Now get my science news from r/science.
[+] [-] vwcx|4 years ago|reply
All things are ephemeral, especially in media. We're just marketed at to believe otherwise.
[+] [-] smitty1e|4 years ago|reply
They could have opted to bring the audience up to the magazine. But that is The Road Not Taken.
[+] [-] frebdo|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dtgriscom|4 years ago|reply
I have the Amateur Scientist 3.0 CD-ROM, including columns from 1928 to 2001, and I just pulled out an October 1974 column, "Electrostatic Motors Are Powered By Electric Field of the Earth". I remember reading it at the time and noticing that one motor diagram had a commutator drawn so that it shorted the supply for half of the rotation. I wrote a (probably precocious and annoying) letter to C. L. Stong alerting him of the problem, signing it as "Dan Griscom, Age 12". Mr. Stong wrote back, confirming that I was right, and signing it as "C. L. Stong, Age 72". (Still have the letter...)
And yes: the magazine has gone downhill.
[+] [-] jmrm|4 years ago|reply
Also, uploading it to Internet Archive wouldn't be a bad idea either :-)
[+] [-] zmix|4 years ago|reply
I know a lot of DataHoarders, who would love to get a hand on this ;-)
[+] [-] thrill|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] WalterBright|4 years ago|reply
The latest episode was about the nanoarchitecture of butterfly wings, which is a fascinating topic.
A researcher mimicked the nano structure onto a piece of metal, a disk the size of a nickel, which is so hydrophobic that two disks close to each other would float, as it had essentially a bubble trapped between them.
The subtext of the show was about "combating climate change". So the narrator ludicrously suggests that it could be used to create floating cities because global water levels are rising.
[+] [-] AareyBaba|4 years ago|reply
Like the kids say these days 'Ain't nobody got time for that'. I'd rather watch a 10 min video on Youtube that covers the same topic.
[+] [-] bawolff|4 years ago|reply
> “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."
[+] [-] gloriana|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] WalterBright|4 years ago|reply
"Somewhere there was a first planet that formed in the entire universe. We'll never know about it. We'll never know when it formed or what its fate was. But it formed somewhere!"
[+] [-] jdkee|4 years ago|reply
"As a reader of the magazine for the past 35 years or so, Scientific American, the print publication, has devolved into what Popular Science was about 20 years ago. Sensationalist headlines, writing geared towards a much lower reading comprehension level and the introduction of politics and opinion in various articles. A sad state of affairs for a once great publication, unfortunately.
However, the mantle has been taken up by online publications such as Quanta, Aeon, Edge and Nautilus, as well as various science authors on Medium and Substack."
[+] [-] mathematicaster|4 years ago|reply
I really miss the quality content that Scientific American had in their issue from the 70s and 80s.
[+] [-] throwawaysea|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ageek123|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] chmod775|4 years ago|reply
This one and most of the other quotes sound like they were written by some AI.
[+] [-] throwaway81523|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jshprentz|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] modeless|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] kerneloftruth|4 years ago|reply
I'm optimistic that there will be a renaissance of objective Journalism, and eager for it to happen.
[+] [-] ourmandave|4 years ago|reply
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/the-complicated-l...
[+] [-] OldTimeCoffee|4 years ago|reply
Sometimes I feel like we've forgotten what a reputation is and how they work. At the very least, it seems we've decided that opinions are functionally equivalent facts.
[+] [-] stjohnswarts|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] twofornone|4 years ago|reply
Across society we seem to be regressing to the lowest common denominator. Entertainment, education, consumer goods, advertisement...this can't be sustainable.
[+] [-] shazeubaa|4 years ago|reply
Cue the film _Idiocracy_
[+] [-] lr1970|4 years ago|reply
The Demise of Scientific American (scottaaronson.blog)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29778348 (419 comments)
[+] [-] waynecochran|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] nate_meurer|4 years ago|reply
On her Twitter, the writer of the piece [Monica McLemore] wrote: "I purposively didn’t quote his work so you could read it for yourself."
Not a good look for an aspiring scholar when her very first word is a misapprehension of everyday english.
[+] [-] greenyoda|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|4 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] WalterBright|4 years ago|reply
He'd given up on SA by the 1980s, saying their quality had declined.
[+] [-] Gatsky|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] pixelgeek|4 years ago|reply
I think that looking at the advertisements in the magazines tells you what part of the problem is. They are aimed at a fairly old demographic and probably the one remaining that still buys magazines.
The other significant issue is ads. No-one wants to spend ad money on ads that do not provide the type stats that Facebook and Google do. Before the internet the relationship between an ad campaign and increased sales wasn't causal. Maybe the ads worked. Maybe they didn't.
Now advertisers have far more information about the success of their campaigns and much, much more control over how ads are targeted.
So why would anyone do print or newspaper ads?
So magazines and newspapers are left with a diminishing pool of advertisers who target a declining demographic.
[+] [-] type0|4 years ago|reply
tldr it's because the oppression
[+] [-] readthenotes1|4 years ago|reply
Sounds like when I was a kid and said "the devil made me do it". Taking responsibility for our (in)actions is a necessary prerequisite for being an adult.
[+] [-] christkv|4 years ago|reply