Scientific American and Political Correctness

[John Clark]

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

[Telmo Menezes]

John, I agree with everything you write below. These attempts to soil the memory of scientists who gave us so much in the name of some current cultural/political crusade is despicable, and the "normal distribution" remark is truly moronic. It reminds me of the "science wars": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Science_wars

There are two aspects of this that I find even more disturbing:

(1) The splendour of science comes from the fact that the only judgement on the validity of a theory is weather it matches what we can observe. It doesn't matter who had the idea. It doesn't matter how much of a horrible person Isaac Newton was, it is still a fact that anyone can verify for themselves that F=ma at classical scales.

(2) People are increasingly afraid to speak up about these things. There can be real world consequences if one does.

This way lies a new dark age.

Telmo

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[spudb...@aol.com]

For many (most?) in the field, Group Loyalty beats science. Group loyalty hitched to ideology specifically.

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[Stathis Papaioannou]

On Tue, 11 Jan 2022 at 02:31, John Clark <johnk...@gmail.com> wrote:

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."

Perhaps she could be excused for this remark, but doesn’t Scientific American have editors?

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

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Stathis Papaioannou

[spudb...@aol.com]

Interestingly enough physicist Guilio Prisco retweeted a similar comment by Richard Dawkins on the ideological bent of SciAm. 

Dawkins-

Well, there were already signs that Scientific American was going under, but could anyone have believed that once great magazine could could conceivably ever sink quite so abysmally low as this? Calling Ed Wilson a racist! https://bit.ly/3ezx7aE

Prisco-

What he says.

[John Clark]

On Tue, Jan 11, 2022 at 5:55 PM Stathis Papaioannou <stat...@gmail.com> wrote:

>> 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."

> Perhaps she could be excused for this remark, but doesn’t Scientific American have editors?

The problem with Scientific American is its editors, especially it's chief editor Laura Helmuth, she called Monica McLemore's ridiculous smear of E.O. Wilson "insightful". Apparently Scientific American's editor in chief doesn't know what a normal distribution is either.  Scientific American is the oldest continuously published magazine in the USA, it's been around since 1845, but Laura Helmuth is flying it into the ground. 

John K Clark