The Demise of Scientific American

by KKKKkkkk1 • 5 years ago

563 396 5 years ago

causi3• 5 years ago

Genuine racists, sexists, and their sort have no greater allies than the ever-present purity inquisition among people purporting to oppose bigotry. What may have begun as efforts to reform thinking in a progressive and egalitarian manner has become the mirror image of the hate-mongering of their opponents. The difference is that the racists attack people who were never inclined to be their allies, and that's why they win elections.

chroem-2• 5 years ago

Hot take: the current state of anti-racism is increasingly indistinguishable from regular racism.

Barrin92• 5 years ago

pretty hot if you've ever been the target of actual racism, which includes getting beaten up for wearing a headscarf, not getting an apartment rented out because your last name sounds weird or being rejected by your parents in law, or fucked over by the police.

I know HN doesn't like heated language and so on but if you think a bunch of intellectuals getting their book tours cancelled and online commentators getting their twitter blocked compares to the lived racism of minorities you have to have your head up your own ass.

Cthulhu_3• 5 years ago

Can you list some examples?

breakyerself2• 5 years ago

I found all these studies showing that actual racism causes measurable disadvantages for people of color. Can you show me where antiracism causes anything close to a similar negative effect on society?

[1] Police stop black drivers significantly more than white drivers when the sun's up and they can see the driver is black, but not at night when they can't see the drivers race. Meaning race is often the determining factor for why someone is pulled over or not.

[2] Unarmed black people are 3.49 times as likely to be killed as unarmed white people. Local crime rates have zero effect on this statistic.

[3] Black and white police use force at similar rates in white neightborhoods, but white cops use force significantly more than black cops when responding to calls in minority neighborhoods.

[4] Police in oakland find contraband at the same rate regardless of race, but search black drivers 4x more often.

[5] The more white a suspect appears to be the less likely police are to use force. The more black a suspect appears the more likely it is that police will use force.

[6] Black police are more likely to be shot by their fellow officers than white police.

[7] Oaklad police disproportionately handcuff blacks at stunning levels in all areas of the city.

[8] In San Francisco, “although Black people accounted for less than 15 percent of all stops in 2015, they accounted for over 42 percent of all non-consent searches following stops.” This proved unwarranted: “Of all people searched without consent, Black and Hispanic people had the lowest ‘hit rates’ (i.e., the lowest rate of contraband recovered).”

[9] The DOJ investigation into Ferguson PD, found “a pattern or practice of unlawful conduct within the Ferguson PD that violates the 1st, 4th, and 14th Amendments to the Constitution, and federal law.” The scathing report found that FPD was targeting black residents and treating them as revenue streams for the city by striving to continually increase the money brought in through fees and fines.

[10] In Chicago, a 2016 report found that “black and Hispanic drivers were searched approximately four times as often as white drivers, yet Chicago PDs own data show that contraband was found on white drivers twice as often as black and Hispanic drivers.”

[11]2014 ACLU analysis of Illinois DOT data found: “Black and Latino drivers are nearly twice as likely as white drivers to be asked during a routine traffic stop for ‘consent’ to have their car searched. Yet white motorists are 49% more likely than African American motorists to have contraband discovered during a consent search by law enforcement, and 56% more likely when compared to Latinos.”

[12] Black people are more likely to be wrongfully convicted and more likely to be framed for a crime they didn't commit.

[13] Black kids are more likely to be tried as an adult.

[14] Black people get 20% longer prison sentences for the same crimes even controlling for criminal history.

[15] Black students are more likely to be arrested at school. A function of increased security at predominantly black schools. Not because black students commit crimes at school at higher rates.

[16] Security levels in schools are determined by how many black kids go to the school and not crime levels.

[17] Predominantly black schools are chronically underfunded compared to predominantly white schools.

[18] An identical resume with a white sounding name like Stephen or Susan is twice as likely to recieve a call for a job interview compared to the same resume with an ethnically black sounding name like Jamal or Latisha.

[19] Minorities who alter their resumes to seem white get more job interviews.

[20] Banks targeted black homeowners for predatory homeloans and refinancing in the lead up to the 2008 crisis. Causing black families to be disproportionately harmed by the forclosure crisis.

[21] owner-occupied homes in black neighborhoods are undervalued by $48,000 per home on average, amounting to $156 billion in cumulative losses. This study controls for crime rates. Neighborhood amenities like schools, parks, walkability, and public transportation. The size and age of homes etc.

[22] In an experiment landlords responding to emails treated Blacks, Arab males, Muslims, and single parents unfavorably.

[23] Almost twice as many non-Hispanic Black children have lead levels at or above 2 micrograms per deciliter compared to non-Hispanic White children.

[24] People of color are much more likely to live near polluters and breathe polluted air. People in poverty are exposed to more fine particulate matter than people living above poverty. “results at national, state, and county scales all indicate that non-Whites tend to be burdened disproportionately to Whites.”

[25] Black children are taken into foster care at a disproportionately high rate, and stay in the system longer before they’re adopted or reunited with their parents.

[1] https://www.nature.com/articles/s41562-020-0858-1

[2] https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal...

[3] https://www.nber.org/papers/w26774?utm_source=dlvr.it&utm_me...

[4] https://stanford.app.box.com/v/Data-for-Change

[5] https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/194855061663350...

[6] https://www.hks.harvard.edu/sites/default/files/centers/wien...

[7] https://sparq.stanford.edu/opd-reports

[8] https://sfdistrictattorney.org/sites/default/files/Document/...

[9] https://www.justice.gov/sites/default/files/opa/press-releas...

[10] https://chicagopatf.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/04/PATF_Fina...

[11] https://www.aclu-il.org/en/press-releases/traffic-stop-data-...

[12] https://www.law.umich.edu/special/exoneration/Documents/Race...

[13] https://www.wnyc.org/story/black-kids-more-likely-be-tried-a...

[14]https://www.ussc.gov/research/research-reports/demographic-d...

[15] https://www.edweek.org/ew/articles/2017/01/25/black-students...

[16] https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2016/06/160608180824.h...

[17] https://psmag.com/education/nonwhite-school-districts-get-23...

[18] https://www.nber.org/digest/sep03/w9873.html

[19] https://hbswk.hbs.edu/item/minorities-who-whiten-job-resumes...

[20] https://www.aclu.org/files/field_document/discrimlend_final....

[21] https://www.brookings.edu/research/devaluation-of-assets-in-...

[22] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S01660...

[23] https://www.publichealthpost.org/databyte/racial-gaps-in-chi...

[24] https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2018/02/the-tru...

[25] https://www.mynews13.com/fl/orlando/news/2021/07/14/foster-c...

Ygg22• 5 years ago

That's a hot take? Didn't CHAZ had black only zones. It's just racism but with a different bent.

littlestymaar4• 5 years ago

It's not a “hot take” at all, it is like the official of the GOP, and have been so for quite some time.

Actually it is a pretty common trope from concervatives talking about anti-racism. For instance in France this argument dates at least since the 80s (your sentence is almost an exact translation of a bullet point in the agenda of the Front National in 1986 (far right and Holocaust deniers, cofounded by a former waffer SS French volunteer, by the way), which changed name to Rassemblement National and grew to become the second most powerful political party in France).

BatteryMountain• 5 years ago

Painfully obvious from looking at America from the outside.

coldtea• 5 years ago

Superficially yes, but I think modern anti-racism is basically classism: a tool privileged whites use to shame and dominate lower classes, and to signal and fight status wars between them.

Which is also why accusation of "privilege" more often than not comes from whites (and a smaller assortment of careerists in activism, journalism, and academia) themselves actually privileged career/money/status-wise, and is non-ironically directed towards people less privileged that them!

Then again, old-style racism was basically classism too: a way justify keeping blacks as slaves or, after the civil war, as cheap laborers. It's only after blacks became integrated that racism became an ideology apart from serving an active function of maintaining privilege (and by then, the ideology was shared with far fewer, the kind of "white power" scum that are quite rare statistically speaking).

user-the-name10• 5 years ago

Garbage.

As someone else already pointed out, this is the exact argument made by the far right. It is entirely dishonest and only serves to suppress efforts to improve the situation of oppressed groups.

You can do better than this kind of intellectual laziness. Go learn what actual anti-racism is. Don't just blindly accept contrarianism by those who wish to harm.

soundnote10• 5 years ago

Cold take: It is regular racism, just directed at acceptable targets.

rob74• 5 years ago

And it becomes even worse when you apply this "purity inquisition" to historical figures - and a person over 90 can already be considered a historical figure...

smt88• 5 years ago

My read of the SciAm article and of modern criticism of historical figures is this:

Without diminishing the accomplishments of historical figures, we can also choose not to lionize them.

All of them were mixtures of flaws and accomplishments. They are heroes to some people and villains to others. We can remember them that way, as a whole.

No one is saying we should forget Wilson's accomplishments. We should just remember the other things about him that weren't ahead of his time.

Cthulhu_3• 5 years ago

I feel like this is what's happening in our household. We have a son at home, he watches a ton of youtube, and here and there he'll emulate what he sees others doing on there. Some of that is AAVE, words, pronunciation, etc, often from memes. And we tell him off for that, because it's not his culture or background. But at the same time, I feel like that creates a stronger divide, an "othering" of sorts - as in "we are not like them", instead of our intent of "you should not appropriate or make fun of African-American culture".

RangerScience• 5 years ago

There's some good stuff floating around on the 'net about, for lack of other terms, cultural adoption and celebration, versus cultural appropriation. IMHO the nugget that distinguishes one from the other is whether the thing is being severed from it's origins, or whether what you're doing with the thing is connecting yourself to it's origins.

noobermin4• 5 years ago

Honestly, everyone should read this article about cultural appropriation[0]. I don't really know if emulating AAVE is "cultural appropriation" unless it's used to cheapen or degrade people, particularly black people you come in contact with, as you say is your intent.

I feel like that's a lot easier, the copying this or that saying isn't really an issue, it's more of respecting people right? That's easily a universal good that isn't hard to understand and gets directly to the underlying issue rather than surface level prescriptions for behavior (don't copy this language, etc).

[0] https://www.currentaffairs.org/2017/09/the-question-of-cultu... the by-line is helpful: "It's more helpful to think about exploitation and disrespect than to define cultural 'ownership'"

causi3• 5 years ago

Using AAVE is not the same as mocking AAVE. That's just how language works, you adopt what you hear. Telling him not to speak like his friends and the people whose media he consumes is an exercise in futility.

MomoXenosaga• 5 years ago

Humans are social animals who want to belong. And despite popular belief being in college/university doesn't make you smarter: you're a impressionable 20 year old with approximately zero life experience. Ready to be moulded in whatever shape woke culture demands.

It was rather sobering to me who believed that those who attend university are curious intellectuals ready to challenge and be critical.

Ygg22• 5 years ago

The social rewards for fitting in are better than being right.

It's not really a surprise.

See case of man that discovered handling corpses and delivering babies afterwards was causing lots of baby deaths.

His reward was being declared insane and dying prematurely.

ZeroGravitas4• 5 years ago

This would suggest that a good tactic for those that do support racism and sexism is to magnify and focus on such people, even make them up if they don't exist in sufficient numbers.

Then they could gather in echo chambers where they could trade stories about how out of hand it's all getting, rather than focus on the middle ground which is slowly moving away from what is generally accepted as a racist, sexist, classist past.

soundnote10• 5 years ago

The woke diversicrats are actual racists. Their target is acceptable, is all.

jpeg_hero• 5 years ago

When I read Scientific American when I was in High School in the 90’s it was a very challenging read. I don’t think any publication outside of a scientific journal is that rigorous anymore.

Cthulhu_3• 5 years ago

I read a good article some time ago that explained the different 'levels' of scientific writing. Level 1 was the actual papers. Level 2 is the press releases of the university or research institute in question. And level 3 and beyond are the pop sci websites, magazines, social media channels etc picking up on it - and it becomes muddled after that, because they will often pick up and rewrite from each other instead of referencing the source.

The most grieving of that one, I find, is about things like exoplanets. The publications will mention some numbers showing evidence of an exoplanet that may be at a certain distance from its star to have reasonable temperatures or traces of oxygen and water. The pop sci drivel sites and some newspapers even will publish screaming headlines with great-but-completely-fantastical artists' renderings of verdant planets, basically claiming that life has been found and we'll be shaking tentacles with our new overlords soon.

schnitzelstoat• 5 years ago

Even the press releases from the universities can often be really low-quality - written for easy regurgitation by the press to ensure maximum virality.

Actual decent articles that put the research into context for the layman and are honest about the findings and consequences of those findings is increasingly rate. Scientific American used to be very good for it but has declined. New Scientist declined even before SciAm did.

Then there's all the pop-sci websites that are a rung below even those.

rbanffy13• 5 years ago

I still like the IEEE and ACM magazines.

It’s sad IBM ceased publication of their journals, which were themselves wonderful.

heikkilevanto• 5 years ago

When growing up, my dad had a subscription to Scientific American. I learnt a lot from it, even English language. First the easy parts (50 years ago, letters to the editor), and then more advanced columns (Metamathematical Themes, Amateur Scientist), and finally some of the articles.

When I moved on my own in the late 80's, I naturally got my own subscription too. But I was already feeling that the level was dropping. They introduced Science in Pictures, and stuff like that. The day when I felt I could read and understand every article, I decided not to renew my subscription. Must have been early 90's.

bschne2• 5 years ago

From the op-ed in question:

And the descriptions and importance of ant societies existing as colonies is a component of Wilson’s work that should have been critiqued

Is she... drawing a connection between the term "ant colony" and human colonialism?

reed1234• 5 years ago

This post feels too much like an unsubstantiated rant to belong on this site. It doesn’t give much textual evidence and feels highly emotionally charged.

That said, I do agree that SA has gone downhill in the last 5 years. I canceled my subscription last year because the science was becoming too pop-sci-ish.

Here’s the offending article the author was referring to: https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/the-complicated-l...

metabagel• 5 years ago

Agreed.

This seems to be a better reasoned critique:

https://whyevolutionistrue.com/2021/12/30/scientific-america...

rajup3• 5 years ago

Yes very eloquently put thanks for sharing!

LaunchAway12• 5 years ago

I actually read the Scientific American article because I have previously read Scott Aaronson's blog and he doesn't looks to me like someone who would write anything before thinking about it.

The SA article is a complete piece of crap. I just hope this doesn't goes the same way it did when RMS asked to give Marvin Minsky the benefit of doubt.

rbanffy13• 5 years ago

The issue with RMS is not that he wanted Minsky to be given the benefit of doubt but numerous other issues and instances where his own behaviour was reprehensible. As a figurehead of an important movement he should think of what effect his personal reputation has on the overall movement.

hilbert426• 5 years ago

"The SA article is a complete piece of crap."

Whether everyone agrees with you to the same degree is comparatively unimportant. However, there are several issues that arise from the SciAm article that are of key importance, these are:

1. From what the author, Monica R. McLemore, says in the article it's very clear that she has a political agenda and that by stating it in a forum such as SciAm, then she is acting in a very divisive manner.

2. McLemore is being extremely unfair by deliberately targeting a person's character. 'Shooting the messenger' for espousing or publishing information that has arisen from a person's research has to be about as low as an attack on a person's character can get. Moreover there's intellectual dishonesty in the attack: by assigning a person's character to a person's research work presupposes that one's moral philosophy always goes hand-in-hand with data that's arisen from one's research. This implies that a person's research cannot be separated from one's moral views, which, of course, is nonsense. It's about as stupid as saying that a person has to be a Republican to actually write about Republican philosophy when in fact anyone can do so.

3. An attack on a person's character by equating their moral position with the work that they do without definitive proof is woolly thinking, if this were in fact true then every defense lawyer would actually have to believe his or her client's statement in respect of their innocence.

4. The most disconcerting aspect of this story is the fact that the author is a person who holds a high and responsible position in society. To quote the SciAm article:

"Monica R. McLemore is an associate professor in the Family Health Care Nursing Department and a clinician-scientist at Advancing New Standards in Reproductive Health at the University of California, San Francisco."

As such, the holder of any such a position has a duty of care to ensure that the views that he or she espouses are not only both fair and equitable in respect of all citizens but also they need to ensure that what's said adds to the cohesiveness of society and not the division thereof.

OOPMan• 5 years ago

You should try reading the self-authored "paper" the author of that op-ed linked to from said op-ed.

It's...not great.

DalasNoin• 5 years ago

Scott Aaronson is featured quite frequently on Hackernews. I feel like many will trust him even if he speaks in an emotionally charged way. But that being said, the article contains one concrete example in the foreword by Scott and another Post by someone who was fired from SA.

jacquesm• 5 years ago

I'm pretty close to re-calibrating my trust levels to 'untrustworthy'.

naniwaduni• 5 years ago

I initially mis(?)read this post with SA = Scott Aaronson—I was mildly surprised at the implication that SA had a subscription service now, but it didn't seem too outlandish.

Turns out there two SAs to this story...

yvdriess• 5 years ago

SA will always be Something Awful for me.

cbsmith2• 5 years ago

The post linked to other critiques of the article in question (https://whyevolutionistrue.com/2021/12/30/scientific-america...), but seemed to be focused more on larger concerns about SA and a refusal to contribute to it any longer.

Might well be ranty and emotionally charged, but seems relevant enough to be of concern for this site.

KennyBlanken2• 5 years ago

It's emotionally charged because the author is Ashutosh Jogalekar, who in the mid 2010's got himself fired from Scientific American as a blogger by praising the theories of a scientific-racism book:

https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/style/whats-going-o...

Jogalekar praised the book, saying it confirms the need to “recognize a strong genetic component to [social and cognitive] differences” among racial groups.

It should be noted that Jogalekar is a chemist.

What did the people whose work Wade cited for his book say?

"Wade juxtaposes an incomplete and inaccurate account of our research on human genetic differences with speculation that recent natural selection has led to worldwide differences in I.Q. test results, political institutions and economic development. We reject Wade's implication that our findings substantiate his guesswork. They do not. We are in full agreement that there is no support from the field of population genetics for Wade's conjectures."

Instead of keeping his head down, Ashutosh followed up shortly thereafter with a blog falling over himself to find reasons to excuse or explain Feynman's rampant history of womanizing and general asshole-ism:

https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/the-curious-wavefunctio...

...and then we have Jogalekar defending EO Wilson, whose book Sociology, proposed (in 1975) that human behavior was determined by genetics, was widely criticized as sympathetic to eugenics. Sound familiar?

Ask yourself this: why does Jogalekar keep defending authors of works that tread around scientific racism and eugenics?

hoseja• 5 years ago

Just because you call it "scientific racism" and "eugenics", doesn't mean it's wrong or untrue, just that you don't like it.

Mordisquitos• 5 years ago

From the Scientific American article, emphasis mine:

Wilson was hardly alone in his problematic beliefs. His predecessors—mathematician Karl Pearson, anthropologist Francis Galton, Charles Darwin, Gregor Mendel and others—also published works and spoke of theories fraught with racist ideas about distributions of health and illness in populations without any attention to the context in which these distributions occur.

I am ignorant about the work of Karl Pearson, but I can see how certain attitudes or expressions of Galton and Darwin could be understood as morally "racist" in our modern understanding and values—not that I believe that detracts from their legacy in any way whatsoever. However, I find the mention of Gregor Mendel truly disconcerting.

As far as I am aware, Mendel's work was absolutely restricted to his research on peas and a strictly mathematical interpretation of the results, and at no point did he extrapolate to anything regarding human inheritance in any way. What's more, I would be extremely surprised if the thought of so-called human "races" was even relevant to the thoughts of a Central European friar of the 19th century who never left the area. In a translated copy of Mendel's Versuche über Plflanzenhybriden (Experiments on Plant Hybridization) [0] I find not a single use of the word "human", "mankind" or "race", and the only use of the word "man" refers to the act of cultivation. Where on Earth is the "racist idea"?

If the author of this SA article happened to be a historian of science, or even a geneticist or an evolutionary biologist, I might still be surprised but give her the benefit of the doubt and think she might know something I don't. However, to have "an associate professor in the Family Health Care Nursing Department and a clinician-scientist at Advancing New Standards in Reproductive Health" make such an astounding clichéd name drop is clear evidence that she is speaking out of ignorance and prejudiced "guilt-by-association" of the whole area of the Modern Synthesis of evolution and genetics.

[0] http://www.esp.org/foundations/genetics/classical/gm-65.pdf

rbanffy13• 5 years ago

I think the big problem with Mendel is that the odds of him obtaining the results he reported are vanishingly low and, therefore, it’s reasonable to assume he forged the results.

Luckily, his model was correct.

duskwuff2• 5 years ago

The decline of Scientific American into pop science started much earlier than that. I'd peg it around 2000, when they changed the cover design and stopped running classic columns like "Mathematical Games" and "Amateur Scientist". The pop-science articles started ramping up around the same time.

green01• 5 years ago

Same thing with Popular Science and Popular Mechanics, science reporting was the first to go in the death of journalism. They were terrible 15 years ago, maybe people didn't notice until recently when they started bizarrely endorsing politicians like Biden and running CRT articles.

DarkWiiPlayer3• 5 years ago

While I agree that the shared text is more on the "angry rant" side of things, the offending article does a more than sufficient job at discrediting itself without any external help.

With wonderfully absurd sentences like "the notion that differences among humans could be explained by genetics, inheritance *and other biological mechanisms* [emphasis added]", this article should not need any explaining as to why it should never have been published.

irrational2• 5 years ago

This seems so on the nose for a magazine called Scientific American based on the anti-science sentiments in America we have been seeing for the last 5 years or so.

zzt123• 5 years ago

Seems so in my reading. I assume I must be incorrect though, since that interpretation seems absurd. Yet, not sure how else to interpret it… but I guess this isn’t much different from the master/slave stuff in code, or the removal of the master branch default in git.

ogogmad8• 5 years ago

Can we not say cool-sounding words anymore like "colony", "supremacy" and "master"?

I'll admit that "master vs slave" might perhaps be in bad taste (but not "master" on its own). But cancelling "blacklist", "colony" and "supremacy" is pretty incredible.

8note• 5 years ago

I'm very favourable to getting rid of blacklist. It's random whether it's an allow list or a deny list, and there are domain specific words you can use instead to make it really clear what the list does

dcanelhas2• 5 years ago

As in "Master of science"?

kevin_thibedeau2• 5 years ago

No way to blame the patriarchy on that one though. Maybe worker exploitation is a possible angle.

bschne2• 5 years ago

With the GIT thing my usual stance is that there's no need to make this a hill to die on. Some people feel better about it, it's next to zero effort, so it's no big deal wether I personally think it's absolutely necessary or not. I don't think it's a high priority or high leverage thing to do against racism or for inclusion, but I don't mind when GitHub goes "you know what, main is nicer for some people, let's switch".

But the ant colony thing in the SA piece sounds a bit like saying software engineering is a "problematic" field that should be critiqued because it often uses a VCS that at some point in the past opted for a very common set of terms that some may now consider offensive.

I could try to rack my brain for all the more or less charitable interpretations of what she is actually trying to get at with that sentence, but viewing it in the context of the whole piece, I think there's not much of a there, there.

janto• 5 years ago

"no need to make this a hill to die on" is what you say to someone to take away their ability to say "no". Don't make it your usual stance.

tomp4• 5 years ago

The problem with git master->main is, that if you don’t say “no”, there’s always gonna be the next thing. Like “ant colony”. Ironically Scott Aarson has himself written about this, after having realised he was, like you, wrong for not saying “no”. (Too late.)

You have to say “no”.

anonymoushn6• 5 years ago

Having different names for main branches in different repositories is "next to zero effort" like git submodules are "next to zero effort"

barfingclouds• 5 years ago

Acronyms are fun

Siira3• 5 years ago

Next to zero efforts for you. I have lost hours debugging issues caused by it, and I am sure I will lose some more in the coming years.

paganel• 5 years ago

Which is absurd because the Romans had used this term first [1] (I mean, compared to the Europeans that set up colonies in the 1500s-1700s), with pretty tame connotations, for crying out loud, there's an entire German city which got its name from it, Köln.

however, the term came to denote the highest status of a Roman city.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colonia_(Roman)

marcan_423• 5 years ago

The master/slave stuff is just terrible terminology. Seriously, it means about a dozen different things depending on context. Sometimes the "slave" is a clone of the master, sometimes it's an alternative of the master, sometimes it merely has the role of a responder in a protocol, and rarely is it actually under the full control of the master (funny enough, the technology closest to "total and absolute control" I can think of - JTAG - calls that the "target", not the "slave"... :-) ). That particular set of terms has been so thoroughly abused and overused so as to lose all nuanced meaning, and we'd do much better to drop it just out of sheer uselessness and switch to more accurate, varied terms that properly fit the context (like primary/secondary, primary/replica, initiator/responder, host/device, leader/follower, etc.).

This isn't out of wokeness; quoting the previous version of the I²C specification:

"Some devices are masters – they generate bus clock and initiate communication on the bus, other devices are slaves and respond to the commands on the bus."

... if you're going to have to define what your terms mean in other terms because your original terms are unclear, why not just use the other terms directly? Initiator/responder would've been perfectly appropriate here (that terminology is used by IPSec, FWIW). Initiator/target would've also worked (iSCSI calls them that).

Interestingly, just a couple months ago the spec was updated to replace the terms with "controller/target" instead, which is actually worse; "controller" is already a widely used term to mean the hardware that implements I²C inside any given chip, and which can work in either "controller" or "target" mode, which is very confusing.

So yeah, I'm all for replacing master/slave since it's terribly ambiguous, just please pick something that doesn't make things worse.

As for git master vs main, that has less of a technical argument to it... but it doesn't hurt anyone, it's easy to change the default branch name, "main" is just as descriptive as "master", and "main" is shorter anyway, so "main" it is. There's absolutely no reason to die on that hill even if you reject the (tenuous) argument of a master -> master/slave -> slavery association (in my mind "master" here is in the sense of "master record" or "master bus" and there is no "slave" counterpart, so I never had a problem with this one, but I still find "main" perfectly fine and it saves typing).

This thing about ant colonies... yeah, that's pretty different and clearly utterly illogical.

mongol• 5 years ago

Master in git I assumed is the same as tape master, master copy etc. I never heard about slave in git context. Which makes it even more absurd.

SV_BubbleTime• 5 years ago

You are making the mistake that anyone you are arguing against wants you to make.

It’s not about this or that word. It’s about controlling language and letting you discuss it seriously is still them winning.

If it “doesn’t work”, they’ll find a new word that is racist or sexist or whatever, and they’ll want you to discuss that one too.

The only way to win (for everyone) is to not play the game. Mock, belittle, double down before you take it seriously.

dang• 5 years ago

We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29778461.

wrp2• 5 years ago

When did SA change? In the 1970s-80s, its articles were quite technical, for scientifically literate readers to understand something outside their field. When I looked at SA again after a long absence, around 20 years ago, it had already been dumbed down to about what Popular Science was many years ago.

SA had another era, in my dad's day, when its aim was less academic and more for the home enthusiast and hobbyist. I wonder when it became more of a forum for academic researchers to popularize their work.

kevin_thibedeau2• 5 years ago

When they switched to the glue binding.

wrp2• 5 years ago

Interesting correlation. I guess that is indicative of new management.

duskwuff2• 5 years ago

When did SA change?

Around 2000, when the cover design changed, and they stopped running classic columns like "Mathematical Games" and "Amateur Scientist".

pwdisswordfish9• 5 years ago

Scott Aaronson has always been like that.

PotatoPancakes• 5 years ago

I think the "SA" in this context referred to Scientific American, not Scott Aaronson.

jessaustin• 5 years ago

As Nelson Muntz once observed, "I can think of at least two things wrong with that name."

causi3• 5 years ago

he had the temerity to suggest that maybe, just maybe, human beings operate with the same mix of genes that other creatures do, the book was met by a disgraceful, below-the-belt, ideological response

This is wild to me. Isn't the whole point of philosophy, or even of the concept of introspection, that our instincts are no longer suited to the existence in which we find ourselves? Isn't all of moral learning directed solely at the struggle against the ways in which our instincts fail to correctly guide us in the modern world? Correct instincts don't need commentary. We don't have to teach someone to run when a predator chases them, or not to walk off of cliffs. Human beings can't not have counterproductive instincts and still need the concept of law.

rshnotsecure• 5 years ago

This blog post seems like an intel play designed to whip up anger and passion among the populace on all sides.

It reminds me very much of "The Stanford Review", founded by Peter Thiel, in tonality and content. That is to say, well written, but with a certain level of anger that doesn't seem necessary.

CodeGlitch3• 5 years ago

level of anger that doesn't seem necessary

SA attacked a respected scientist who passed away and so couldn't defend himself. Seems like a reasonable thing to get angry at?

What would you suggest should be a reasonable response?

reactspa3• 5 years ago

Bring the dead scientist back from the dead.

kkjjkgjjgg• 5 years ago

Or maybe the author is just genuinely angry?

reactspa3• 5 years ago

His entire blog seems like that.

tasty_freeze• 5 years ago

I can understand their dismay at the hit piece on EO Wilson, and other editorial stances that they disagree with.

But the editorial section is about 3% of the magazine. It seems hysterical to say that SciAm is "utterly destroyed" because of their resentment of "woke" editorials. Really, the 100 or so in depth pieces written every year, the "things in the news" sections are now just part of a "zombie clickbait rag"?

rajup3• 5 years ago

I don’t know, I would personally consider an outlet publishing such rubbish as not deserving of my attention and money. Just because it’s an editorial does not absolve the magazine of its mistakes.

dustintrex• 5 years ago

Editorial stances are one thing, but publishing articles maligning the "so-called normal distribution of statistics" (!) as racist (!!) is another.

xyzzyz• 5 years ago

For many decades now, but particularly strongly in past 6 years or so, being perceived as racist against so-called “marginalized groups” equates to career death in the professional world. This is true even if you are perceived to be racist only 3% time. For this reason, false accusation of racism is an abhorrent crime. If 3% racists aren’t given a pass, why should we give a pass 3% garbage dump rags?

SpicyLemonZest2• 5 years ago

I don’t think they can be so cleanly separated. If you see a newspaper that publishes just complete nonsense in its editorial section, arguing that up is down and vaccines cause autism and reptilians rule the world, should you trust that their hard news is accurate?

tasha0663• 5 years ago

the editorial section is about 3% of the magazine

While you have a good point, it says a lot about SciAm that they ran such a piece:

- that was so shamefully anti-intellectual

- so soon after Wilson's death

- with a special mention about it as "insightful" from the editor on her Twitter account

It's a sloppy hit piece for no good reason. Monica McLemore and Laura Helmuth deserve considerable shame.

ajkjk• 5 years ago

Well, I agree with two of those.. but it makes total sense to run it soon after their death. When else would you run it? Probably when they were in the news again.

inglor_cz4• 5 years ago

I wouldn't eat a salad with 3 per cent of cyanide in it.

If the editorial section was just boring and unoriginal, I could live with it. But cowardly hit jobs on recently deceased people, that goes too far.

The woke are happy to destroy lives of people for saying one 'wrong' sentence or word. Maybe they should be treated in an identical way for their own transgressions. It could make them rediscover the Golden Rule: “Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.”

pm902• 5 years ago

Not a convincing counter to the OPs argument. You can be as hyperbolic as you want but the fact remains that even well known publications will post questionable content. The comparison to eating cyanide is totally inaccurate.

dqpb3• 5 years ago

But the editorial section is about 3% of the magazine

You do realize that this is exactly what woke cancel culture does right? It cherry picks something offensive that someone said and then cancels the entire person.

wavegeek• 5 years ago

I notice over the years SA has become more and more influenced by fashion. The pressures to appeal to the popular crowd have only intensified over the years.

Why would you subscribe to SA when the internet has more good material than you can possibly digest? That is their problem in a nutshell.

Another once mightly magazine The Economist, whose founder was praised by Nietzsche as "an objective journalist", has also gone downhill IMHO.

I cancelled my subscriptions to both a while back.

mihaaly3• 5 years ago

I stopped my subscription for The Economist when in the electronic format it forced advertisements on me on a more intrusive way than the full page ads in printed edition which was easier to jump over. I did not want paper format (I already had a big pile, also why to waste paper when I have an iPad) and I got no response on requesting a (even) more expensive subscription without the watch and other useless adverts wasted on me anyway.

I buy it only occasionally now therefore cannot agree or disagree if it went downhill from before, looking at single issues from time to time look alright. I always liked its balanced but analytic style, helped to learn the events and mechanisms of the world.

WalterBright• 5 years ago

I used to enjoy the NOVA TV show, but it has steadily gotten dumbed down over the years. An example:

"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!"

-- NOVA Universe Revealed: Big Bang

mikaeluman• 5 years ago

The true power of markets is that these sorts of editorial mismanagement only mean one thing: people stop purchasing an increasingly subpar print.

I used to read SciAm regularly. But this type of Wokeism into everything and calling great people horrible things after they die is so disgraceful.

How can anyone take the magazine with an ounce of seriousness anymore?

raspasov2• 5 years ago

As much as I love markets in a libertarian sort of way, they are not perfect. Markets can be slow, and there are many different types of customers.

Fox News and CNN still "sell" decently well. CNN used to be the "real news" some years ago. Not any more. The product has changed. They still try to claim to be the "real news". They are really not. They are, for the most part, an opinion outlet with narrow agenda. Fox News is, more or less, exactly the same but pointed almost perfectly in the opposite direction.

It's not unthinkable for Scientific American to "transform" itself in a similar way and find customers while claiming to be about "science" while it can be mostly about "agenda".

elmomle• 5 years ago

I wouldn't say CNN is perfectly in the opposite direction; rather, they're on nearly opposite ends of the Overton window.

caconym_• 5 years ago

I read (not extremely closely, but better than skimming) Aaronson's foreword, the guest post, and the article in question; and I still don't know what about Wilson's work was supposedly "problematic". It's apparently something to do with the "nature vs. nurture" question, but I can hardly remember reading so many words with so little substance. For somebody not involved with the field (e.g. me), this omission of substance makes it very difficult to evaluate the merits of either perspective.

It also sets off some alarm bells, since it's difficult for an intellectually honest (edit: and competent) author to write on the order of a thousand words of evasive fluff and deem it suitable for publication.

OP's link aside, I don't think the SA article comes anywhere close to justifying its attack on Wilson ("racist ideas"), and the quoted bit regarding normal distributions is beyond the pale.

ljf2• 5 years ago

For those (like me) who haven't heard of the scientist at the heart of the offending article, have a read of https://www.theguardian.com/science/2001/feb/17/books.guardi...

This goes into some of the original accusations of racism he received in the 70s and the background behind them.

Quote:

They accused Wilson of sending human nature back to the concentration camps. Wilson isn’t a determinist who believes that life is purely mechanistic, and he isn’t right-wing - he remains a Democrat and fears the environmental worst from the George Bush presidency. Although Wilson argued that homosexuality might have a genetic element, he also argued that it was therefore natural and should be tolerated. But Gould was good-humoured and discursive, taking an apparently compassionate view of human nature, and Lewontin, a population geneticist who could show that racial differences are genetically tiny, added credence to charges of racism, even though Wilson hadn’t brought the subject up.

Did he think that his opponents were themselves guilty of prejudice? “They were, although they never admitted it,” Wilson says slowly, reaching for the words. “I came from the Old South, I was raised as a racist. I mean, we all were. It was only in my teens that I began to change. But here, if you were called racist - well, in the 70s it was like a death sentence.”

helmholtz• 5 years ago

Lovely article and perhaps the first one that people new to Wilson's work, like me, should read. Having read it, I can't say that I came away thinking Wilson was racist, at all. If anything, it inspires me to try to be less emotionally charged when dealing with emotionally charged issues.

littlestymaar4• 5 years ago

But here, if you were called racist - well, in the 70s it was like a death sentence.”

I find this argument really hard to buy because at the same time someone like Richard Lynn had a successful career despite being openly racist (talking about “caucasoids” vs “negroids” (or is it “congoids”? I'm not sure)

jmcgough• 5 years ago

I read big portions of Sociobiology while taking a lot of evolutionary biology coursework in college. As stated in the guest post, the book primarily focuses on non-human animals so it's bizarre to me that McLemore is trying to make this about racism in humans without any quotes or anything to tie him to that. It's just an astoundingly poorly written article that SA shouldn't have published for that reason alone.

But I suspect they're employing the same strategy that The Washington Post and others use - post intentionally inflammatory guest op-eds and profit from the influx of clicks.

KennyBlanken2• 5 years ago

Your characterization of the book does not square, even remotely, with Wikipedia's.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E._O._Wilson#Sociobiology:_The...

Or that of EO Wilson himself: "the hypothesis that human nature has a genetic foundation"

https://archive.nytimes.com/www.nytimes.com/books/98/12/06/s...

pr_nik2• 5 years ago

The long answer to your question can be found in Pinker's "Blank Slate". In a nutshell: the nature/nurture discussion went off the rails after WWII. 'Scientific' racism and eugenics had culminated in the Holocaust. One generation later (i.e. 60s and 70s), a strand called "radical science" had emerged (in the US) that was into deconstruction of ideas. They creatively came up with the assertion than any notion of human nature was the bedrock of racism and eugenics.

When Wilson published "Sociobiology" and mainly talked about non-human animals, they lost their shit completely. All of research, science, and academia, they asserted, was more a negotiation of power distributions than an honest attempt to make sense of the universe. The most aggressive tactic in that sphere was research on the nature of humans. Another generation later (90s), some of those "radical scientists" had secured tenure and made it their gig to teach creative deconstruction and cancel culture to students (yes, for real in the 90s). Pinker's book is from 2002, but you know the rest of the story.

refurb9• 5 years ago

All of research, science, and academia, they asserted, was more a negotiation of power distributions than an honest attempt to make sense of the universe.

Precisely. The approach seems more “ends justifies the means”. If your entire political theory depends on outcomes being socially determined, not genetically, then any science counter that must be attacked by whatever means necessary.

garbagecoder11• 5 years ago

I was in college in the 90s and we called it PC. It was a thing, but it was mostly confined to campuses and adjacent places.

Veen• 5 years ago

I still don't know what about Wilson's work was supposedly "problematic".

To oversimplify slightly, his detractors have a deep ideological commitment to the blank slate theory of human development, largely because it implies human behaviour is socially determined and not biologically determined. They believe that if we accept that human behviour is influenced by our genes, it follows that that certain negative human behaviours like racism and sexism will be excused as natural and therefore permissible. Most people can agree that those behaviours are undesirable, but instead of arguing that we can overcome our genetic heritage, blank slate adherents argue that biology has no significant impact on human behaviour and anyone who thinks it does is a racist and a step away from being a Nazi-style eugenicist.

kofejnik3• 5 years ago

… but also, at the same time, sexual orientation is predetermined genetically (“born this way”) and isn’t socially influenced in any way at all.

goatlover4• 5 years ago

Behavioral geneticist Kathryn Paige Harden receives similar criticism for having the temerity to suggest that genes play some statistically significant role in individual behavior. I don't understand why it has to be all or nothing. Surely the reasonable position is that both genes and environment have an intertwining role to play, and we can measure some of that across various psychological studies combined with genetic profiles, on a statistical basis. Paige was on Julia Galef's Rationally Speaking podcast, and her work sounds completely reasonable and hardly controversial.

Unless one is ideologically committed to an all or nothing view on genes.

Panoramix• 5 years ago

Aren't most of those things testable?

No scientist can choose to believe something is true because it favors the left-wing agenda. Or the right wing for that matter. It's the definition of un-scientific thinking.

Now, some topics are extremely charged and one has to be extremely careful on how to present the data not to stir the nest of hornets in either direction.

hilbert426• 5 years ago

Good summary. It seems to me that from a scientific perspective that having a deep ideological commitment to a given position - no matter what that position is - isn't desirable for all the obvious reasons: bias, negative impacts on truth, accuracy, etc. With ideology having now entered the debate, any chance reaching a common consensus will be greatly prolonged.

As discussion and debate over gene expression has been in the high-stakes category both in the scientific community and across much of humanity for decades it would ultimately make sense to get to the scientific truth of the matter. If it eventuates and we learn for certain that human genes are in fact able to express themselves in ways that the vast majority of us humans now find morally repugnant and that such expression manifests in actual behaviour then as a species we'd be forced to deal with the problem head-on rather than sweep it under the carpet (as we now seem to be doing).

I've little doubt that those who 'believe that if we accept that human behviour is influenced by our genes, it follows that that certain negative human behaviours like racism and sexism will be excused' are acting from the highest moral motives but to personally denigrate and malign the character of researchers who genuinely report scientific research that purportedly shows negative or undesirable gene expression is, in my opinion, extremely counterproductive.

For starters, character assassinations of the type we're now seeing are very likely to deter scientists from entering this field of research or that they ignore researching the field altogether—or perhaps worse—researchers out of fear of being vilified then fail to report the actual findings of their research. I've little doubt that such events have happened in recent decades. Moreover, it's very likely that the character assassinations that have occurred in recent years have been deliberately targeted to deter researchers from pursuing such research and also to persuade funding bodies to deny funding of any such research. After all, a researcher would have to have considerable fortitude and resilience to continue in the light of such attacks on his/her character.

Tragically, in the current political climate, it is just not possible to have a sensible nuanced discussion about race, human intelligence, etc. without one's opponents immediately raising the 'racist' moniker and this has been the situation for many decades. Whilst it was very necessary to debunk the dangerous racist propaganda from the 1930s and earlier, stifling discussion on these matters altogether in the sense that it's now politically incorrect to even raise or discuss them will eventually likely lead to dangerous outcomes—outcomes that could come with nasty unintended consequences.

Moreover, the reticence to discuss matters of race openly and honestly, the repression of gene research information and the vilification of researchers who report or discuss findings contrary to acceptable political orthodoxy is not unique to this field of endeavour. We are not only witnessing similar repression of ideas across many endeavours but especially so in other areas of science—for instance 'facts' concerning COVID-19 and climate change no longer need be based on scientific truth but 'adjusted' to suit the prevailing politic.

I have a foreboding feeling that we seem to be returning to a time not dissimilar that of Galileo's when the Inquisition would send one to prison for possessing or espousing view outside the accepted orthodoxy. The fact that one's views were factually correct being both irrelevant and immaterial in the decision to impose sentence.

lqet• 5 years ago

Here is a publication of the SA article's author in which she and her co-author explain their "default human" critique in more detail (linked in the SA article).

https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fpubh.2021.6757...

I only skimmed the text. The normal distribution isn't mentioned, but if you combine the SA article with this text (which is linked in the SA article as a reference for her normal distribution critique), it gives the impression that the author somehow thinks that the normal distribution is intentionally "engineered" / "used" as a tool of suppression.

systemvoltage5• 5 years ago

Wait what the hell?

Someone should tell the author that normal distribution is a property of the central limit theorem: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Central_limit_theorem

Take 10, 6-sided dice. Roll them all and sum the total. Do it many times and you’ll see a normal distribution magically emerge out of nothingness.

refurb9• 5 years ago

That article seems like a cobbled together thesis based on radical Marxism and Tweets from random people.

And this author is a Professor of Nursing at UCSF?

This is a person teaching our next generation of healthcare workers?

Vetch2• 5 years ago

Like you, I was confused by this whole thing. In my mind Wilson is slotted next to Attenborough as a kind and knowledgeable naturalist environmentalist. The only controversy I knew associated with him was his claim that skill with math is not necessary to be a great scientist.

What I could piece together:

People didn't like that he supported the idea that genetics has a large influence on personality, behavior or intellect, a genetic leash as he called it (he also argued against free will). I suppose the fact that Evolutionary Psychology (which is susceptible to just-so stories) derives from Sociobiology is also enough for current people to unfairly accuse him of promoting racism.

Something surprising I learned from all this is cancellations, de-platforming and campus protests of certain ideas already existed way back in the 60s and 70s! The only difference with today is increased connectivity and mass.

In the ’60s and ’70s it became almost dogma — it was a dogma — to believe that the human brain was a tabula rasa, a blank slate. I don’t think scholars in this generation, even those of middle age, can appreciate how stern was the prohibition against believing that human behavior was influenced by genes in any manner whatsoever.
But I really was upset at being called a racist, promoting racism and sexism. I was accused of trying to reintroduce a retrograde, outmoded, dangerous philosophy. There was nothing in “Sociobiology” to suggest such a thing. The words had to be taken out of context and tweaked.
On one occasion, I had a little mob in Harvard Square parading and protesting and holding placards demanding that Harvard dismiss me. On another occasion, when I was to give a lecture at the Science Center, a crowd of protesters gathered at the entrance with signs and shouts and chants and so on. I was ushered in through the rear by University police. My class was disrupted at least once.

---

The SciAm article spent only a few words on Wilson. It instead seemed to really want to air disagreements on how health studies are carried out and IMO, was sloppy in its attempt to shoehorn Wilson in. It would probably have worked better as a stand alone piece on how poverty impacts on health outcomes are ignored.

---

Sources:

https://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2014/04/search-until-...

https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/sociobiology

https://old.reddit.com/r/math/comments/1bwoeg/e_o_wilson_vs_...

ZeroGravitas4• 5 years ago

Another article posted here, defending Wilson, states that he himself later agreed his work was sexist.

So we may need to add specific dates to quotes about him being hounded for "nothing" or it'll not make much sense.

He acknowledges one charge as having validity, the accusation from more thoughtful feminists that he had over-simplified the role of women. “As time has gone on two things have happened,” he says. “One is that we are vastly better informed about gender differences, their genetic and physiological bases, right down to fine- tuning of hormonal regulation of behaviour. Another thing is that scientists like Sarah Hardy have been able to demonstrate a far greater richness of female flexibility in reproductive strategies. It’s far more subtle and sophisticated than we anticipated. The theory in the 70s was that women were more passive, judging between male capacities, but now we know that women are vastly more powerful than that in establishing relationships

So that's a 2001 quote from a positive article interviewing 71 year old Wilson.

Presumably we've not learned anything about the genetics or other aspects of race since the 70s and so all his theories on that are still valid and anyone who disagreed was totally unreasonable, like the less thoughtful feminists.

Oh and your article, is 3 years later, and in which he returns to it all being a big misunderstanding, that he was technically right and invented "evolutionary psychology" but he just needed to add a disclaimer that although he said that women were genetically designed to act the way his society wanted them to, and not like some of them claimed they wanted to behave, that didn't mean his society was right and they were wrong. But he won a Pulitzer, so he was right and they were wrong.

Glad we cleared this up.

systemvoltage5• 5 years ago

I've completely lost faith in Scientific American after they tried to "cancel" James Webb (yes, JWST telescope name) for complicitness against LGBTQ people some 70 fricking years ago, more details here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29690749

I consider Washington Post quite left-leaning and the comments were resoundingly going 'WTF!': https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2021/10/13/nasa-james-...

cycomanic• 5 years ago

I always found the New Scientist a much better publication and never understood the obsession with Scientific American. I assume it's because SA is based in the US, so Americans have been exposed to it much more.

jollybean3• 5 years ago

The editorials are getting problematic, it was hurtful. I grew up reading SA as a kid, never really grasping the material, but it was hugely inspiring to me, the legitimacy and depth of it all.

I feel as though this problem represents a form of corruption, and that it's in SA, such an ostensibly 'Scientific' and not 'Populist' institution implies that it's effectively 'existential' and will have corrupted large swaths of people with power.

I feel this demonstrated the inability of some leaders to separate their political or personal views from 'Science', or at least to contextualize them and that they've jumped onto the postmodern bandwagon in which their cancelling of others is justified 'in the name of' whatever.

That said, I wonder if it has mostly to do with some research in some curious, sensitive corners, and some of the broader and obviously political editorials in which case, maybe once the management team moves on, it'll get back to 'normal'.

spoonjim• 5 years ago

Scientific American became another lame Twitter account quite some time ago:

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/modern-mathematic...

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/why-the-term-jedi...

cbsmith2• 5 years ago

So, it's been a while since I've read the opinion section of Scientific American (for reasons that will shortly become obvious), so I'm going to ask the broader audience here this question:

Is it really that unusual (certainly not unprecedented) to come across a poor opinion piece in Scientific American?

If this was an indicator of the demise of SA, I should think it would have folded decades ago.

imgabe6• 5 years ago

I saw only this quote on Twitter the other day

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.

Which was, frankly, shocking to see coming from Scientific American, something I had assumed was a respectable scholarly publication, if not an actual academic journal, per se. It's an absolutely mind-boggling mistake to publish in something that claims itself to be about science. That is not at all what a normal distribution is, and the normal distribution makes no such assumption. Anyone who passed a basic Intro to Statistics course should be able to explain why this is wrong.

To open with such a profoundly wrong assertion, and then publish an article built on this flawed assumption just beggars belief. I feel like I've wandered into some kind of Twilight Zone that there are apparently serious people, charged with informing the public about science, who are publishing obvious falsehoods and expecting us to go along with them.

I cannot understand how an editor of a scientific publication read that sentence and did not immediately send the piece back to the author with a note reading "No thank you. You clearly have no idea what you're talking about".

namdnay2• 5 years ago

it's like reading something from Derrida.. you have to abandon all assumption that technical terms mean what they're supposed to

funnay3• 5 years ago

When you sample a population you infer the type of distribution and try to sample it in a way that respects the distribution properties, because that can have a great impact on the results.

I'm afraid most people here criticizing her normal distribution remarks are oversimplifying it much more than her.

masklinn• 5 years ago

Which was, frankly, shocking to see coming from Scientific American, something I had assumed was a respectable scholarly publication

TBF SciAm has been popsci since the 50s (before that it was mostly about new patents apparently, the original styling was "The Advocate of Industry and Enterprise" and the "Journal of Mechanical and other Improvements").

It's never been a scholarly publication per se, though it used to be pretty respectable in the sense that reading sciam is what you'd do if you were well-read middle-class and weren't going to read the papers and reports straight but wanted to keep abreast of the major stuff. The "level of depth" so to speak has varied a lot since it switched to popsci. But the recent years are some pretty damn shallow levels.

qsort2• 5 years ago

The thing that strikes me is how obviously nonsensical that is. It's not only a lie, it's someone straight up insisting that 2+2=5.

I'm frankly stumped by claims like those, I feel it's pointless to even debunk them (what is there to debunk? If you're willing to listen anybody qualified at all, you wouldn't believe it in the first place.)

Reminds me of this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Firehose_of_falsehood

HN post, just 14 hours ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29773082

gadders• 5 years ago

> The thing that strikes me is how obviously nonsensical that is. It's not only a lie, it's someone straight up insisting that 2+2=5.

As Pauli said "It's not even wrong."

makomk• 5 years ago

The article where they endorsed a presidential candidate for the first time in their history was pretty atrocious too - just based on out and out lying about what the US coronavirus response involved and how it compared to the rest of the world. It turns out that when you mix science and politics, all you're left with is politics that calls itself science and accuses its political opponents of attacking science.

funnay3• 5 years ago

I respected SA for that. And I think it was on topic for them given the anti-science sentiment transpired from one of the sides. And science will always be political.

Terretta• 5 years ago

I’m baffled even pop pulp rag “editorial” leadership wouldn’t be familiar with the famous “stats don’t mean normal exists” examples dating back to the 1950s:

No “normal” man:

“Out of 4,063 pilots, not a single airman fit within the average range on all 10 dimensions. One pilot might have a longer-than-average arm length, but a shorter-than-average leg length. Another pilot might have a big chest but small hips. Even more astonishing, Daniels discovered that if you picked out just three of the ten dimensions of size — say, neck circumference, thigh circumference and wrist circumference — less than 3.5 per cent of pilots would be average sized on all three dimensions. Daniels’s findings were clear and incontrovertible. There was no such thing as an average pilot. If you’ve designed a cockpit to fit the average pilot, you’ve actually designed it to fit no one.“

And no “normal” woman:

“Before the competition, the judges assumed most entrants’ measurements would be pretty close to the average, and that the contest would come down to a question of millimetres. The reality turned out to be nothing of the sort. Less than 40 of the 3,864 contestants were average size on just five of the nine dimensions and none of the contestants — not even Martha Skidmore — came close on all nine dimensions. Just as Daniels’ study revealed there was no such thing as an average-size pilot, the Norma Look-Alike contest demonstrated that average-size women did not exist either.”

https://www.thestar.com/news/insight/2016/01/16/when-us-air-...

On the other hand, maybe the editor of Scientific American being unaware of this is why there’s room for a not so new book, “The End of Average”:

”Yet, as Rose, Ed.M.’01, Ed.D.’07, a lecturer at the Ed School and director of the Mind, Brain, and Education Program, writes in his forthcoming book, The End of Average, from the moment we’re born to the moment we die, we are measured against a mythical yardstick — the average human — and it’s hurting everyone. That’s why with this book and through his nonprofit, the Center for Individual Opportunity, Rose is on a mission to dismantle this myth of the average and instead help the public understand the importance of the individual.”

https://www.gse.harvard.edu/news/ed/15/08/beyond-average

http://www.toddrose.com/endofaverage

oneoff7862• 5 years ago

Note the difference here is that your examples use multiple dimensions at once. Assuming Gaussian distributions are a good fit, most of the population will look relatively normal on a single variable measurement. It’s only on multivariate measurements where this stops being true. Though this is exactly what the mode expects. Plot a 2D cross section of a 9 dimensional Gaussian curve and you’ll see the center lose its density very quickly.

usgroup2• 5 years ago

I think most of the problem with the statement is that it is ambiguous. If she is saying that the Gaussian distribution is used because it assumes there exists people who are the mean average representatives of humanity; then she is just failing to understand what the law of large numbers implies about the distribution of sample mean(X) regardless of the distribution of X.

If on the other hand she is saying that a problem in healthcare is that significantly different sub-populations are lumped together resulting in inappropriate benchmarks for some sub-populations, that is more palatable. Even if this latter interpretation is not true, at least it isn't false by definition.

throwawaylinux2• 5 years ago

The problem with the cult of The Science is that like all religions it needs outs when the actual data and science contradicts the faith. This is where the "math is racist" type of craziness comes from.

bambax2• 5 years ago

Wilson’s far left colleagues Richard Lewontin and Stephen Jay Gould

Stephen Jay Gould was a great man, a great scientist, a great writer, and my personal hero. He wasn't from the "far left"; he was intellectually honest and consistent. He spent an inordinate amount of time fighting the teaching of Creationism in US schools.

He also wrote The Mismeasure of Man which rubbed proponents of IQ measurement the wrong way (the Wikipedia article covers the debate quite well: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Mismeasure_of_Man) and which I think was and still is an important critique of biological determinism.

I don't know much about E. O. Wilson or his life or politics (I will try to learn more), but if you're prepared to dismiss Gould in a side note like this, it probably means you're on a mission and not very honest yourself.

systemvoltage5• 5 years ago

You left some important details in the quote:

response from Wilson’s far left colleagues Richard Lewontin and Stephen Jay Gould who hysterically compared his arguments to thinking that was well on its way down the slippery slope to that dark world where lay the Nazi gas chambers.

Anyone comparing their fellow scientists with Nazis is pretty uncharitable and very unscientific, unprofessional and unethical way to criticize someone.

bambax2• 5 years ago

1. Quote required. Gould was the opposite of "hysterical" so if one wants to accuse him of such they need to quote what he said exactly.

2. You yourself are misquoting and misinterpreting. Even the OP, for all its excess, doesn't accuse Gould of "comparing scientists to Nazis"; all it's saying is that Gould may have questioned some theories and pointed that they were on a "slippery slope". Being on a slippery slope means being somewhere on the slope, not (yet) at the bottom of it.

Incidentally, in the 40-50 years since the controversy, it has been demonstrated [0] that Nazi racist theories took much of their inspiration from American segregation laws, which were themselves backed up by pseudo-science every step of the way. So saying that there are ways of thinking about man and biology that can lead to gas chambers is not "hysterical", it's an observation of reality and history.

[0] See for instance https://aeon.co/ideas/why-the-nazis-studied-american-race-la...

soundnote10• 5 years ago

Gould's guilty of fraud as far as I know.

ageek123• 5 years ago

This co-opting of previously reputable domain-specific publications by radicals with only an interest in pushing their political agenda and no interest in the supposed topic of the publication, has happened to a lot of publications in the last few years -- Wired, MIT Technology Review, Vanity Fair, and many others.

systemvoltage5• 5 years ago

I think we need to "Make Science boring again". No ideological drama, no cancel culture, no bigotry and no one should feel threatened by anyone for contrarian opinions. Otherwise, Science ceases to be. We need to get back together and discover how nature works, quoting Feynman "For nature cannot be fooled".

SamoyedFurFluff• 5 years ago

In this definition was science ever boring? Science has always had ideological drama and cancel culture and feeing threatened by contrarian opinions. Look at germ theory, hand washing, the earth revolving around the sun, Alzheimer’s and plaque theory, and the fight around AIDS discovery.

finolex1• 5 years ago

I find Quanta Magazine to be a pretty good replacement to SA.

noobermin4• 5 years ago

Yeesh. The tone of the blogpost is quite extreme honestly. I read the SA article and the tone felt like it was dealing with what they saw as a complicated topic while the blogpost's language seemed to paint it as more extreme than it actually was.

That said, the tone aside, I agree with the blogpost that I can't really gather what the issue is with the late Wilson specifically. I do agree with the SA author that people like Charles Murray exist and various people misunderstand genetics and psychometrics (and honestly, psychometrics has its issues) and use statistics misleadingly to demagogue or spread racist propaganda, such things were rife on 4chan et al. a few years back. I don't see how that fact squares with Wilson though, at least from the article.

darawk• 5 years ago

Yeesh. The tone of the blogpost is quite extreme honestly. I read the SA article and the tone felt like it was dealing with what they saw as a complicated topic while the blogpost's language seemed to paint it as more extreme than it actually was.

I mean, regardless of the politics of it, the quote about the normal distribution was completely inexcusable for a supposedly scientific publication. The fact that that got by their editors, and afaik they have not corrected it or changed it, is a pretty harsh indictment. And I think that's true even if you agree with their take on EO Wilson and his legacy (which I don't, for the record).

gspr5• 5 years ago

I read the SA article and the tone felt like it was dealing with what they saw as a complicated topic

I read the criticism as saying that this shouldn't be a "complicated topic" for a publication like SA. I agree with that assessment.

sebow• 5 years ago

It's a disgrace really.A top-down command (not even trend, because that would assume this thing is organic and authors are not pressured or influenced) for accepting certain political ideology without any room for discussion,debate, and aim towards the truth.

If one wants some other good reads from another ex-SA person i recommend Michael Shermer.And people who scream homophobes/racists/sexists should take a good look in the mirror at the start of the day and ask themselves if they're afraid or they like what they see.Most often than not, the people who accuse others of something are the ones doing that thing themselves, it's a tale as old as time.

reactspa3• 5 years ago

the so-called normal distribution

I absolutely agree with SciAm here.

Words matter. They may not break my bones, but they matter.

The word "normal" is loaded. The distribution was named "normal" in a different era when "scientists" believed that the distance from the tip of the one's nose to one's forehead was a measure of intelligence.

It's called "normal distribution" for a reason. With hindsight and progress we can now discount the nomenclature, and clarify it. It's okay.

adhesive_wombat• 5 years ago

Apparently not:

"Gauss himself apparently coined the term with reference to the "normal equations" involved in its applications, with normal having its technical meaning of orthogonal rather than "usual"." (Wikipedia)

The interpretation of "normal" to mean "common" came later, and even then refers to the distribution itself being "the norm" rather than the distribution being about comparisons to a hypothetical "normal" object.

buntsai• 5 years ago

Have you actually looked up whether Gauss called this distribution "normal" because the other (parts?) of the distribution were "abnormal"?

Surely it is worth at least have a quick read of wikipedia or doing a Google search before saying something that may sound preposterous...

oxfordmale• 5 years ago

The term normal was actually coined by Karl E. Pearson, as there there was international disagreement about the naming of the Laplace-Gaussian (or Gaussian-Laplace) distribution. "Normal" also doesn't mean "usual", and is a mathematically construct.

The problem with the default person is actually that there are minor genetic differences between different ethnicities. This means that certain medical conditions are more prevalent in some ethnic groups than others (for example lactose intolerance) and this is not accounted for by assuming a normal distribution, or "a default person".

tgv2• 5 years ago

I don't think it was Pearson who coined the name. Wikipedia dates it back to 1875, when Pearson was 18. Its more likely (to me), that its use grew organically, and is associated with Pearson because of his influence.

this is not accounted for by assuming a normal distribution

Often, groups with different averages produce a normal distribution when combined. So it may be the right distribution, but not the proper conclusion.

tgv2• 5 years ago

If words matter, reading and understanding should matter even more.

gspr5• 5 years ago

The word "normal" is loaded. The distribution was named "normal" in a different era when "scientists" believed that the distance from the tip of the one's nose to one's forehead was a measure of intelligence.

No. The word "normal" is overloaded. Seriously, anyone who has ever done any amount of mathematics will have noticed this! To wit, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Normal#Mathematics . Among research mathematicians it's even an established in-joke: – Oh, so if we define X to have these properties, everything works out! – Indeed, we need to give these properties a handy name. – How about saying X is normal? – LOOOOL

timwaagh• 5 years ago

Agreed it's loaded. I don't like the word normal either. I think scientists should definitely not assume normal distribution. But I think the name is to put emphasis on how many things are distributed in such a manner. If you know something has a different distribution that is valuable information. You now know it can not consist of many independent similar variables being summed. So either there are not many similar parts or they depend on one another. So in that sense the name is appropriate. But I would not have any problem to rename it the common distribution or something which also conveys the point.

jl6• 5 years ago

There’s a particular Scientific American article which gets trotted out in a certain popular culture war topic (which I will not name here as that’s not the point), ostensibly to prove that “the science is on my side”, but which is a hopeless pile of not-even-wrong which has clearly been constructed by starting with the conclusion and then cherry picking scientific-sounding parts-of-facts to support that conclusion.

It is science in reverse.

It is literally anti-science.

okhobb• 5 years ago

I really liked the Powers of Ten article / film / book originated within SA which certainly doesn't justify any current editorial choices, but is I hope a fun video for anyone who hasn't seen it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0fKBhvDjuy0

doingtheiroming• 5 years ago

Reading Rose and Leowentin's "Not in our Genes" was formative for me. I read it when I was 17 or 18 and very political. Even then, though the book was clearly anti-sociobiology (as it defined it) it had nuance and drew a distinction between genetics and biology that left little doubt that the slate was not entirely blank - but that looking for individual genes to explain complex human behaviour was unlikely to be fruitful.

Although when I read it I came away thinking "the sociobiologists are baddies", the discussion of reductionist thinking and distinctions between genetics and biology that ran through the book, ended up priming me to be much more open minded about the subject that perhaps the authors intended. It also gave me a skepticism of psychology that turned out to be well founded as the replication crisis hit. It really set me up to be excited by systems and complexity. It certainly led to me taking classes in the philosophy of science at University and probably caused exhaustion on the part of my sociology teacher as I spent my time poking holes in methodology discussions.

I might re-read the book and Wilson's Sociobiology side by side. I remember it being very readable and less doctrinaire than a book whose introduction calls out the authors' Marxism could be expected to be. And there's clearly a lot more to Wilson than the book made out.

netcan2• 5 years ago

Why workstuff broken? Politics. Sad. :(

One definition of politics is the point at which meta takes over. Why doesn't ManagerX just cancel projectY even though everyone knows it will fail? Politics. Reasons unrelated to the task at hand.

60% of an assembly agrees with Law X, but it can't pass. Why? Coalition dynamics, party politics, presumed impacts on the next election, promises, deals, precedents, etc. Politics.

When my work often put me in a boardroom, I developed a concept of "boardroom logic." The type of argument, suggestion and such that gets easy groans of approval from various managers on unrelated departments and generalist executive advisors. There are also committee facts, corporate truths and more.

It can get recursive. Attempting to bypass, or highroad the politicalnsess is itself political. Standing outside of a courtroom and presenting court-inadmissible evidence to the press. Politics

Here we have the word "science," which also comes with rights over "unscientific," "expert" and a bunch of legitimacy stuff. That's politics. We've got literal, current US politics. Both are big money fields, with careers, donations, grants, magazine subscriptions. Social Sciences in general are mixed in with all of this. It'll take decades to settle.

rbanffy13• 5 years ago

Life in a society is political. There’s no way around that.

netcan2• 5 years ago

Aye sure. There are different things that we call "political" though.

Also there's a subtle but important difference between "politics is everywhere" and "everything is politics." The former leaves room for coexistence with other things.

tjpnz• 5 years ago

Nice to see Dawkins' bite hasn't lost any vigour with age.

https://twitter.com/RichardDawkins/status/147685004176342630...

taylorius• 5 years ago

People trust science, so to take control of a science publication, and twist it's output to advance your agenda seems to be rather effective. Not to sound like Alex Jones, but it makes one wonder what other "trusted news sources" might be compromised.

zepto5• 5 years ago

NYT

aivisol• 5 years ago

Mention of SciAm always brings back memories. It was one of the few western scientific magazines available in former Soviet Union in 80s and was issued in translated and probably censored version, but still. My father figured that it was somehow possible to get a subscription for it and we received our monthly copy for several years. That is where a learned about things like Mandelbrot fractals and Conways Game of Life and wrote my own implementations in BASIC later when I got hold of my first computer. Sad to see things coming down so badly since then.

bojangleslover• 5 years ago

The "so-called" normal distribution of "statistics"

One of the least scientific things I've ever read

mihaaly3• 5 years ago

I was a subscriber of Scientific American many many years ago while being adolescent and young adult. I liked to read about (to me) new knowledge in an easy to digest form. To me it was The Popular Science Magazine.

Some years ago, driven by nostalgia, I bought single issues occasionally but was very disappointed. Its tone did not remind me of the old years. To me it feels like it tries to use tabloid style to approach ever broader part of the public in delivering knowledge and it is just not a combination that works for me. Tabloid is not about comprehensiveness and balanced factual view that I expect from a text in science. To me it seemed like it tries to pick and magnify spectacular details on the expense of important others. True for the selection of topics as well. Using an analogy, my feeling is when someone is making a very tasty cake but uses too much sugar in it, put lots of neon food colouring into and serves it poring huge amount of honey on top on a plate that flashes like a Japanese game hall. Not for me anymore I'm afraid.

dav_Oz• 5 years ago

It is written by design to outrage, the reaction just validates that "latent racist patriarchal structures in science" (arbitrary wokeism speak) are indeed "present".

It is a power play game by attacking ("subverting") the legacy of the "father of sociobiology".

It is akin to Nixon or McCarthy wielding the axe of the "communist threat" and enjoying the squeals when it hits a vulnerablity in the establishment.

SA is just delivering the fodder for the outrage game played on Social Media (esp Twitter).

Are you not entertained i.e. engaged?

Edit:

On one side one could address her concern without using terms like "scienctific racism" as an (ideological?) gap between "sociology" and "biology".

On the other side one cannot just simply redefine technical terms like "normal distribution" in statistics.

What she probably was trying to articulate is the methodology: in order to find your ancestry "genetically" you can only compare relatively.

For example: When a genetic test company claim you are 42% "West Asian" they compare your genetic makeup to a (more or less) arbitrary model of their "West Asian". It is very speculative in its qualitative terms but at the basis quantitatively: how many variations to you have in common with this model?

There is a great talk about the methodologies used in paleogenetics for anyone interested in the particularities. [1] At the end you are left with a lot of more questions you never thought about and wonder about the complexities and intricacies involved.

[1] https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=Dk65TbJRN_A

Symmetry2• 5 years ago

I haven't really had any respect for SA since their terrible anti-Bjorn Lomborg. Goodness knows he was totally wrong about global warming but he was also totally right about the effectiveness of the EPA and Clean Air act in reducing pollution. That issue had the person criticizing the forward questioning how he could prove that the mainstream media was being too pessimistic and the person criticizing the bibliography complaining that there were a lot of mainstream media citations.

zpeti2• 5 years ago

How is he wrong about global warming? As far as I know he doesn't say it doesn't exist, just that compared to other issues facing humanity, the data doesn't actually indicate global warming is the biggest threat to our future.

Other than going against the current unchallengeable orthodoxy, I think that is a valid hypothesis that is almost impossible to disprove, but is certainly worth debating.

Symmetry2• 5 years ago

He spent a lot of the chapter pointing out that the IPCC climate models have problems and could potentially be inaccurate. But his takeaway seems to be that global warming might be mild and so we don't have to worry that much while my takeaway is that most of the reason to be afraid of global warming is in the tail risks for things getting much worse than IPCC projections.

cannabis_sam• 5 years ago

There is something devastatingly depressing when you realize that widely acclaimed people, who are obviously vastly smarter than you, by literal orders of magnitude, are still absolutely and fundamentally clueless, yet our fucked up society treat these people as something between a demigod and an oracle..

My question in WHY? (The answer is markets..)

8bitsrule• 5 years ago

This man won a Nobel in 1912.

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

He also founded the 'French Foundation for the Study of Human Problems'. In 1942. It resulted in a requirement for a 'prenuptial certificate' before marriage.

pmdulaney• 5 years ago

For me this page is marred by the downvoting. Can't we just be big boys and girls and realize that we won't agree with everyone else, that we don't need to warn others that there's something we don't agree with?

dqpb3• 5 years ago

I also find the up/down voting to provide very little value.

dqpb3• 5 years ago

When I saw that editor-in-chief Laura Helmuth is from UC Berkeley, everything made sense.

Edit: I'm not trolling. The people I know from UC Berkeley are much more primed to see racism (including where it doesn't exist) than the people I know from other Universities. Certainly, this is anecdotal and I could be wrong, but I would put money on this being a real pattern (if there was such a place to put money it).

xyzzy21• 5 years ago

Scientific American started its decline in the 1990s. It became a "rag" in the 2000s. It's 100% worthless now.

nmca• 5 years ago

The SA article reminds me of Liu Cixin's depiction of science and the "struggle sessions" of the cultural revolution:

Einstein is a reactionary academic authority. He would serve any master who dangled money in front of him. He even went to the American Imperialists and helped them build the atom bomb! To develop a revolutionary science, we must overthrow the black banner of capitalism represented by the theory of relativity!

From the fictional "three body problem", though these sessions were a real phenomena: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Struggle_session

slips01• 5 years ago

You might find this interview with E.O. Wilson from 2004 interesting in connection with the discussion here, especially with respect to Gould and Lewontin. https://quillette.com/2021/12/29/speaking-with-e-o-wilson/

syngrog66• 5 years ago

in summary: after E.O. Wilson died this December 2021 SciAm published a piece which was a reality-detached "PC/Wokeness scold" hit piece on the man

shame on SciAm. I subscribed decades ago -- but never again

The Demise of Scientific American

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