The Fall of Scientific American

This quote was when I know something was seriously wrong with the magazine I read assiduously as a child:

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

(https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/the-theory-that-m... - and I am not quoting out of context)

I suscribe to Le Scienze, which was founded in 1968 as the Italian translation of Scientific American. You might find that weird but knowledge of English was not common back then. Furthermore it contains local articles and other local content. However it's still mostly a translation of most of the articles of SciAm, from one or two months before. Sometimes I read them in advance in English from the links here on HN. It's run by an Italian editor, they've got a contract with SciAm but they are not part of the same business group.

It's easy to spot an increasing political stance in SciAm through those translated articles. That could please some readers and piss off others, it's understandable and of course it could be a risk for the sales maybe even for the Italian magazine.

However I also noticed another trend. The ratio of thearticles written by journalists vs the articles written by researchers increases from almost zero in the 80s to probably 1 nowadays. Unfortunately the articles from journalists are far more less detailed and interesting and place SciAm closer to the lower tiers of their competition.

Of course they have to compete with the whole of the scientific production on the internet now, but the answer of lowering quality seems wrong to me.

Get an issue of Scientific American from the past few years and compare with one from the early 90s. It will become obvious why Scientific American no longer has readers.

I've been thinking a lot about this example of decline, and the conclusion I've come to is that as print media has lost relevance and power, the only people willing to fill the remaining roles are those people who have ideological axes to grind.

Basically, formerly great media empires have declined to the point where only people willing to work for low wages in uncertain careers will accept positions writing for those institutions. So we mourn the loss of the brand, but if anyone actually cared about the brand in practice, it would not employ these people.

I've been a continuous subscriber since the early 1980s.

The magazine's low point was the infamous op-ed in 2021 about E.O. Wilson a few days after the biologist's death. It was basically a woke hit piece accusing him of scientific racism and white supremacy, with no evidence from his body of writing. It also criticized the genetics community at large for the term "normal distribution", which it took as offensive for implying that anyone outside the peak is "abnormal". (Never mind that "normal" has a technical definition in statistics.)

It's improved a lot over the last few years.

Still, I fear it may soon go the way of BYTE. Not because the need isn't there or because the market is gone, but because people get information in such different ways now.

scientific progress is facts plus people, people researching and people evaluating, judging the science.

people dynamics matter.

and we can and do _scientifically_ look at that part of "doing science".

for example in social sciences.

and their findings, and then attempts to remedy injustice uncovered in these findings are what drove and drives approaches for remedy, "policies".

these _of course_ are disputed by those benefitting from the status quo, like publishers as part of the top wealth percentile.

so far so obvious.

what baffles me is that some call injustice "issue du jour", when it is much older than Christianity.

even more so when as we found out taking care benefits business.

and I dare going one step further: if we don't discuss social implications of science and tech, the AI gives the wealthy cheap access to smarts, while it takes smarts the lever for a good life.

to me, the advent of AI puts the question of societal justice _in science_, in intelligence work, front and center.

Reading the comments I hear about disagreements with science. Headline and articles. I don’t hear any objections the facts or refutations. You don’t have to like Science, but stop claiming that Scientific America isn’t using it unless you have proof.

They buried the lede:

> Helmuth, who joined the magazine in 2020, had pushed it to cover more politics, arguing that science cannot be disentangled from its social context. Scientific American had issued presidential endorsements for the first time under her leadership. In 2024, after Helmuth called Trump supporters “bigots” and “fascists” on social media on election night, the magazine again became the target of right-wing backlash.

The magazine chose to go more political. When the political winds changed direction they found themselves on the wrong side of the new administration.

Remaining purely apolitical was an option for them.

My family didn't want me subscribing to magazines, although our household had a lifetime subscription to TIME, among others. But when Grandma took us out shopping, I would pull issues off the rack at the store. I distinctly recall enjoying Scientific American for years as a young child, fascinated by some of the articles and the cold, hard facts within.

My strongest memory is of the "Rubik's Cube" cover art, which depicted a quite impossible state of a Cube that was solved, except for one corner turned 1/3rd of the way. This was controversial, but certainly eye-catching, especially for a boy like me, striving to improve my solving record of 63 seconds.

I used to buy a Scientific American as a treat and even subscribed for some time but wow, how bad it has become.

Why oh why destroy something so precious to so many people.

Spewing politcal hate is not the best way to win friends it seems.

It's really funny how it is always right-wing backlash and how the magazine's independence is at stake when the owners want it to remain neutral.

The sheer idea that people from all political sides could be complaining because they don't want politics everywhere never comes to mind.

Also the fact that Helmuth fundamentally altered the magazine's course by pushing politics is completely ignored. Instead, when the owners have to forcefully correct the course it's being sold as threatening the magazine's independence.

Same old, same old...

Requiring a membership, free or otherwise, is a goddamn paywall.

“It wouldn’t be the last conflict between Helmuth and Springer Nature. Helmuth, who joined the magazine in 2020, had pushed it to cover more politics, arguing that science cannot be disentangled from its social context. Scientific American had issued presidential endorsements for the first time under her leadership. In 2024, after Helmuth called Trump supporters “bigots” and “fascists” on social media on election night, the magazine again became the target of right-wing backlash. This time, facing pressure from Springer Nature, she resigned.”

So, an activist editor in chief focused on social justice nonsense and identity politics instead of on science, the resulting distraction ran it into the ground, and what used to be a respected institution is now struggling to recover from this disastrously poor leadership. A familiar story.

I used to enjoy SciAm. A few years ago I picked up an issue and was annoyed by several articles that used the mantle of “science” to push social, political and cultural issues. Articles about how mathematics is misogynistic and how some other field was racist or white supremacist, etc. The same bullshit as the rest of the media, frankly. So I put it down and haven’t read it again since. Too bad.

You'd expect this from totalitarian regimes where even the most mundane cultural output becomes a vehicle for ideology. When you read a book about raising babies in Nazi Germany, you're actually learning how to raise obedient, emotionally hardened citizens. When you watch a romantic musical comedy in Stalin's Soviet Union, you're actually watching a celebration of the supposed superiority of Soviet society. Hell, my own dad who studied music in an east German conservatory had to write his thesis about Marx perception of classical music.

Somehow, this ideology achieved this without any of the pressures of a totalitarian regime - just by being an intransigent minority.