9 ms·

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

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-legacy-of-e-o-wilson/ https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/the-complicated-l...

DalasNoin 5y 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 5y ago
  I'm pretty close to re-calibrating my trust levels to 'untrustworthy'.
  - inglor_cz 5y ago
    For what? Do you too, find, the editorial framing E.O.Wilson as racist, 'insightful'? Because that is the topic of his last blog entry.
metabagel 5y ago
Agreed. This seems to be a better reasoned critique: https://whyevolutionistrue.com/2021/12/30/scientific-american-does-an-asinine-hit-job-on-e-o-wilson-calling-him-a-racist/ https://whyevolutionistrue.com/2021/12/30/scientific-america...
- rajup 5y ago
  Yes very eloquently put thanks for sharing!
  - systemvoltage 5y ago
    Hmm..I didn't find it eloquent or better in any way than Scott's post. The only difference is quotations of the original article followed by "No, that's wrong" or "Are you serious!?".
LaunchAway1 5y 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.
- rbanffy 5y 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.
  - LaunchAway1 5y ago
    The issue was that RMS did not conform to some ideology and so he was bullied. The fact that he is wrong or right about his opinions it's not even relevant. We have normalized ad hominem attacks, amplified through social networks. Reputation was everything in medieval science and we are moving in that direction.
    - rbanffy 5y ago
      Ad hominem would be using his misbehavior to attack, say, the FSF. Noting the fact he regularly made his female coworkers (and not only coworkers) uncomfortable is not an ad hominem - it's a direct criticism of his attitudes.
      - esarbe 5y ago
        Spreading falsehoods about a person is also called 'libel'.
  - irthomasthomas 5y ago
    Those issues reported about RMS turned out to be falsehoods, miss-quotes and exaggerations (apparently, the bed he kept in his office was for pulling all-nighters at work, not for raping people.). They never survived the fact check, and Stallman is back at the FSF. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26780192 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26780192 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26558348 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26558348 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26535224 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26535224
naniwaduni 5y 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 5y ago
  SA will always be Something Awful for me.
cbsmith 5y ago
The post linked to other critiques of the article in question (https://whyevolutionistrue.com/2021/12/30/scientific-american-does-an-asinine-hit-job-on-e-o-wilson-calling-him-a-racist/ 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.
KennyBlanken 5y 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-on-at-scientific-american-deleted-posts-sexism-claims-a-fired-writer/2014/07/16/46526b52-0d20-11e4-8c9a-923ecc0c7d23_story.html 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-wavefunction/richard-feynman-sexism-and-changing-perceptions-of-a-scientific-icon/ 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 5y 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.
  - tpush 5y ago
    It absolutely is wrong and untrue, though, in addition to being racist. There being significant IQ differences between ethnicities/"races" that are caused by genetics is a long debunked theory; just look at the scientific discourse around something like "The Bell Curve".
Mordisquitos 5y 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 http://www.esp.org/foundations/genetics/classical/gm-65.pdf
- rbanffy 5y 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.
  - 5y ago
duskwuff 5y 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 5y 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.
DarkWiiPlayer 5y 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.

DalasNoin 5y 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 5y ago
I'm pretty close to re-calibrating my trust levels to 'untrustworthy'.
- inglor_cz 5y ago
  For what? Do you too, find, the editorial framing E.O.Wilson as racist, 'insightful'? Because that is the topic of his last blog entry.

metabagel 5y ago

Agreed. This seems to be a better reasoned critique: https://whyevolutionistrue.com/2021/12/30/scientific-american-does-an-asinine-hit-job-on-e-o-wilson-calling-him-a-racist/ https://whyevolutionistrue.com/2021/12/30/scientific-america...

rajup 5y ago
Yes very eloquently put thanks for sharing!
- systemvoltage 5y ago
  Hmm..I didn't find it eloquent or better in any way than Scott's post. The only difference is quotations of the original article followed by "No, that's wrong" or "Are you serious!?".

LaunchAway1 5y 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.

rbanffy 5y 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.
- LaunchAway1 5y ago
  The issue was that RMS did not conform to some ideology and so he was bullied. The fact that he is wrong or right about his opinions it's not even relevant. We have normalized ad hominem attacks, amplified through social networks. Reputation was everything in medieval science and we are moving in that direction.
  - rbanffy 5y ago
    Ad hominem would be using his misbehavior to attack, say, the FSF. Noting the fact he regularly made his female coworkers (and not only coworkers) uncomfortable is not an ad hominem - it's a direct criticism of his attitudes.
    - esarbe 5y ago
      Spreading falsehoods about a person is also called 'libel'.
- irthomasthomas 5y ago
  Those issues reported about RMS turned out to be falsehoods, miss-quotes and exaggerations (apparently, the bed he kept in his office was for pulling all-nighters at work, not for raping people.). They never survived the fact check, and Stallman is back at the FSF. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26780192 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26780192 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26558348 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26558348 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26535224 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26535224

naniwaduni 5y 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 5y ago
SA will always be Something Awful for me.

cbsmith 5y ago

The post linked to other critiques of the article in question (https://whyevolutionistrue.com/2021/12/30/scientific-american-does-an-asinine-hit-job-on-e-o-wilson-calling-him-a-racist/ 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.

KennyBlanken 5y 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-on-at-scientific-american-deleted-posts-sexism-claims-a-fired-writer/2014/07/16/46526b52-0d20-11e4-8c9a-923ecc0c7d23_story.html 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-wavefunction/richard-feynman-sexism-and-changing-perceptions-of-a-scientific-icon/ 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 5y 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.
- tpush 5y ago
  It absolutely is wrong and untrue, though, in addition to being racist. There being significant IQ differences between ethnicities/"races" that are caused by genetics is a long debunked theory; just look at the scientific discourse around something like "The Bell Curve".

Mordisquitos 5y 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 http://www.esp.org/foundations/genetics/classical/gm-65.pdf

rbanffy 5y 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.
- 5y ago

duskwuff 5y 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 5y 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.

DarkWiiPlayer 5y 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.