One of the things that non-lawyers were often incapable of grasping was the ability of criminal defense lawyers to separate their zealous representation of clients who committed egregious acts from the conduct itself. How, people regularly argued, could you defend a heinous murderer without being a supporter of the heinous murders they committed? After all, if the crimes were appalling, then defending those who committed those crimes was no less appalling, no less supportive of their commission than those who actually committed heinous crimes.
Nah. We defend because defending the accused is a critical part of the system that distinguishes between the guilty and the innocent, that holds the government to its burden and makes certain that the person accused, no matter how heinous the accusation, has been afforded the protections our system requires and has been proven, beyond a reasonable doubt and upon only competent and admissible evidence, to be guilty. Without this, the system fails and trust in the system, which is more important than the conviction of any individual no matter how heinous their crimes, fails.
While not exactly the same, trust in science requires a similar perspective. We may not want some things to be scientifically true, but if that means science becomes captive to ideology, then it can no longer be trusted. Over the past decade, perhaps more, many have come to doubt that the purpose of science isn’t to find truth, but to validate ideology and reach the conclusions that proponents find politically palatable. This has been most notable with regard to science relating to issue involving race, sexual identity and even infectious diseases, all controversial to some extent and giving rise to narratives that risk life and death issues where belief trumps science.
The danger here is manifest. Since most of us aren’t scientists, and lack the qualifications to distinguish between what’s fact and what ideology, we’re constrained to either trust others who are more knowledgeable and honest or believe those whom we want to believe because they tell us what we want to hear.
This is why Laura Helmuth, the now-resigned Editor-in-Chief of Scientific America, has done unfathomable damage to the lives and welfare of humanity because of her stunning inability to separate her politics from science.
The editor in chief of Scientific American, the oldest continuously published magazine in the United States, has resigned more than a week after she posted comments on social media that called some supporters of President-elect Donald J. Trump “bigoted” and “fascists.”
This characterization doesn’t sound particularly bad or, frankly, unusual. Many people have said the same thing while holding positions of some significance. But this barely scratches the surface of what Helmuth had to say.
On election night, Laura Helmuth, who served as editor in chief of the publication for more than four years, posted a series of expletive-laden comments on Bluesky, a social platform.
In one comment, she apologized to younger voters for Generation X being full of “fascists.” In another, she wrote, “Solidarity to everybody whose meanest, dumbest, most bigoted high-school classmates are celebrating early results,” according to screenshots of the posts.
In an effort to be kind to the New York Times’ tepid recitation of what Helmuth had to say, it may be that the worst of it couldn’t be printed due to it being “expletive-laden.” Can’t have that in the paper of record, because expletives from the EIC of SciAm would burn their delicate eyeballs, NYT readers never have uttered expletives themselves.
But this was the end of a long, downward spiral of a once-respected magazine.
Scientific American, which was founded in 1845 and reaches more than 10 million people around the world each month, has at times weighed in on American politics. In 2016, it ran an editorial warning of Mr. Trump’s “disregard, if not outright contempt,” for science but stopped short of endorsing Hillary Clinton.
Four years later, the magazine issued its first formal endorsement of a presidential candidate, backing Joseph R. Biden Jr. in an editorial condemning Mr. Trump’s handling of the coronavirus pandemic. At the time, Ms. Helmuth told The New York Times that the magazine’s editors felt the endorsement was necessary, calling Mr. Trump’s first administration “a disaster for science at every level.”
There is, of course, good reason for a magazine dedicated to science to challenge Trump’s handling of Covid, but the scientific focus should have been on the disease, not the man who caused a run on Clorox at the supermarket. Then again, science would have compelled consideration of the cause of the disease unfettered by concerns that it might reflect poorly on marginalized Chinese people. If it was true that it was developed in a lab, then it was irrelevant that it might hurt people of Chinese identity.
But SciAm, which means Helmuth, not only learned no lesson from its digression into politics, but chose to persist even though there was no reason why it, as opposed to the millions of other voices condemning Trump like the New York Times, needed to separate from its scientific mission.
Earlier this year, Scientific American published an editorial endorsing Vice President Kamala Harris. After Mr. Trump’s victory, the magazine published an article on coping with election grief, which Ms. Helmuth also shared online.
Did this endorsement break the logjam of support for Trump such that Harris won the day? Did this endorsement do anything? Well, yes, it did do two things.
On Thursday, Ms. Helmuth said that she would be leaving the magazine to “take some time to think about what comes next” and, she added, “go bird-watching.” Her resignation announcement, which she shared on Bluesky, did not reference her previous posts.
The other thing it did was reveal that Scientific American chose to forsake science for politics, truth for ideology. Helmuth claims that her actions were caused by “‘“shock and confusion about the election results’ and said that they did not reflect the position of Scientific American or her colleagues.” This, of course, is bullshit.
No one at SciAm called either her or the magazine out for its endorsements before. No one at SciAm demanded her resignation for having reduced a once-trusted scientific magazine to an ideological broadside. No one at Scientific American stood up for science as the magazine slid down the slippery political slope.
Not because they supported Trump, or believed he was not a threat to science, but because Scientific American was not a political or ideological voice, but a science magazine that, under Helmuth, just couldn’t manage to stick to its mission even though the price of its failure was trust. Now, when we need to be able to trust in science more than ever, we can no longer turn to SciAm and believe what it offers. Helmuth is not solely to blame, but she is certainly to blame.
Discover more from Simple Justice
Subscribe to get the latest posts sent to your email.
This is all true. But it’s worth emphasizing that Scientific American is a popular magazine, not a scientific journal. It may well curate the educated layperson’s understanding of science but it does not (more than very tangentially) influence the creation and validation of scientific knowledge. As such, the complete ideological takeover of SciAm by the progressive left is, in my opinion, < 1% as bad as the ideological takeover of real science journals by the progressive left, which has happened. Consider JAMA, the Journal of the American Medical Association. In 2021, a deputy editor at JAMA on a podcast questioned the validity of "structural racism" as a cause of health disparities, because in his mind socioeconomic factors, rather than racism, would be a more parsimonious explanation, Occam's razor and all that. In no time: the podcast was deleted, the question-asker was booted from his position as JAMA deputy editor and then the editor-in-chief of JAMA, who had nothing to do with the podcast, was booted for not being fast or harsh enough in his criticisms (!). At the same time, in the ensuing 3+ years, there have been no JAMA scientific articles questioning COVID policies. Ideological takeover, not coincidence, is to me a more parsimonious explanation of the latter.
PS I don't think JAMA endorsed a presidential candidate (explicitly) but Nature, one of the most prestigious and influential scientific journals in the world, did..as did Lancet, which is a British medical journal!
As an “educated layperson” I found Scientific American during college, subscribed and routinely devoured its contents. After many years along came the drum beat of global cooling/global warming/climate change and I let the subscription lapse. In my estimation Helmuth wasn’t the agent that brought SA down. She was just a comfortable pick as an editor for a publication that was already slowly committing suicide.
For those within and adjacent to the medical community, journals are far more serious publications than magazines intended to engage with the groundlings, but if JAMA wants to hype structural racism, it’s up to the medical community say something, and it would appear you did (like us lawyers say about the now-woke ABA). Of course, it’s not as if pretty much every medical association is all in for little kids who with “gender affirming” care because they love/hate the color pink, so it seems medicine has a way to go still.
But where do you think the interested public learns? They’re not reading JAMA or Lancet, but they may read SciAm to get their “scientific” information, making SciAm a more valuable source as far as the public is concerned than any medical journal.
You make good points, Miles. SciAm is more powerful than real journals, and in my experience the health column of the NY Times is more impactful than any medical study. And yes, members of the medical community who dissent are obliged to say something. But medical science is “socially constructed”. That means you can say something only if you get through peer review, and if your peers are ideologically captured, you cannot say your piece. (Or as the Grateful Dead lyric has it, you can ‘say your piece and get out’– as happened to Pitt cardiologist Norman Wang, who was fired for publishing an article questioning affirmative action. [It’s worth reading about; google ‘Center for Individual Rights Wang’])
in honor of Dr Wang, I would have cited the Pittsburgh Three Rivers concert version, 7-8-90. (A show, by the way, where they played Wang Dang Doodle… the lord works in mysterious ways.) But like medical journals, this here site has gatekeeping rules too. (google ‘grateful dead archive.org july 8 1990’ to find the link)
Another case study in how the strong force of bad judgment is more powerful than the weak force of intention. (see also: antiracism, third wave feminism, “woke” politics, etc.) People parroting “Trust The Science” are making a quintessential right wing argument, while imagining they are anything but. It’s like showing up outside a courthouse during a controversial trial waving a sign that says “Trust The Justice System.”
The Amateur Scientist, Mathematical Games, Metamagical Themas – all gone.
It’s where I first learned of public key cryptography, asymmetrical/aperiodic tesselation and so many other fascinating and astounding works of the human mind.
I let my subscription go decades past, when they started preaching instead of teaching.
This event is not a tragedy, whatever John Horgan might say – it is part of the inevitable progression of an institution crumbling into dust.
Nat Geo isn’t far behind, I’m afraid.
Kurt
Why do something as mundane and useful as educate when you can “FIGHT FOR TEH CAUSE!!!”?
NBC quoted Robert Kennedy as saying about a year ago, “I’m gonna say to NIH scientists, God bless you all,” Kennedy said. “Thank you for public service. We’re going to give infectious disease a break for about eight years.” Apparently Mr. Kennedy wants to shift NIH to the study of chronic disease only, an extraordinarily irresponsible policy. I am not certain that Scientific American’s endorsement of Kamala Harris is a good or bad policy, but under the circumstances I understand the sentiment.
Here’s a simple way to tell if something is “science” or “horse manure.” If someone says, “X% of scientists agree that Y,” that’s horse manure. Also remember that NOTHING is ever “proven true” in science. Anyone who says that either completely fails to understand science, or is peddling horse manure. Science is about the things that we (so far) have not been able to DISPROVE. The main goal of real scientists is to try to disprove things. The more experiments they set up that fail to disprove a theory, the more confidence we have that that theory is a reasonable explanation for reality.
But even theories that have stood for decades are not proven. They are simply “good enough” for now. Newtonian mechanics was “good enough” for centuries, until Einstein started asking questions about what happened if you went really, really fast, or if you were dealing with really, really large masses. Hence special and general relativity. In most of our lives, Newton’s explanation is good enough, and we can ignore Einstein, though relativity bites all of us indirectly everyday. GPS satellites are victims of Einsteinian time dilation, and have to allow for it, or they would quickly become useless.
So just remember, science doesn’t care who or how many believers it has. It’s sole concern is what has not so far been disproven.
Scientific theory is a wonderful thing.
My father started his SviAm subscription in 1952, when it was 2, and I grew up with his entire collection. It was useful for all sorts of schoolwork. And it used to serve as an intermediate conduit between the journals and the technical public, which does not follow the journals for issues outside their area of expertise. It reduced journalise language to something that could be understood by other disciplines, and the drawings and illustrations were magnificent in conveying information. There are articles from the 50s-60s that are still useful if you want to understand issues in my field today. But when the rot started, it was a shock. I think i cancelled my subscription in the early 80s. It is now just a propaganda organ for the progressives.
News Item: “Scientific American Editor Resigns After Saying Trump Supporters are the ‘Meanest, Dumbest, Most Bigoted’ Voters”
I canceled my long term subscription with a protest note shortly after she (and her politics) took over.
She has destroyed SciAm in less than 5 years. A stunning achievement!!! /s
“Discover’ has become the better science magazine.