Category: science journalists acting badly

An article in Science takes implicit bias (and its measurement) for granted despite the problems, and suggests interventions that haven’t been shown to work

March 25, 2023 • 11:30 am

Nearly all psychologists have lost their enthusiasm for the idea of implicit bias because of its manifold problems; and the most common test for implicit bias, the IAT (implicit association test) has largely been abandoned by its users. In light of this you’d think the idea and its IAT metric would have dropped out of sight in academics. But that’s not the way it works these days. If an idea like implicit bias fits into the academic Zeitgeist, and we can actually (pretend to) measure how biased people are when they don’t even know it, then it’s full steam ahead with the idea. Ferret out everybody’s bias, because we all have it! And ignore those niggling doubts about the IAT!

This, along with the often problematic notion of “systemic racism”, which persists in all of academia, are two examples of how the authoritarian Left will cling to a concept when it’s been found empirically useless, simply because the idea comports with their ideology.  And this article in Science—one of the world’s two most prestigious science journals—buys straight into the idea of implicit bias and IAT, hardly mentioning that they’re deeply controversial and have not been found to improve race relations. The article also assumes that inequities are due to racism (another dubious conclusion), and that the racism within science is a structural racism, not maniftested by biased individuals but baked into the system. Finally, the article raises the possibility of Big Brother-like monitoring of people to catch the implicit bias that we all know they harbor. (We discussed this suggestion the other day.)

There is no science journal I know of that has not gone in this direction if it’s weighed in at all on that ideology. Science is one and Nature is another.  It’s embarrassing how the two most prestigious journals concerned with understanding nature play so fast and loose with the facts.

Click to read:

The article’s largely about bias in medicine. I’ll give a few quotes showing how embedded the idea of implicit bias is in the article, how little the author and the IAT-users recognize the weaknesses, and describe new methods of measuring implicit bias in light of the IAT’s failure (which they don’t admit). The article is long, but is so similar to others of its ilk that I’ll be brief.

Note the immediate buy-in of the concept of implicit bias below. The article begins with the story of Chastine, a patient with autoimmune disease whose steroids made her gain weight, and then, she claims, doctors would assume that her extra weight was her primary medical condition. (This could, of course, be dispelled by the patient simply telling the doctor this at the outset).:

Stories like Chastine’s are unfortunately common, say researchers who examine how implicit biases—unconscious assumptions based on skin color, gender, sexual preference, or appearance—in health care providers affect patient care. Chastine, who is Black and queer, is now channeling her troubled experience with the medical establishment to aid studies of implicit bias and identify ways to counter it. She is part of a 5-year collaboration between various departments at both the University of Washington (UW) and the University of California, San Diego (UCSD), in which a team is developing a tool to give physicians feedback in real time during patient visits—or shortly after—on what they can do to mitigate their unconscious prejudices.

Here comes the IAW as used by Janice Sabin, a researcher at the University of Washington:

Sabin used the well-known Implicit Association Test (IAT), which determines how strongly an individual associates a trait—such as race or sexual orientation—with a subjective value, such as “good” or “bad.” The quicker you match each concept to a subjective value, the greater the association and the higher your score, which broadly indicates a stronger implicit association between the trait and value.

Sabin found the doctors she tested—a few of them nonwhite—held the unconscious bias that white patients took their medication as prescribed more so than Black patients. It was one of the first studies showing health care providers had unintentional racial prejudices. “It was kind of scary because this was a concept completely foreign to [many] people at the time,” Sabin says.

As I said, the article does mention issues with the IAT, but doesn’t state that its problems (lack of replication, evidence against the unconscious nature of the bias, and the failure of the tests results to lead to effective antiracist programs) are so severe that serious psychologists have abandoned the test:

The IAT remains a standard tool for measuring implicit bias, although some have criticized it because it has to be taken several times to reveal a reliable result, as people’s scores could change every time they take it. Even when people come out neutral on race, most studies will reveal some kind of unconscious prejudice, such as an unrecognized preference of certain sexual orientations or religions.

. . . Scientists have long studied several kinds of interventions that attempt to “erase” implicit bias, but few of them have shown lasting effects. “There is a robust science around implicit bias,” Hardeman says. But, “There is no gold standard for how to intervene right now. It’s imprinted in our brains in ways that make it really hard.”

Simple interventions can dampen biases, as measured by successive IATs, but the changes are usually modest and don’t persist.

. . .Simply asking health care providers to take the IAT without providing context or tools can be counterproductive. A study in 2015 indicated that when medical students are told about their unconscious bias without direction on overcoming it, they tend to get anxious, confused, and nervous interacting with patients who belong to social groups different from their own. That’s why even a quick training on skills to mitigate implicit bias can go a long way, according to Hardeman.

But as the article says (and other articles agree) why measure bias in a way that’s counterproductive if there is no “gold standard about how to intervene” to mitigate bias? Is this all just performative action with no effect on what it hopes to change? And so researchers move on to the Big Brother tests:

That made him [Brian Wood, an infectious disease specialist] eager to take part in UnBIASED’s first experiments, which rely on cameras installed in exam rooms. The cameras in Wood’s Seattle clinic captured interactions between him and his patients, including close-ups of his and their facial features and body language. “I found quite quickly that the patient and I both forgot the cameras were there and just fell into our usual routine and conversation,” he says.

The UnBIASED team then used a type of artificial intelligence (AI) known as machine learning to analyze patterns in the recordings and identify nonverbal cues that could indicate implicit bias. In one of the clips Wood was later shown, he was talking with a patient while leaning forward with his arms crossed on the desk, body language he worries may have made him seem closed and unapproachable. “I reflected on my own as to how that body language might be felt and perceived by the patient,” he says. Wood, who hopes to improve his demeanor, says he welcomed such feedback and is eager for more.

“Reflecting on possible negative moments during a visit was not easy, but felt important and valuable,” Wood says.

The team is now working on translating the experiment’s results into feedback like “digital nudges”—such as an icon that pops onto the computer screen, a wearable device, or other mechanism telling physicians to interrupt patients less or look them in the eye more often. But the UnBIASED team still has challenges interpreting the data in the recordings. For instance, nonverbal signals are nuanced, Hartzler says. “It’s not always as simple as ‘more interruptions means bad.’”

Translation: this method doesn’t seem to work. But nevertheless, the article persists, describing other methods of measuring hidden bias, including clinical simulations of biases and “microaggressions”, constructing training exercises for physicians and nurses, and calling out people on the spot. The problem is that while the article describes a panoply of methods, with at least one “increasing their recognition of bias” in a way that lasted a year (but their own biases or other people’s?), none of the methods seem to have an effect on mitigating bias, conscious or unconscious.  Despite the failure of developing an efficacious program so far, they will persist—forever:

Getting buy-in from whole health care systems could accelerate the process. Recently, California, Michigan, Maryland, Minnesota, and Washington state passed legislation mandating implicit bias training for the medical professionals they license. And since June 2022, Massachusetts physicians are required to take implicit bias training to get a new license or get recertified to practice.

Although researchers see this as a good step, they worry mandated training will become a one-off box-checking exercise. Sustained implicit bias training for physicians should instead be the norm, some emphasize. Hospitals also need to monitor and collect data on health care outcomes for different groups in order to monitor equity, Sabin says. “You have to know where the disparities lie and then begin to work backwards from that.”

It won’t be easy, Hardeman says, noting that, at least in the United States, centuries of white supremacy and other forms of bigotry have resulted in deep-rooted stereotypes and other implicit biases. “Every single person should be thinking about doing this work,” she says. “But if they’re doing it within a system that hasn’t addressed its own biases and racism, then it’s not going to be fully effective.”

Clearly, we’re going to have mandated training for the rest of our lives (much of it involving a form of compelled speech), and all of us who aren’t people of color will be told that we harbor implicit biases and participate in white supremacy, which is now structurally built into medicine.

And yes, of course some people are biased! I can’t help but assume that these people really do mean well instead of just trying to enact an ideology that they know won’t help the situation. But perhaps they should be using methods that work, and if they can’t show they work, they shouldn’t be part of mandated training. It’s not going to make people more “inclusive” to tell them all that they’re ridden with biases they don’t even know about the invisible Klan robes we all wear.

When this kind of palaver invades all of the prestige science journals—in article after article that all say exactly the same thing—you know that we’re in for a long haul.

If you want to measure your own implicit bias for race using Harvard’s IAT, try it here.

h/t: Steve

Why science and its journals should remain free of ideology: an example from Nature

March 22, 2023 • 10:30 am

It’s one thing for a newspaper to take political stands, but that’s okay only in the editorial section. So long as the “news” section—the reporting itself—remains untainted by political leanings or obvious bias, people can still trust the news, even if they use editorials to diss entire papers like the NYT as “authoritarian leftist” or the Wall Street Journal as “right wing”. The important thing is to keep the editorial section completely separate from the news.

But it’s another thing entirely for scientific journals to take political stands, and this post should show you why. For when you endorse a candidate that liberals like, like Joe Biden, you’re going to turn off the people who don’t like Joe Biden. That’s okay for newspapers, as their readership probably leans the same way as the paper itself. But writing off a scientific journal as “politically biased” has potentially worse effects than writing off a newspaper, for the former can cause people to distrust the science itself.

This is what happened to Scientific American, which, once free from politics, has under its new leadership decided to repeatedly take woke stands in their editorials, and that has made the whole magazine lose credibility. Can you trust their judgement about what science they choose to publish if their editorials accuse Mendel of racism? (They did that, but of course it’s a lie.) Best to keep political views out of science journals, whose purpose, after all, is not to render political opinions but to convey scientific truth.

But it’s even worse when it happens in a serious journal like Nature, for, unlike Scientific American, Nature publishes new scientific results. By steering clear of ideological stands in the rest of the journal, it can at least be free of the criticism that it’s publishing biased science.

And for years Nature pretty much refrained from politics, probably because it realized that its mission was the dissemination of science, not social engineering. The journal was first published in 1869, and remained fairly unpolitical until 2016, when the journal wrote an op-ed saying “HIllary Clinton will make a fine U.S. President.” It wasn’t exactly an official endorsement, but it came close to it. After that, the endorsements began.

That came in 2020, when, bucking tradition, Nature endorsed Joe Biden for President of the United States, publishing a piece on October 14 called, “Why Nature supports Joe Biden for U.S. President“. Of course I endorsed Joe Biden, too, but I think that scientific journals, like universities, should remain viewpoint neutral—except when their political views are related to the mission of finding scientific truth. Endorsements only hurt the brand, and also make it seem that the mission of science, like that of universities, might be more than just seeking the truth. (After all, do you think cereal brands should put political endorsements on Wheaties boxes?)

And loss of scientific credibility did in fact happen. Nature itself admits this in an article published two days ago, “Political endorsements can affect scientific credibility.” Here’s of the piece, whose supporting data are summarized in Nature’s tweet below:

How did Nature’s endorsement affect people who viewed it? Writing in Nature Human Behaviour, Zhang2 describes an experiment that asks this question, revealing that some who saw the endorsement lost confidence in the journal as a result. This topic is important because, if people believe that political forces might introduce bias or inaccuracy into research claims, they might also think it is riskier for them to trust that research.

There have been efforts to understand how public confidence in science is affected by such concerns (see go.nature.com/3zfcpxh), and to mitigate any negative effects of this type of politicization3. But there have been fewer studies of how political endorsements that specifically come from inside the scientific community affect science’s credibility. To my knowledge, the current study is the first to test this experimentally.

Zhang’s experiment involved a survey that was completed by more than 4,000 US citizens in the summer of 2021 — about 6 months after Biden took office as president. Early in the survey, participants were asked about their level of support for Joe Biden and Donald Trump, and how likely they thought it was that Nature would have endorsed a candidate in the election. Later, participants were randomly assigned to view either Nature’s endorsement of Biden or an announcement of new visual designs for its website and print articles. They were then asked for their views of Biden, Trump, Nature and US scientists in general, and whether they would choose to obtain scientific information about COVID-19 from Nature or from other sources.

Overall, the study provides little evidence that the endorsement changed participants’ views of the candidates. However, showing the endorsement to people who supported Trump did significantly change their opinion of Nature. When compared with Trump supporters who viewed Nature’s formatting announcement, Trump supporters who viewed the endorsement rated Nature as significantly less well informed when it comes to “providing advice on science-related issues facing the society” (Fig. 1). Those who viewed the endorsement also rated Nature significantly lower as an unbiased source of information on contentious or divisive issues. There was no comparable positive effect for Biden supporters.

So endorsing Biden made Republicans more distrustful of the journal. Is that surprising? The data are summarized in the tweet below, but here’s the full graph with caption. The length of the bars show the percentage of people (Trump and Biden supporters, divided by whether they had viewed or not viewed the endorsement) who rated the journal from “not informed at all” up to “extremely informed.” Note that the pink bars predominate at the lower ratings of credibility, and the blue at higher levels of credibility:

(From Nature): Figure 1 | Exposure to a political endorsement affects how some people view Nature. Zhang conducted a survey to examine how viewing Nature’s endorsement of Joe Biden for US president affected supporters of Donald Trump and Biden in the United States. Participants were asked a range of questions, one of which was ‘In your opinion, how informed are editors of the journal Nature, when it comes to providing advice on science-related issues facing the society?’. Trump supporters who viewed the political endorsement rated Nature as significantly less-well informed than did Trump supporters in a control group. By contrast, the endorsement had little effect on Biden supporters. (Figure adapted from Fig. 2 of ref. 2.)

Nature’s tweet:

The lesson? This (from the same article):

The current study provides evidence that, when a publication whose credibility comes from science decides to politicize its content, it can damage that credibility. If this decreased credibility, in turn, reduces the impact of scientific research published in the journal, people who would have benefited from the research are the worse for it. I read Zhang’s work as signalling that Nature should avoid the temptation to politicize its pages. In doing so, the journal can continue to inform and enlighten as many people as possible.

QED and duhhh. . .

So what does the journal do in light of this conclusion? They go against their own advice! Here’s a piece published two days ago:

Now of course they couch the whole thing in terms of promoting reason, which could be good for science, but you can always say that the candidate you like is more “reasonable” than the other candidate. After all, that’s why you endorse somebody: because you think they listen to reason more than the other candidate. From the new article:

We live in troubling times for research and for societies, and Nature’s endorsement for the November 2020 US election — and for Brazil’s similarly pivotal election last October — should be viewed in that context. Influential political voices are eschewing rigorous evidence and interfering with or undermining the functioning of independent judicial and regulatory bodies that rely on rigorous science and evidence. This has been noticeable in other countries, too, including Brazil, India, Hungary and the United Kingdom. It’s hard to know whether this is a long-term trend or global phenomenon, or something specific to certain places and circumstances. These are questions that researchers are investigating. Scientists are also testing strategies for ways to bridge the political divides, as Nature reported in a Feature earlier this month (Nature615, 26–28; 2023).

Nature doesn’t often make political endorsements, and we carefully weigh up the arguments when considering whether to do so. When individuals seeking office have a track record of causing harm, when they are transparently dismissive of facts and integrity, when they threaten scholarly autonomy, and when they are disdainful of cooperation and consensus, it becomes important to speak up. We use our voice sparingly and always offer evidence to back up what we say. And, when the occasion demands it, we will continue to do so.

You can bet your sweet bippy that Nature is now in the endorsements business, regardless of what they say. And you know that they’ll endorse “progressive” candidates, which will further turn centrists and right-wingers away from science.

Yes, they can justify what they did, but Nature’s endorsement almost surely didn’t have an effect on the election. They admit that above! After all, the majority of American scientists are Democrats and donate to Democrats. It’s likely, then, though not certain, that the journal’s endorsement had a net negative effect: hurting the credibility of the journal (and of science) while not helping the candidate. Despite that, they’re going to keep on endorsing political candidates. They can’t help themselves!

This brings to mind the old quote, “The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting a different result.” (This is often attributed to Albert Einstein but really comes from other sources.)

And here’s a snarky but relevant tweet:

h/t: Luana

American Scientist goes “progressive” with a truly bizarre article

January 28, 2023 • 1:15 pm

American Scientist is a bimonthly science publication put out by Sigma Xi, the honorary fraternity for scientists and engineers. ( I think I’m a member but can’t recall.) At any rate, it specializes in popular articles about science but is now including articles like the one below, which could well be described with the “w word.”  Does this hijacking of a science magazine by “progressive” ideology remind you of any similar incidents?

At any rate, the article below, which purports to be about science and music, and has a very clickbait-y title, turns out to be a bunch of unevidenced assertions that add up to this claim: when people rank music, very often men come in at the top, and women lower.  That’s because, they say, of bigotry against women musicians. Further, just like in music, women don’t rise to their proper level in science. That, too, is because of present-day structural misogyny in science.

I’m not sure why they make this comparison, since the claim about misogyny has been made widely, and they could just write about women and STEM. But that has been done to death, so I suppose that’s why they dragged music into it. But they don’t substantiate the claims they make, blithely assuming that the ranking of women in both science and music reflects misogyny that, while abating in modern times, is still practiced by guys. It’s also very poorly written, with the connection between the two areas not made well at all. It’s just a comparison without data, presumably made to show the science magazine’s virtue.

Click to read

Again I’ll argue that yes, of course there used to be misogyny in science, and it was widespread. Women of enormous talent were forced into other areas, or, if allowed into science, weren’t often given regular academic jobs, and were discriminated against in many other ways. The predominance of men in science was palpably obvious, and the discrimination against women in the past is made clear from the fact that since prejudice has fallen, women are now pouring into the field.  Things aren’t yet adhering to “equity” (50% of each sex), but I doubt that once can make a convincing for present structural sexism in science. (Of course, there are male scientists who are sexists and act on it; I’m talking about the mores and practices of science in general.)

We have to remember, too, that there are data showing that some of the sex inequity in STEM reflects different choices of the sexes as well. This is the famous “gender equality paradox”, showing that the underrepresentation of women in STEM fields actually increases in countries that have more gender-equality. The explanation is that women aren’t as interested in STEM fields as men, and in gender-equal countries they are freer to exercise their preference, while in poorer and more gender-biased countries (the two factors are correlated), women gravitate more towards STEM because it’s professional, lucrative, and offers a step up in remuneration and quality of life. I wrote about this result at length, and showed the data, in a post from 2018.

A short summary of the American Scientist’s argument:

a.) In December, the Philadelphia public radio station asked its listners to vote on the 2021 greatest albums of all time.

b.) They the played selections from those albums for a week.

c.) During one nine-hour period of this week, apparently by chance, all the music played was by male groups or vocalists, even though music by women was on the greatest-albums list.

d.) Ergo, there shows bias against women’s music. So does the fact, says the article, that over 80% of Rolling Stone‘s Top 50 albums of all time are by exclusively male groups or singers (many of those asked to vote were women).

e.) The bias towards male music is said to result from brain development, in which younger people develop their taste for music when their brains are forming—between ages 13 and 25.  For older people who voted, their musical tastes were thus formed when male music predominated, and those tastes are reflected in votes throughout their life, ergo the results above.

Have a gander at their theory:

The gender gap, both in STEM education and employment, has been shrinking over time. Is that shrinkage simply a matter of a gradual rise toward better equality from the ground up? I was somewhat surprised when Kurtis pointed me to arguments that the long persistence of inequality in musical tastes may be due to radio listeners’ brains. In a separate Twitter thread, she pointed to neuroscience research that Daniel Levitin wrote about in his 2006 book This Is Your Brain on Music, which suggests that individual music preferences are solidified between the ages of 13 and 25 because of the brain development that typically occurs around that age. Although WXPN did not ask for age or gender information from its listeners when collecting votes, Kurtis told me that this result from cognitive science may explain a generational preference toward certain bands and genres. “While I’m mainly talking about music that was NEW while you were 13–25, really, it’s any music you fell in love with during that time which leaves an indelible mark on your brain, so younger people are still apt to emotionally connect with music older than they are, but older music fans are not as likely to become attached to music released after they turn 25,” Kurtis told me in our email exchange.

I’d say that doesn’t constitute evidence at all. It may be true, and it seems likely that music preferences are indeed formed when you’re younger and are hard or impossible to change. And yes, twenty years ago there were more men than women producing music. (But ask: does this absolutely mean discrimination against women, or could it partly reflect preference for making music?)  But what that has to do with brain development eludes me.

And then the kicker: a sly but duplicitous transition into inequities in STEM:

Does something similar happen in the sciences? Is there a particular age when our brains are most impressionable and open to embracing a STEM-focused career path? If so, do we have to wait to outlive the generation of Baby Boomers reliving the greatest hits from their own teenage wasteland?

The article goes on, and I don’t want to waste my time correcting or highlighting all the conceptual errors that author Shapiro makes.  I will leave you to read it for yourself, but want to make three points:

1). Inequities between groups can have causes other than bias or bigotry. Thus you can’t assert that inequities are prima facie evidence for bigotry. (This is the most pervasive error in social-justice activism these days, and yet it’s almost taboo to discuss it.)

2). Still, women have had a hard time making it in science. This is now being rectified by a gazillion initiatives on many levels, and I see no present evidence of “structural misogyny” in science. Inequities don’t constitute evidence for misogyny going on now, but they likely reflect biases in the past: the invidious signs of history.

3). The piece above does not belong in a science magazine, particularly because of the dearth of evidence supporting their hypothesis (which is theirs).

h/t: Williams

New Scientist expunges references to humans having two sexes

January 11, 2023 • 11:30 am

UPDATE 2:  Ms. Sheepshanks has commented below and has verified that she is indeed a real person bearing the name she wields so proudly. Her remarks are in the thread after comment 11. And if she reads this, I urge her to keep writing in this vein and with that critical acumen. (She’s now made several comments.)

UPDATE 1: After doing a bit of sleuthing about Octavia Sheepshanks online, I wonder if that’s her real name (see here, for instance), though that may really be her name and she pretended while at Cambridge that it wasn’t.  Regardless, whatever real person wrote the article was serious, humorous, and should write more.

____________

Seriously, people, I get no pleasure from calling out wokeness (even using that word gets me excoriated), for along with that comes opprobrium from the ideologically pure. Even worse: I feel awful that academia, and especially biology, is being distorted and corrupted by ideologues.

One of the examples I used at the Stanford free-speech conference was the inability of people to recognize that, biologically, there are only two sexes in humans. Just two. In our species sex is effectively binary, with only a tiny handful of people who are “intersex” (these exceptions constitute about 0.018% of the species, or about one person in 5600).  Sex is not gender, for the latter is a true social construct because there are far more sex roles or sexual identities than two, although even gender is bimodal, with most people identifying as traditional male or female. A frequency plot of sex would look like two huge lines, each about 50% of the population, with one of the lines at “male” and the other at “female”, and a few almost invisible blips between those lines. A frequency distribution of gender would look more like a bactrian (the two-humped camel), with more intermediates. But the humps would be high.

Enough: I’ve written about this before. At least biologists recognize that humans have two sexes. Or so I thought, until I encountered this article in The Critic by Octavia Sheepshanks, a freelance writer).  It’s leavened with humor but makes a serious point: New Scientist, the British equivalent of Scientific American (that is not praise), is now removing the words “women” and “woman” from its articles about advances in science, even when the original papers did use the w-words. (For some reason the magazine is not cutting back so much on the words “boy,” “man” or “men”, and given the ideological underpinnings I find this disparity puzzling.)

In other words, New Scientist is bowdlerizing language, presumably in the interest of illiberal left-wing ideology. I trust by now that I don’t have to explain to readers why this ideology won’t use the word “woman” when referring to biological females. (Oh hell, I guess I’d better for new readers: it’s because of the trans-activist mantras that “trans women are women” and “trans men are men”.)

Click to read Sheepshanks’s piece:

Note that New Scientist has no problem with males and females in other species, like sheep. It’s humans where they bridle, and we all know why.

Anyway, Sheepshanks wrote a good piece, and it’s funny in places. I’ll give you a long excerpt, but her arguments for retaining the w-words are more extensive, and you should read those in the original piece. The bold headings are mine:

Sheepshanks’ awakening:

I assumed that New Scientist was doing what it had always done: synthesising and disseminating research findings in a way that was easy to understand, situating them in the context of the real world. It describes itself as “a trusted, impartial source of information about what is going on in the world, in a time where facts are in short supply”, and I had believed this without reservation. It was the voice of reason in my life. After reading one article in which miscarried male foetuses were given a sex (“boys”) but the women who had suffered miscarriages were not (“pregnant people”) I wrote a long and passionate letter to the editor about how it had made me feel (not good). I received no reply, and I began to wonder if my strong belief in the significance of sexual dimorphism in humans was inaccurate and hateful after all. This was the most popular weekly science publication in the world, and it was reporting science as it was. I must be the problem.

Then I encountered the most befuddling article yet. A new form of contraception “for people” had been discovered. After a minor brain adjustment, I established from the sentence “a gel that is applied inside the vagina has been shown to block sperm injected into female sheep”, that this was a new contraception for women. The article was so strange to read that I sought out the original journal article to witness this bizarre wording in situ. When I read the first sentence of the abstract, “Many women would prefer a nonhormonal, on-demand contraceptive that does not have the side effects of existing methods”, I was astonished. Science had not changed; New Scientist had. It had lied to me. (Gaslighting is an overused accusation but resonates here. I intend to avoid one-sided love affairs with magazines in future.)

Note that the “original article” she’s referring to is the Science article highlighted by New Scientist. Note that NS gladly admits that there can be female sheep, but the equivalent in H. sapiens is, well, “people.” People with vaginas. “Female” is mentioned only once in the article, referring to sheep with vaginas, and “women” not at all. Sheepshanks was onto something. As she dug deeper, she found more bodies.

Sheepshanks’ investigation:

I looked back at all the New Scientist articles that had confused me and found the original publications. They had been altered, too: every time only women or men (i.e., males or females) were being referenced, they said so, in stark contrast to New Scientist’s interpretation.

Essentially, New Scientist is blithely misreporting published research to remove any implication of two sexes in humans. Presumably the purpose of these scientifically inaccurate linguistic gymnastics is to include those with alternative gender identities without causing offence. New Scientist has yet to respond to a request for comment, so I can’t be sure.

Sheepshanks’ take on why it matters (I love the name “Octavia Sheepshanks”, and note that it was the reproduction of female sheep that got her going):

Why does it matter if New Scientist is doing this? Perhaps an alien happening across the publication would class humans not with other mammals but with snails and slugs, merrily churning out children all by themselves. Most readers are human and can work out for themselves which sex is being referred to, however. If certain language choices make some people feel happier and safer (again, I can only assume that this is the goal) why ignore this in the name of accuracy?

There is nothing trans-inclusive about pretending humans are a hermaphroditic species. If we were, trans people wouldn’t exist. Perhaps New Scientist, if it wants to include trans people in future(for example, trans men in a study on female contraception) could do so by writing about them? Just a suggestion! Accuracy does not have to mean using the words “women” and “men” — “males” and “females” would include those with all gender identities, including non-binary people.

The alteration of scientific studies to avoid naming the demographic previously known as “women” has serious consequences for anyone female. Returning to the example of the new form of contraception for women, New Scientist’s wilful misinterpretation ignores the positive consequences of the study for women globally, because it cannot name the group it is discussing. These consequences — social and economic liberation through reducing the number of unplanned pregnancies — are discussed in the original paper, which I found fascinating and enjoyed reading. Meanwhile, New Scientist contents itself with informing us that researchers “inserted the gel towards the backs of the vaginas of sheep, which are similar to those in humans”. New Scientist was founded in 1956 for “all those interested in scientific discovery and its social consequences”. Now, female readers interested in studies affecting themselves must read the original academic papers to gain a full picture.

When the same approach is used with studies concerning only men, women are still adversely affected. . .

Read the original to find out why. But I like the fact that Ms. Sheepshanks can write a piece that’s deadly serious while still keeping a sense of humor.  But of course she’ll still be labeled as a transphobe. I get the feeling that she doesn’t care.

Here’s her ending, which is great [note that “gonochorism” describes a biological system, as in humans, in which a species has only two sexes and every individual is a member of only one of those two sexes].

I look forward to a day when I have a place to read about the physical and social implications of research into women’s bodies and health, without limitation. In the meantime, I note that New Scientist remains happy to acknowledge gonochorism in other animals; it recently rejoiced over a study of female robins that discredited the sexist theory that only male robins sing. Maybe I’ll support the liberation of female songbirds until I can read about my own species. In fact, if there’s a rally for feminist robins, I’ll be there with a placard the size of my thumbnail, desperately seeking a new safe haven of sanity.

I don’t read New Scientist regularly, so I don’t know if it has a plethora of bad articles. But it has certainly been unscientific in the past. Here’s the most egregious example, which I wrote about in 2020:

But there have been quite a few other missteps in this journal, and I’ve called the venue out more than a few times (see here).  Imagine if Scientific American merged with New Scientist.  The result would be the scientific equivalent of The Onion!

h/t: Cora

Confirmation bias from the editor of Scientific American

January 9, 2023 • 9:15 am

I almost never engage in Twitter wars, or in slagging people off via tweets, but the laws of physics compel me to highlight these two from Scientific American’s editor, referring to the article I discussed yesterday. It’s a good example of the circular “fallacy of opposition.”

There was so much pushback against that article, and criticism of the journal’s direction, that Helmuth issued the second tweet, which is very odd for someone engaged in science journalism. No, Dr. Helmuth, pushback against wrongheaded editorials doesn’t prove anything except that readers didn’t agree with it. And if you follow the comments on the tweet, you’ll find, as I did, at least 98% of them take the article, the editor, or the journal to task.

This is, I think, a staple of the illiberal Left: the claim that criticism of an idea just “proves” that it was correct all along. Oy, my twisted kishkes!

Apparently Helmuth turned off replies to that comment except from those whom she follows on Twitter. I happen to be one of those blessed people, but chose to reply here rather that make a tweet.

This isn’t science, or even rationalism: it’s a form of religion.   Oh, one response came from a man with “lived experience”: Tony Dungy, a former football safety and then head coach of two NFL teams.

 

Oh, a reader wanted to know if this tweet was a parody or not.

It didn’t take long to find out that this was not a parody; see here.

Scientific American continues its departure from science and descent into illiberal politics

January 8, 2023 • 11:30 am

Somebody called my attention to three new articles and op-eds in Scientific American that have no science in them, but are pure ideology of the “progressive” sort.  I agree with some of the sentiments expressed in them, as in the first one. But my point is, as usual, to show how everything in science, including its most widely-read “popular” magazine, is being taken over by ideology. Not only that, but it’s ideology of only one stripe: Leftist “progressive” (or “woke,” if you will) ideology, so that the “opinion” section is not a panoply of divergent views, but gives only one view, like a Scientific Pravda.  Remember that the editor refused when I offered to write an op-ed expressing different (but of course not right-wing) views.

Click on the screenshot below to read the pieces.

The first article’s argument is in the subtext: anti-LGBTQ+ “hate speech” leads to violence against members of that community. It’s clear that anti-LGBTQ+ belief does in some (but not all) cases, but of course as a First Amendment hard-liner I wouldn’t ban such speech unless it was created to promote imminent and serious violence. Still, I oppose it, or any speech that calls out not beliefs, but demonizes believers. The question though, which the piece doesn’t answer, though it takes it as an article of faith, is whether rhetoric leads to violence down the line.

Read on:

The article indicts Republicans and white nationalists for their anti-LGBTQ+ rhetoric and actions (e.g., banning the teaching of CRT, for example—laws that I oppose).  Of course “hate speech” doesn’t always lead to action, even at a temporal or spatial remove from the speech, and the article doesn’t give solid evidence for the connection between speech and action. Of course some killers are motivated by “homophobia” or “transphobia”, but not as many as the media suggests. Omar Mateen’s 2016 mass shooting at the gay Pulse nightclub in Orlando, for example, a horrific act that killed 49 people and injured 53, was immediately touted by the press as a likely act of homophobia, but no evidence was ever found that Mateen was motivated by hatred of gays. Rather, his motive appears to have been revenge for American airstrikes in the Middle East, and Mateen appeared not to even know that the club was gay. (He died in the assault.) The media likes what fits a narrative, particularly the progressive media—but they’re not always right.

However, the DOJ says that 19.2% of single-incident hate crimes were classified as crimes related to gender identity and sexual orientation, while 64.8% were related to race/ethnicity/ancestry. So what is the evidence that anti-LGBTQ+ rhetoric is a major cause of this violence? There’s very little in the paper, which mostly cites (and properly damns) the rhetoric but can’t pin it down as a cause of violence the cause, although there’s evidence that anti-LGBTQ+ rhetoric does increase animus toward that group.

Here’s the evidence, but it’s all “may cause” or “can motivate”:

The false claims and rhetoric used by right-wing extremists dehumanize and vilify the LGBTQ+ community and provoke stochastic terrorism, a phenomenon in which hate speech increases the likelihood that people will attack the targets of vicious claims. Research has also shown that this type of rhetoric can motivate people to express and possibly act on their prejudiced views.

and

The potential for any individual extremist message to push people toward violence is low, Ophir says. But continuous exposure to this hate speech from many different media platforms and politicians can contribute to radicalization.

Check the final link in each paragraph.

I’m not denying the hypothesis, of course, nor am I excusing LGBTQ+ hatred or violence, only that the connection is not as clear as Sci. Am.’s headline suggests. More important, this connection has been made a gazillion times before, and not just for LGBTQ+ hate crimes, but also for the triply-frequent crimes caused by hatred of people’s race and ethnicity. So we have a familiar but largely unevidenced message, but one appearing in a science magazine.

What is it doing there? It’s because the editor, Laura Helmuth, has decided to turn Scientific American into a mouthpiece for the illiberal Left. Other magazines do that much better, and more regularly, and don’t harp on Mendel and Darwin being racists. It’s as if you picked up an issue of an LGBTQ+ magazine and found op-eds and articles on how genes can be edited or how we found gravity waves.

Finally, note that this is not an op-ed piece, but an article. In contrast, the two pieces below are labeled “opinion”,

I immediately saw though the one below without even reading it, for why would black men experience disproportionate violence in football? Are they being deliberately targeted on the field? If not, then the violence they experience is the same violence that every football player experiences.

In fact, it turns out that there is no evidence that football injuries disproportionately accrue to black men in football, at least compared to other players on the field.  The author is trying to somehow find a racist slant to the fact that there are proportionately more black players in football than black people in the American population, thus turning football injuries (which I abhor) into signs of racism. Not the slippery use of the word “disproportionately” in the following:

This ordinary violence has always riddled the sport and it affects all players. But Black players are disproportionately affected. While Black men are severely underrepresented in positions of power across football organizations, such as coaching and management, they are overrepresented on the gridiron. Non-white players account for 70 percent of the NFL; nearly half of all Division I college football players are Black. Further, through a process called racial stacking, coaches racially segregate athletes by playing position. These demographic discrepancies place Black athletes at a higher risk during play.

Higher risk than white players? What’s the comparison here?

Read on; the author is a sports anthropologist at Duke University.

Indeed, if bigotry is cause of an underrepresentation of black managers or owners, that needs to be investigated, for there are causes other than racism. And if it is bigotry, then by all means efface it.  But the “racial violence” clearly implied in the headline doesn’t seem to exist, and the author admits she doesn’t know:

While I am not aware of research that compares the rate of injury between Black and white football players, heatstrokes, ACL and labrum tears, ankle sprains, bone breaks, and concussions are just a few of the consequences of how these bodies are used.

Yes, but all that shows is that football is violent. So is hockey, and you could write the same headline, but using “the violence white men experience in hockey.”

Remember, though, that although Canada approvingly quotes someone saying that football fields “are never theoretically far from plantation fields,” the players play voluntarily, get huge salaries and public acclaim, and although I despise football for its violence, these men are making decisions to play an are aware of the possible consequences. For many, it’s a way out of poverty, and who’s to tell a talented black running back in high school that he shouldn’t try to make $2.7 million a year because there are disproportionately few white men in upper management?

What we have is just another propagandistic article that’s basically misleading the reader in its headline, admits that it misleads the reader, and, in the end, doesn’t belong in a science magazine. Even if you vetted propaganda like this on the basis not of ideology but on evidence for its claims, this article is a loser. But Laura Helmuth collects these risible pieces like Nabokov collected butterflies.

Finally, there’s this article (click to read):

I haven’t grappled with the issue of Universal Basic Income in the U.S., so I have no real opinion here, but do agree with the author that there should be a universal childcare allowance that’s higher than the tax deduction we get now.  The article adds this:

No country has yet introduced a universal basic income sufficient for essential needs. But in the U.S., Alaska has enacted its Permanent Fund Dividend, which is an annual cash payment, averaging around $1,600, that goes to every resident without means test or work requirement. It contributes to poverty reduction and has no negative effect on people’s willingness to work.

In the U.S., a universal child allowance and Social Security for seniors would mean that the two most vulnerable age groups in our population would have near-universal and unconditional income guaranteed.

This doesn’t seem like much of a solution to me, and we do have social security for older folk, though it’s based on your lifetime earnings. If there’s to be a universal basic income, it’s got to be much higher than that, and of course would involve huge tax increases. (I’m not necessarily opposed to those.)

The best “science” stories of the year from Scientific American

December 27, 2022 • 12:00 pm

Scientific American, once a respectable publication but now a woke joke of a rag, recently put out special edition highlighting the top science stories of 2022. (Click on cover to read.) I will make no comment except to say that the “epigenetics” article has none of the caveats about epigenetics in the nice piece by Razib Khan I highlighted recently.

Oy, my kishkes!

There are other and more science-y stories, too, but these constitute nearly half of the top science stories of the year:

And let’s not forget the “departments”:

I will leave it up to the readers to comment.

Spot the fake fact

November 10, 2022 • 9:00 am

This article from Linkiest (a real time-waster of a site) adduces, well, you can read the title. Click on the link to “blow your mind”:

As far as I know, all but one of these “facts” are correct, but there is one howler: a “fake fact”.  Can you spot it?  It’s arrantly, blatantly, mind-blowingly WRONG. Put the fact in the comments, but don’t explain why it’s wrong yet; I’ll add the correct answer this afternoon.  I would expect most science-friendly readers here to spot it.

(There’s also a typo in one fact, but that’s not what I’m talking about.)