The editor of scientific American

[John Clark]

A few days ago the editor of scientific American magazine, Laura Helmuth, was fired and I am NOT sorry to see her go. She was fired because a few days after the election she posted a tweet calling Trump supporters "fascists" and "bigoted", but that's not why I'm glad she was kicked out. I'm glad because she also made the following unscientific claim: 

"Inequity between male and female athletes is a result not of inherent biological differences between the sexes but of biases in how they are treated in sports."

Elon Musk said, with some justification, the magazine should change its name to Unscientific American. Even worse was the way Laura Helmuth treated the memory of Richard Feynman and E.O. Wilson as I explained in the following post that I originally sent in early 2022:

==

"In recent days the once great magazine Scientific American has been plagued by a serious and perhaps fatal case of wokeness, it is no longer the home of giants like Martin Gardner and Philip Morrison. A few years ago Ash Jogalekar was fired from the magazine by its editor, Laura Helmuth, for writing an article that was too complimentary to Richard Feynman, she having judged that Feynman was insufficiently politically correct according to today's rapidly evolving social standards. Then the magazine blasted Joe Biden for appointing Eric Lander, an excellent scientist, as his science advisor because Lander had committed the unforgivable crime of being neither black nor female. And now, just three days after the death of the great evolutionary biologist E.O. Wilson, the magazine ran a hit piece on him written by somebody named "Monica McLemore", who is obviously not a scientist, claiming that Wilson was a racist without giving a single quote by Wilson demonstrating that fact. I say "obviously not a scientist" (she turns out to be a nursing teacher) because the article contains the following unintentionally hilarious remark:

"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."

So I guess according to her the great mathematician Carl Gauss must have also been a racist for having discovered the normal distribution more than 200 years ago. 

I wrote the following letter to the magazine, I know it won't do any good but it made me feel better: 

====

I've been a subscriber to your magazine for over half a century but after reading the shameful article by Monica R. McLemore disparaging the memory of a great scientists like E.O. Wilson just days after his death, I kept asking myself two questions:

1)  Why couldn't Scientific American find somebody smarter than Monica R. McLemore to write for them, at least somebody smart enough to know what a statistical normal distribution is?

2) Why do I continue my subscription to Scientific American? 

John K Clark

John K Clark    See what's on my new list at  Extropolis

tbi

[Russell Standish]

I haven't read SciAm for many years (I got New Scientist addiction
when I was a PhD student, and have continued since), but I can see why
you'd be annoying by idiocies like that.

ISTM this "wokeness" you refer to is basically an outcome of the
intellectually bankrupt idea of post-modernism. Everybody is right,
and nobody's position is priveleged over anone else's. It's not
scientific, nor rational.

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[Cosmin Visan]

Human species is mentally ill. What can you do ? Just sit down, relax, and enjoy the clown show.