The left is destroying science and health
Bendintheriver
Member Posts: 5,473
Admittedly the linked article is long so read (if interested) when you have 15 minutes to spare.
I used to subscribe to Scientific American (SciAm) and I particularly loved Michael Shermer's columns. Michael Shermer is the founder of the "Skeptics Society" and his columns were always science based skepticism, questioning everything, every conclusion, point and counter point. There was zero politics to his articles because they were data driven. In true rat thinking, they were insulted when the data did not go their way. It was fascinating and entertaining reading. SciAm was my favorite mag. While some of it was over my head, I still enjoyed reading it and seeing if I could piece it all together and quasi grasp what the piece was trying to communicate. SciAm got a new editor, a female from Berkley, and things changed even more dramatically. I could tell it had changed when it was turned completely political instead of just science based. I dropped my subscription after 25+ years. Shermer was let go because he was questioning a lack of data on many liberal conclusions/talking points. He was replaced with liberal mouth pieces that did anything but look at conclusions skeptically.
The article is written by James Meigs, who is a brilliant man. It gives example after example of the damaging way rats block skepticism, research, discussion, basic math, etc. All the foundations of a healthy science environment. Like the discussion or skepticism of wuhan lab leaks. Liberals shut it down and there are a great deal of experts in the field who firmly believe, especially now, that the origin was a lab. Rats now are continuing to work gain of function labs and the same thing can happen again. Same with climate change. There are 1000's of scientist from every imaginable discipline who disagree with the man made climate change schtick but rather than look at the data and knock it around until real conclusions are reached, rats shut it down and condemned everyone who disagreed.
The aforementioned lack of scientific data based inquiry and conclusion can cost lives and clearly has in the case of covid. Its a fascinating read with many examples of where rats have dumbed science down, ignored real scientific conclusions and kept data driven articles out of print because it would hurt their political cause.
Michael Shermer got his first clue that things were changing at Scientific American in late 2018. The author had been writing his “Skeptic” column for the magazine since 2001. His monthly essays, aimed at an audience of both scientists and laymen, championed the scientific method, defended the need for evidence-based debate, and explored how cognitive and ideological biases can derail the search for truth. Shermer’s role models included two twentieth-century thinkers who, like him, relished explaining science to the public: Carl Sagan, the ebullient astronomer and TV commentator; and evolutionary biologist Stephen Jay Gould, who wrote a popular monthly column in Natural History magazine for 25 years. Shermer hoped someday to match Gould’s record of producing 300 consecutive columns. That goal would elude him.
“I started to see the writing on the wall toward the end of my run there,” Shermer told me. “I saw I was being slowly nudged away from certain topics.” One month, he submitted a column about the “fallacy of excluded exceptions,” a common logical error in which people perceive a pattern of causal links between factors but ignore counterexamples that don’t fit the pattern. In the story, Shermer debunked the myth of the “horror-film curse,” which asserts that bad luck tends to haunt actors who appear in scary movies. (The actors in most horror films survive unscathed, he noted, while bad luck sometimes strikes the casts of non-scary movies as well.) Shermer also wanted to include a serious example: the common belief that sexually abused children grow up to become abusers in turn. He cited evidence that “most sexually abused children do not grow up to abuse their own children” and that “most abusive parents were not abused as children.” And he observed how damaging this stereotype could be to abuse survivors; statistical clarity is all the more vital in such delicate cases, he argued. But Shermer’s editor at the magazine wasn’t having it. To the editor, Shermer’s effort to correct a common misconception might be read as downplaying the seriousness of abuse. Even raising the topic might be too traumatic for victims.