This is very thoughtful and hits close to home. Several people I care about aren’t vaccinated because of covid demagoguery. But I’d still argue Science needs to protect its political neutrality and not publish specific rebuttals. I’d be more open to Science hosting a page debunking widely circulating myths in a neutral style.
Part of the reason people at Science feel the need to speak out is that other institutions here are no longer able to deter false claims in broadcast media. Fauci is just a civil servant, yet he’d still have to show Fox intentionally defamed him (“actual malice”) in order to get any compensation for whatever he’ll pay for private security these next 10 years. “Shock jock” makes Carlson sound more like entertainment, but obviously people take him seriously. It shouldn’t be this profitable to delegitimize elections and incite rage at civil servants — at least not if we want liberal democracy to last.
You’re way too generous to the “debunking” article. It’s absolute drivel. Science is playing the same game as Tucker here, lawyering it’s way towards a preconceived conclusion. There’s nothing at all objective about the “facts” asserted in the article. Saying for instance that the Great Barrington Declaration and Johns Hopkins lockdown analysis were heavily criticized in no way suggests Carlson said anything false or misleading by referencing them. He’s allowed to advocate for one side of a debate, and doing so isn’t false or misleading. The GBD in my mind has been vindicated, and it is forever to the public health agencies’ shame that they sought to attack the authors as “fringe epidemiologists” instead of engaging in a sincere debate about the costs and benefits of lockdown policies. Many of the other “fact checks” suffer from similar or worse deficiencies.
The public health agencies acted like political hacks, not scientists, and Science is doing the same here. In addition to the point that Science should not be in the business of “fact checking” cable news hosts, this particular attempt at debunking was utter garbage that brings discredit upon the entire institution.
The crime aspect is especially weak. Carlson says Fauci is:
"a man who has done things that in most countries, at most times in history, would be understood perfectly clearly to be very serious crimes"
and their rebuttal is:
"Neither Carlson nor anyone else has presented evidence that Fauci has committed any crime."
Which is a non-sequitur. Carlson didn't claim he actually had committed crimes by the letter of the law, only that he'd done things that in most other contexts would be "understood to be very serious crimes". And that is unambiguously true! Look at the difference between how Elizabeth Holmes / Sunny Balwani ended up for lying about the effectiveness of medical technologies (prison) vs Fauci (best paid civil servant in America, not in prison). We don't even need a trial to establish his guilt because Fauci has gone on record - in the New York Times no less - as saying he did in fact lie about two different medical technologies, masks and vaccines, specifically to manipulate people's behavior! So there can be no question about this, or the difference in treatment between public and private sector. That's before we get to all the false claims where he hasn't admitted he was lying and might, conceivably, have just been what would in the private sector be classed as criminally negligent.
So Science "debunks" Tucker's claim by deliberately mis-understanding it and then by merely observing that this manifestly unequal treatment under the law exists. It's not even a debunking at all, really, as the obvious followup question is "ok, so why isn't it a crime for Fauci to lie to people when for other people it is?"
Really, every time I see Science or Nature be referred to as prestigious I wince a bit. These magazines seem to be full of the most astonishingly poorly written stuff, including lots of obviously terrible research. If these are really the cream of the crop then how bad must most scientific output really be?
Edit: kept reading, the debunking gets worse and worse. I can't imagine the incompetence and institutional malaise required to sign off on this article. Carlson refers to the moment Fauci admits to the NYT he lied about vaccine herd immunity thresholds, and Science then quotes different parts of the interview as a "debunking" whilst neglecting to quote the part Tucker is actually talking about (where Fauci says he upped his estimate because he saw that vaccine uptake was higher than he expected). They can't quote the actual key part of course because it's utterly damning to Fauci and impossible to misinterpret.
This debunking is itself badly in need of a debunking, or would be if it weren't practically self-debunking. What a train wreck. Science needs to fire its journalists before they make this problem even worse, but I see from elsewhere in this thread that someone from Nature stopped by to say their staff win awards so there's no problem (head->desk).
Yeah, I didn’t see anything in the “debunking” that couldn’t be easily picked apart. Pure biased spin masquerading as “Science.” Shameful. I have quite a bit more respect for Carlson in this instance because he doesn’t pretend to be anything other than a partisan. But for Science to behave the same way while claiming the mantle of dispassionate objectivity is sickening.
My very basic thoughts are that journals should just not have news and opinion stuff at all - it's not their job and they are quite bad at it - but if they do it's mostly fine to do debunking? Like if the problem is public trust that ship has sailed with the proliferation of news and opinion sections in general. The problem is further upstream with journals trying to be brands (presumably as a way of justifying being monetized when the main product probably should be publicly-available) and that calling out discreete instances of the section being problematic lets the rest of the stuff under that banner fly under-the-radar as something we should be comfortable with. Frankly they are MORE qualified to do debunking than a lot of what they do under those banners.
I dunno, there is a lot of good stuff published in the news sections of journals - like e.g. the recent investigation of that Alzheimer's paper with the "problematic" images. But I wonder if the best thing is to not have any opinion/comment, and just have news.
I think the news should be relegated to news that is clearly relevant to the journal or field, which really is more of an analysis of the scholarship than news in the traditional sense. The focus of the journal should be on the scholarship, and when things other than the scholarship get injected it tends to be rough (which shouldn't be surprising! Nobody involved is a news reporter).
My understanding is that the news sections at journals -- Science and Nature, etc. -- are editorially independent, and that the science publishing arms have basically nothing to do with them. Also, having worked for a science magazine that focused strictly on analysis of scholarship -- nobody reads that. These journals have news and opinion writers because that is what people want to read, and those articles tend to garner 3-10x more views in my experience than strictly "roundups of the paper"-type pieces.
As a features editor at the journalism section of Nature, just jumping in here to note that, yes, the news sections are editorially independent.
Also, regarding Joseph Conner Miscallef's general view that "they are quite bad at it" ('it' being "news and opinion stuff") -- I'd also note that the reporters & editors at Science and Nature have consistently won multiple journalism awards each year for their work. (That's not to comment on the merits of any particular article).
Universities have become increasingly biased, and increasingly distrusted, institutions. That spills over into science and it is something that science journals etc. should resist, not lean into.
Hmm, I’m coming round to thinking that public life would be better if people embraced their chosen roles in The Discourse.
So journalism is best done by looking for the truth, not support for a political position. Equally, activists get more latitude in presenting a simplified case, because that’s necessary to persuade people.
And science journals should participate in the vaccine fight by publishing really great research on efficacy and safety. That research can then be used by journalists, or activists. But it’s not good to muddle the roles.
The cost-benefit here clearly weighs in favor of not ever engaging in such ridiculous “debunking” exercises. No Tucker viewer will read the article and decide “oh, I guess Tucker was wrong,” whereas a non-trivial number of scientifically-minded people will read it and conclude “oh, there’s yet another datapoint supporting the hypothesis that institutional science is hopelessly politicized.” I’m one of those people in the latter category.
I have never heard anything from Tucker Carlson that was provably false and I have seen him airing corrections more than once which is the hallmark of vetted accurate journalism. Just because you don't approve of someone's politics or his choice of topics, I've often wished Tucker would choose different topics, does not mandate that you smear and attempt to discredit them with the vapid flailing CNN grade weaksauce argument "most everything Tucker Carlson said… was misleading or false" without citing a single lie and your proof it was a lie.
I think this is really letting him and other partisan demagogues off the hook for unethical behavior. They're quite skilled at misleading reasonable viewers without technically making provably false statements. It's a very profitable form of deception for partisan news networks, but it's terrible if you don't want people dying of preventable diseases, feeling needlessly suspicious of the elections system, etc.
It's less a form of "deception" than a form of "rhetoric". Lawyers do the same thing in litigation, and while there may be unethical lawyers abounding, that's not why. That's how litigation works.
To counter it requires more rhetoric. It's not a matter of needing scientists to "correct" anyone.
Whatever we call it, I don't think more of it from the other side is the answer. It
just leads everyone to think ordinary political disagreements are existential battles with enemies. The results are people don't see value in compromise, talented people avoid highly controversial issues, people don't recognize the right of their political outgroup to govern, etc. It seems to me like the most profitable rhetoric is the worst for substantive debate and viewpoint diversity.
I generally agree with you. I'm saying that to the extent that people are going to debate, they should treat it like litigation rather than science "correcting" TV hosts. That creates conflict because it begins with the accusation that the other side is lying and escalates from there.
Contrary to popular perception, the majority of litigation is courteous and works toward compromise. There is mutual respect between opposing sides. Debate proceeds according to time-tested rules of engagement and evidence. Etc.
This is separate from conciliatory educational dialog in the culture, light political discourse, or whatever, which is also separate from the production of scientific findings.
Stuart, all due respect but that piece in Science is an awful factcheck. That fact that you'd even partly defend it is kind of worrying.
-They interpret obvious satirical exaggerations Carlson made (the quotes in the 3rd factcheck) as if they were literal quotes.
-They invented claims he didn't even make (that Ukraine was working on bioweapons).
-Their description of the facts is pretty damn lazy in some places (e.g the paper regarding lockdowns was a meta-analysis that was conducted by economists, but the studies they relied upon were medical studies, not economics studies, so pointing out that they're economists in the first place is utterly irrelevant, just an obvious use of the genetic fallacy.
I could go on. Nearly every point they made had some fairly obvious "well actually" counter-point, as far as I could tell. I'm not even a republican and I'm looking at modern science and thinking I can't trust a word that comes out of it (at least the subsection of science that isn't testable by the public and requires just taking the words of 'experts'). You definitely have a big problem here. Especially when issues like climate change fall into that category.
I’m with SA on this one - these articles are almost always bland and derivative, written because someone wants to be published in Science but can’t actually do, you know, any science…
I find myself annoyed by them even when I agree with the author!
It just seems futile to me, debunking this or that. Everyone is pretty much preaching to their choir. There’s also something smug about most fact checking and debunking that I doubt will change anyone’s mind.
Not very eloquent, this, but - sigh - it just brings me down, the state of things...
Very nice! :) I particularly like your implicit Socratic dialog as a rhetorical device. Excellent points on both sides. Unfortunately, arguing with oneself can be a lot like playing chess with oneself: you can't come up with a strategy that your opponent hasn't already thought of.
I wonder if a case could be made for *more* opinion in science journals. I'm always suspicious of claims of impartiality or objectivity. The more objective one becomes, the closer one gets to what Thomas Nagel famously called the "view from nowhere."
A fundamental problem in science is that there are almost always some kinds of implicit bias involved in the scientific methodology. Science as a whole can be thought of as an attempt to remove errors of subjectivity from knowledge claims, by prioritizing objective ways to assess accuracy. But science always relies on science for its methods and assumptions, so bias can almost always find a secret hiding-place. This is especially true in science that rests on solid paradigms of Kuhnian dimensions.
This problem of implicit bias invisibly coloring the conclusions is rendered more insidious by the pretext of pure objectivity. I always feel a bit more confident in research presented in a fashion that does not pretend to be without opinion.
Of course, opinionated science could certainly be taken too far. But we should at least be alert to the danger posed by relying too comfortably on the illusion of true objectivity.
Everything Tucker Carlson said about Fauci is either true or has a kernel of truth exaggerated for rhetorical effect. You seem to think Carlson’s viewers blindly believe whatever he says. We (conservatives), believe it or not, are able to discern truth from exaggeration. We can also discern Fauci’s narcissistic, lying, and deceptive statements when we hear them. Conservatives are not “turned off from scientific institutions,” as you put it. Conservatives respect Science only as much as Science deserves it.
Maybe you know this, but I don’t think you realize that Carlson is not giving new ideas to his millions of viewers. He’s simply reflecting what his millions of viewers already believe, and they have legitimate reasons for their beliefs.
The more interesting question is WHY Nature published Cohen’s commentary. The purpose was not to set the record straight. Cohen had no hope of talking to people who might be persuaded. Cohen’s article is a harbinger. As you noted, science journals have become more political. Journals like Nature are strategically positioning the journal itself to become aligned with leftist beliefs and they are testing the waters for bigger political fights in the future. I think journals like Nature are accelerating the divisiveness in society and they welcome the coming conflicts. Please keep bringing them to our attention.
The 'fact check' was so one-sided it could have been written by Fauci himself. They claimed the Wuhan Institute of Virology was "scrutinized" yet omitted the NIH just terminated their sub award for continued failure to provide records of their bat coronavirus studies before the pandemic. Also, Andersen, Holmes & Garry's reasons for going from saying the virus looked "inconsistent with expectations of evolutionary theory", to the extreme position lab origin wasn't plausible prior to any investigation were never convincing.
StuartAlpha seems to have the best of the argument, judging by the comments. I think the editors at Science who thought publishing this article was a good idea are living in an epistemic bubble, where everybody agrees with them, and they disastrously underestimate the scale of the backlash about anything that sounds "woke." Tucker Carlson is not the problem – the ratio of the size of Carlson's audience to the audience of CNN is the problem. See, e.g., school board elections – not only Florida, but San Fransisco's recall election.
When the magazine has so obviously chosen sides in this much broader contest, it reflects badly on the academic research article as well. Who among the non-woke will believe that the choice of research articles is free of political bias?
The trend of politicization of institutions continues, descriptions of how this is occurring in law, medicine and the study of history have all been published in the last couple of weeks. Science and scientific publishing join the list. The loss of trust in these institutions that will develop will be very harmful.
1. Is it an assumption that of the 3-4 million who tune in to Carlson every single one of them believes every single thing he says?
2. Perceived scientific bias (and a growing lack of political diversity in science) is an issue and there is a body of work (in the psychology field at least) about how this can undermine faith in Science. Perhaps there is an important distinction to be made between “scientists” and “science” - while all humans carry biases of some form, can “science” and its instruments of communication afford to if they wish to maintain the trust of all people, irrespective of their politics, prejudices etc?
In any case, isn’t this Science piece preaching to the converted? Communicating evidence-based, bias-free scientific research in the mainstream is vital, but in my opinion doing so via established academic journals that *should be* apolitical is not the way to do it.
For (1), yes. This sort of assumption is pervasive in academia, astoundingly so. Read any papers on misinformation research (yes it's a real field) and you'll discover they take for granted the assumption of a blank slate population whose opinions are effectively programmed in via social or TV media. As far as large swathes of academia are concerned, the vast majority of people and _especially_ anyone conservative doesn't arrive at their views by thinking but only by absorbing whatever things they happen to read or hear, more or less at random.
Because these parts of social science take this assumption as axiomatic there has been little attempt to investigate the validity of this belief, only the assumed downstream effects of it.
This is very thoughtful and hits close to home. Several people I care about aren’t vaccinated because of covid demagoguery. But I’d still argue Science needs to protect its political neutrality and not publish specific rebuttals. I’d be more open to Science hosting a page debunking widely circulating myths in a neutral style.
Part of the reason people at Science feel the need to speak out is that other institutions here are no longer able to deter false claims in broadcast media. Fauci is just a civil servant, yet he’d still have to show Fox intentionally defamed him (“actual malice”) in order to get any compensation for whatever he’ll pay for private security these next 10 years. “Shock jock” makes Carlson sound more like entertainment, but obviously people take him seriously. It shouldn’t be this profitable to delegitimize elections and incite rage at civil servants — at least not if we want liberal democracy to last.
You’re way too generous to the “debunking” article. It’s absolute drivel. Science is playing the same game as Tucker here, lawyering it’s way towards a preconceived conclusion. There’s nothing at all objective about the “facts” asserted in the article. Saying for instance that the Great Barrington Declaration and Johns Hopkins lockdown analysis were heavily criticized in no way suggests Carlson said anything false or misleading by referencing them. He’s allowed to advocate for one side of a debate, and doing so isn’t false or misleading. The GBD in my mind has been vindicated, and it is forever to the public health agencies’ shame that they sought to attack the authors as “fringe epidemiologists” instead of engaging in a sincere debate about the costs and benefits of lockdown policies. Many of the other “fact checks” suffer from similar or worse deficiencies.
The public health agencies acted like political hacks, not scientists, and Science is doing the same here. In addition to the point that Science should not be in the business of “fact checking” cable news hosts, this particular attempt at debunking was utter garbage that brings discredit upon the entire institution.
The crime aspect is especially weak. Carlson says Fauci is:
"a man who has done things that in most countries, at most times in history, would be understood perfectly clearly to be very serious crimes"
and their rebuttal is:
"Neither Carlson nor anyone else has presented evidence that Fauci has committed any crime."
Which is a non-sequitur. Carlson didn't claim he actually had committed crimes by the letter of the law, only that he'd done things that in most other contexts would be "understood to be very serious crimes". And that is unambiguously true! Look at the difference between how Elizabeth Holmes / Sunny Balwani ended up for lying about the effectiveness of medical technologies (prison) vs Fauci (best paid civil servant in America, not in prison). We don't even need a trial to establish his guilt because Fauci has gone on record - in the New York Times no less - as saying he did in fact lie about two different medical technologies, masks and vaccines, specifically to manipulate people's behavior! So there can be no question about this, or the difference in treatment between public and private sector. That's before we get to all the false claims where he hasn't admitted he was lying and might, conceivably, have just been what would in the private sector be classed as criminally negligent.
So Science "debunks" Tucker's claim by deliberately mis-understanding it and then by merely observing that this manifestly unequal treatment under the law exists. It's not even a debunking at all, really, as the obvious followup question is "ok, so why isn't it a crime for Fauci to lie to people when for other people it is?"
Really, every time I see Science or Nature be referred to as prestigious I wince a bit. These magazines seem to be full of the most astonishingly poorly written stuff, including lots of obviously terrible research. If these are really the cream of the crop then how bad must most scientific output really be?
Edit: kept reading, the debunking gets worse and worse. I can't imagine the incompetence and institutional malaise required to sign off on this article. Carlson refers to the moment Fauci admits to the NYT he lied about vaccine herd immunity thresholds, and Science then quotes different parts of the interview as a "debunking" whilst neglecting to quote the part Tucker is actually talking about (where Fauci says he upped his estimate because he saw that vaccine uptake was higher than he expected). They can't quote the actual key part of course because it's utterly damning to Fauci and impossible to misinterpret.
This debunking is itself badly in need of a debunking, or would be if it weren't practically self-debunking. What a train wreck. Science needs to fire its journalists before they make this problem even worse, but I see from elsewhere in this thread that someone from Nature stopped by to say their staff win awards so there's no problem (head->desk).
Yeah, I didn’t see anything in the “debunking” that couldn’t be easily picked apart. Pure biased spin masquerading as “Science.” Shameful. I have quite a bit more respect for Carlson in this instance because he doesn’t pretend to be anything other than a partisan. But for Science to behave the same way while claiming the mantle of dispassionate objectivity is sickening.
My very basic thoughts are that journals should just not have news and opinion stuff at all - it's not their job and they are quite bad at it - but if they do it's mostly fine to do debunking? Like if the problem is public trust that ship has sailed with the proliferation of news and opinion sections in general. The problem is further upstream with journals trying to be brands (presumably as a way of justifying being monetized when the main product probably should be publicly-available) and that calling out discreete instances of the section being problematic lets the rest of the stuff under that banner fly under-the-radar as something we should be comfortable with. Frankly they are MORE qualified to do debunking than a lot of what they do under those banners.
I dunno, there is a lot of good stuff published in the news sections of journals - like e.g. the recent investigation of that Alzheimer's paper with the "problematic" images. But I wonder if the best thing is to not have any opinion/comment, and just have news.
I think the news should be relegated to news that is clearly relevant to the journal or field, which really is more of an analysis of the scholarship than news in the traditional sense. The focus of the journal should be on the scholarship, and when things other than the scholarship get injected it tends to be rough (which shouldn't be surprising! Nobody involved is a news reporter).
My understanding is that the news sections at journals -- Science and Nature, etc. -- are editorially independent, and that the science publishing arms have basically nothing to do with them. Also, having worked for a science magazine that focused strictly on analysis of scholarship -- nobody reads that. These journals have news and opinion writers because that is what people want to read, and those articles tend to garner 3-10x more views in my experience than strictly "roundups of the paper"-type pieces.
As a features editor at the journalism section of Nature, just jumping in here to note that, yes, the news sections are editorially independent.
Also, regarding Joseph Conner Miscallef's general view that "they are quite bad at it" ('it' being "news and opinion stuff") -- I'd also note that the reporters & editors at Science and Nature have consistently won multiple journalism awards each year for their work. (That's not to comment on the merits of any particular article).
Richard Van Noorden.
Universities have become increasingly biased, and increasingly distrusted, institutions. That spills over into science and it is something that science journals etc. should resist, not lean into.
https://www.chronicle.com/article/americans-confidence-in-higher-ed-drops-sharply
Hmm, I’m coming round to thinking that public life would be better if people embraced their chosen roles in The Discourse.
So journalism is best done by looking for the truth, not support for a political position. Equally, activists get more latitude in presenting a simplified case, because that’s necessary to persuade people.
And science journals should participate in the vaccine fight by publishing really great research on efficacy and safety. That research can then be used by journalists, or activists. But it’s not good to muddle the roles.
The cost-benefit here clearly weighs in favor of not ever engaging in such ridiculous “debunking” exercises. No Tucker viewer will read the article and decide “oh, I guess Tucker was wrong,” whereas a non-trivial number of scientifically-minded people will read it and conclude “oh, there’s yet another datapoint supporting the hypothesis that institutional science is hopelessly politicized.” I’m one of those people in the latter category.
I have never heard anything from Tucker Carlson that was provably false and I have seen him airing corrections more than once which is the hallmark of vetted accurate journalism. Just because you don't approve of someone's politics or his choice of topics, I've often wished Tucker would choose different topics, does not mandate that you smear and attempt to discredit them with the vapid flailing CNN grade weaksauce argument "most everything Tucker Carlson said… was misleading or false" without citing a single lie and your proof it was a lie.
I think this is really letting him and other partisan demagogues off the hook for unethical behavior. They're quite skilled at misleading reasonable viewers without technically making provably false statements. It's a very profitable form of deception for partisan news networks, but it's terrible if you don't want people dying of preventable diseases, feeling needlessly suspicious of the elections system, etc.
It's less a form of "deception" than a form of "rhetoric". Lawyers do the same thing in litigation, and while there may be unethical lawyers abounding, that's not why. That's how litigation works.
To counter it requires more rhetoric. It's not a matter of needing scientists to "correct" anyone.
Whatever we call it, I don't think more of it from the other side is the answer. It
just leads everyone to think ordinary political disagreements are existential battles with enemies. The results are people don't see value in compromise, talented people avoid highly controversial issues, people don't recognize the right of their political outgroup to govern, etc. It seems to me like the most profitable rhetoric is the worst for substantive debate and viewpoint diversity.
I generally agree with you. I'm saying that to the extent that people are going to debate, they should treat it like litigation rather than science "correcting" TV hosts. That creates conflict because it begins with the accusation that the other side is lying and escalates from there.
Contrary to popular perception, the majority of litigation is courteous and works toward compromise. There is mutual respect between opposing sides. Debate proceeds according to time-tested rules of engagement and evidence. Etc.
This is separate from conciliatory educational dialog in the culture, light political discourse, or whatever, which is also separate from the production of scientific findings.
Stuart, all due respect but that piece in Science is an awful factcheck. That fact that you'd even partly defend it is kind of worrying.
-They interpret obvious satirical exaggerations Carlson made (the quotes in the 3rd factcheck) as if they were literal quotes.
-They invented claims he didn't even make (that Ukraine was working on bioweapons).
-Their description of the facts is pretty damn lazy in some places (e.g the paper regarding lockdowns was a meta-analysis that was conducted by economists, but the studies they relied upon were medical studies, not economics studies, so pointing out that they're economists in the first place is utterly irrelevant, just an obvious use of the genetic fallacy.
-They claim to debunk the idea that Fauci deliberately changed the definition of 'herd immunity' for political reasons, even though the New York Times also reported that Fauci had admitted to doing that: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/12/24/health/herd-immunity-covid-coronavirus.html
I could go on. Nearly every point they made had some fairly obvious "well actually" counter-point, as far as I could tell. I'm not even a republican and I'm looking at modern science and thinking I can't trust a word that comes out of it (at least the subsection of science that isn't testable by the public and requires just taking the words of 'experts'). You definitely have a big problem here. Especially when issues like climate change fall into that category.
I’m with SA on this one - these articles are almost always bland and derivative, written because someone wants to be published in Science but can’t actually do, you know, any science…
I find myself annoyed by them even when I agree with the author!
It just seems futile to me, debunking this or that. Everyone is pretty much preaching to their choir. There’s also something smug about most fact checking and debunking that I doubt will change anyone’s mind.
Not very eloquent, this, but - sigh - it just brings me down, the state of things...
Very nice! :) I particularly like your implicit Socratic dialog as a rhetorical device. Excellent points on both sides. Unfortunately, arguing with oneself can be a lot like playing chess with oneself: you can't come up with a strategy that your opponent hasn't already thought of.
I wonder if a case could be made for *more* opinion in science journals. I'm always suspicious of claims of impartiality or objectivity. The more objective one becomes, the closer one gets to what Thomas Nagel famously called the "view from nowhere."
A fundamental problem in science is that there are almost always some kinds of implicit bias involved in the scientific methodology. Science as a whole can be thought of as an attempt to remove errors of subjectivity from knowledge claims, by prioritizing objective ways to assess accuracy. But science always relies on science for its methods and assumptions, so bias can almost always find a secret hiding-place. This is especially true in science that rests on solid paradigms of Kuhnian dimensions.
This problem of implicit bias invisibly coloring the conclusions is rendered more insidious by the pretext of pure objectivity. I always feel a bit more confident in research presented in a fashion that does not pretend to be without opinion.
Of course, opinionated science could certainly be taken too far. But we should at least be alert to the danger posed by relying too comfortably on the illusion of true objectivity.
Everything Tucker Carlson said about Fauci is either true or has a kernel of truth exaggerated for rhetorical effect. You seem to think Carlson’s viewers blindly believe whatever he says. We (conservatives), believe it or not, are able to discern truth from exaggeration. We can also discern Fauci’s narcissistic, lying, and deceptive statements when we hear them. Conservatives are not “turned off from scientific institutions,” as you put it. Conservatives respect Science only as much as Science deserves it.
Maybe you know this, but I don’t think you realize that Carlson is not giving new ideas to his millions of viewers. He’s simply reflecting what his millions of viewers already believe, and they have legitimate reasons for their beliefs.
The more interesting question is WHY Nature published Cohen’s commentary. The purpose was not to set the record straight. Cohen had no hope of talking to people who might be persuaded. Cohen’s article is a harbinger. As you noted, science journals have become more political. Journals like Nature are strategically positioning the journal itself to become aligned with leftist beliefs and they are testing the waters for bigger political fights in the future. I think journals like Nature are accelerating the divisiveness in society and they welcome the coming conflicts. Please keep bringing them to our attention.
The 'fact check' was so one-sided it could have been written by Fauci himself. They claimed the Wuhan Institute of Virology was "scrutinized" yet omitted the NIH just terminated their sub award for continued failure to provide records of their bat coronavirus studies before the pandemic. Also, Andersen, Holmes & Garry's reasons for going from saying the virus looked "inconsistent with expectations of evolutionary theory", to the extreme position lab origin wasn't plausible prior to any investigation were never convincing.
https://thebulletin.org/2022/08/nih-to-terminate-ecohealth-alliance-grant-after-its-wuhan-partners-refuse-to-deliver-information-on-coronavirus-studies/
StuartAlpha seems to have the best of the argument, judging by the comments. I think the editors at Science who thought publishing this article was a good idea are living in an epistemic bubble, where everybody agrees with them, and they disastrously underestimate the scale of the backlash about anything that sounds "woke." Tucker Carlson is not the problem – the ratio of the size of Carlson's audience to the audience of CNN is the problem. See, e.g., school board elections – not only Florida, but San Fransisco's recall election.
Blog posts like:
https://legalinsurrection.com/2022/08/the-alarming-ideological-capture-of-our-scientific-institutions/
Heather Mac Donald:
https://www.city-journal.org/the-corruption-of-medicine
When the magazine has so obviously chosen sides in this much broader contest, it reflects badly on the academic research article as well. Who among the non-woke will believe that the choice of research articles is free of political bias?
The trend of politicization of institutions continues, descriptions of how this is occurring in law, medicine and the study of history have all been published in the last couple of weeks. Science and scientific publishing join the list. The loss of trust in these institutions that will develop will be very harmful.
Thought-provoking.
1. Is it an assumption that of the 3-4 million who tune in to Carlson every single one of them believes every single thing he says?
2. Perceived scientific bias (and a growing lack of political diversity in science) is an issue and there is a body of work (in the psychology field at least) about how this can undermine faith in Science. Perhaps there is an important distinction to be made between “scientists” and “science” - while all humans carry biases of some form, can “science” and its instruments of communication afford to if they wish to maintain the trust of all people, irrespective of their politics, prejudices etc?
In any case, isn’t this Science piece preaching to the converted? Communicating evidence-based, bias-free scientific research in the mainstream is vital, but in my opinion doing so via established academic journals that *should be* apolitical is not the way to do it.
For (1), yes. This sort of assumption is pervasive in academia, astoundingly so. Read any papers on misinformation research (yes it's a real field) and you'll discover they take for granted the assumption of a blank slate population whose opinions are effectively programmed in via social or TV media. As far as large swathes of academia are concerned, the vast majority of people and _especially_ anyone conservative doesn't arrive at their views by thinking but only by absorbing whatever things they happen to read or hear, more or less at random.
Because these parts of social science take this assumption as axiomatic there has been little attempt to investigate the validity of this belief, only the assumed downstream effects of it.