How Scientific American's Departing Editor Helped Degrade Science

Earlier this week, Laura Helmuth resigned as editor in chief of Scientific American, the oldest continuously published magazine in the United States. “I’ve decided to leave Scientific American after an exciting 4.5 years as editor in chief,” she wrote on Bluesky. “I’m going to take some time to think about what comes next (and go birdwatching), but for now I’d like to share a very small sample of the work I’ve been so proud to support (thread).”

Helmuth may in fact have been itching to spend more time bird watching—who wouldn’t be?—but it seems likely that her departure was precipitated by a bilious Bluesky rant she posted after Donald Trump was reelected.

In it, she accused her generation, Generation X, of being “full of fucking fascists,” complained about how sexist and racist her home state of Indiana was, and so on.

“Fuck them to the moon and back,” she said of the dumb high school bullies supposedly celebrating Trump’s victory.

Whether or not Helmuth’s resignation was voluntary, it should go without saying that a few bad social media posts should not end someone’s job. If that were the whole story here—an otherwise well-performing editor was ousted over a few bad posts—this would arguably be a case of “cancel culture,” or whatever we’re calling it these days.

But Helmuth’s posts were symptoms of a much larger problem with her reign as editor. They accurately reflected the political agenda she brought with her when she came on as EiC at SciAm—a political agenda that has turned the once-respected magazine into a frequent laughingstock.

Sometimes, yes, SciAm still acts like the leading popular science magazine it used to be—a magazine, I should add, that I received in print form every month during my childhood. 

But increasingly, during Helmuth’s tenure, SciAm seemed a bit more like a marketing firm dedicated to churning out borderline-unreadable press releases for the day’s social justice cause du jour. In the process, SciAm played a small but important role in the self-immolation of scientific authority—a terrible event whose fallout we’ll be living with for a long time.

When Scientific American was bad under Helmuth, it was really bad. For example, did you know that “Denial of Evolution Is a Form of White Supremacy“? Or that the normal distribution—a vital and basic statistical concept—is inherently suspect? No, really: Three days after the legendary biologist and author E.O. Wilson died, SciAm published a surreal hit piece about him in which the author lamented “his dangerous ideas on what factors influence human behavior.” That author also explained that “the so-called normal distribution of statistics assumes that there are default humans who serve as the standard that the rest of us can be accurately measured against.” But the normal distribution doesn’t make any such value judgments, and only someone lacking in basic education about stats—someone who definitely shouldn’t be writing about the subject for a top magazine—could make such a claim.

Some of the magazine’s Helmuth-era output made the posthumous drive-by against Wilson look Pulitzer-worthy by comparison. Perhaps the most infamous entry in this oeuvre came in September 2021: “Why the Term ‘JEDI’ Is Problematic for Describing Programs That Promote Justice, Equity, Diversity and Inclusion.” That article sternly informed readers that an acronym many of them had likely never heard of in the first place—JEDI, standing for “justice, equity, diversity, and inclusion”—ought to be avoided on social justice grounds. You see, in the Star Wars franchise, the Jedi “are a religious order of intergalactic police-monks, prone to (white) saviorism and toxically masculine approaches to conflict resolution (violent duels with phallic lightsabers, gaslighting by means of “Jedi mind tricks,” etc.)”

You probably think I’m trolling or being trolled. There’s no way that actual sentence got published in Scientific American, right? No, it’s very real.

But what really caught my eye was SciAm‘s coverage of the youth gender medicine debate. This is one of the few scientific subjects on which I’ve established a modicum of expertise: I’ve written articles about it for major outlets like The Atlantic and The Economist, and am working on a book. I found SciAm‘s coverage to not just be stupid (JEDI) or insulting or uncharitable (the Wilson story), but actually a little bit dangerous.

I know, I know: We’re not supposed to call mere words “dangerous.” Hear me out: The evidence for youth gender medicine—blockers, hormones, and (sometimes) surgery for minors to treat their gender dysphoria—is scant. We really don’t know which treatments help which kids in which situations. Every major government or government-backed effort to look into this question, most recently the U.K.’s Cass Review, has come to this conclusion. The supposed leading professional organization, WPATH, is mired in scandal, with evidence from court cases strongly suggesting it has suppressed negative research results. One of the leading clinicians and researchers in the country admitted to the New York Times that she and her team suppressed negative research results (not the first time, I don’t think). 

Rather than cover these important developments, Scientific American has hermetically sealed itself and its readers inside a comforting, delusional cocoon in which we know youth gender medicine works, beyond a shadow of a doubt, and only bigots and ignoramuses suggest otherwise. Over and over, SciAm simply took what certain activist groups were saying about these treatments and repeated it, basically verbatim, effectively laundering medical misinformation and providing it with the imprimatur of a highly regarded science magazine.

This was a chronic problem at Scientific American. One article, to which I wrote a rebuttal for my newsletter, contained countless errors and misinterpretations: Most importantly, it falsely claimed that there is solid evidence youth gender medicine ameliorates adolescent suicidality, when we absolutely do not know that to any degree of certainty. As far as I can tell, every article SciAm published on this subject during Helmuth’s tenure followed the exact same playbook of reciting activist claims — often long after they’d been debunked.

Some of these articles might have done serious damage to the public’s understanding of this issue. For example, SciAm ran a response to the Cass Review written by a pair of writers who were somehow able to issue a searing critique of the review despite having clearly never read it. They wrote that the document’s problems “help explain why the Cass recommendations differ from previous academic reviews and expert guidance from major medical organisations such as the World Professional Association for Transgender Health (WPATH) and the American Academy of Pediatrics.” But part of the Cass Review’s remit was to evaluate the strength of these exact pieces of expert guidance—the Cass Review explicitly explains why the WPATH and AAP guidelines are weak and untrustworthy. Anyone who read the document would have understood that. Not to put too fine a point on it, but the Cass Review argued that the WPATH and AAP guidelines were shoddily constructed, and SciAm published a response accusing the Cass Review of differing from the WPATH and AAP guidelines. That’s the sort of error that can only occur in the context of lax editorial standards married to ideological certitude.

People trust Scientific American. It’s not out of the question that parents of trans or gender-questioning kids, who are (unfortunately) more likely to get their information on this subject from media outlets than from carefully conducted efforts like the Cass Review, will ‘learn’ from SciAm that blockers and hormones are safe, effective, and likely to reduce suicidality—even as the jury is still out on all these claims. This false belief could prove disastrous for obvious reasons, and yet SciAm has had no qualms about spreading what can only be described as medical misinformation on this subject—something it decries when the sources and claims in question are right-coded.

To be sure, Scientific American was not alone in its abysmal coverage of the youth gender medicine debate. The popular science show Science Vs, which bills itself as a swashbuckling effort to cut through politics and get to the truth of scientific controversy, repeatedly debased itself on this subject, and CNN took such a hard turn toward propaganda on gender medicine  that it recycled the same false passage about the supposedly strong evidence base for youth gender medicine in dozens of its articles.

The crisis of expert authority has many causes. But one of them is experts mortgaging their own credibility. When magazines like Scientific American are run by ideologues like Helmuth, producing biased dreck as a result, it only makes it more difficult to defend the institution of science itself from relentless attack. This lack of trust absolutely contributes to the sorts of dunderheaded, reactionary populism presently threatening America and much of Europe.

If experts aren’t to be trusted, charlatans and cranks will step into the vacuum. To mangle a line from Archer, “Do you want a world where RFK Jr. is the head of HHS? That’s how you get a world where RFK Jr. is appointed  head of HHS.”

Going forward, Scientific American can right the ship by simply hiring an editor who cares more about science than progressive political goals. That doesn’t mean the editor needs to be apolitical or that there’s no role for SciAm to chime in on social justice issues in an informed manner, with the requisite level of humility and caution. It simply means that Scientific American needs to get back to its roots—explaining the universe’s wonders to its readers, not lecturing them about how society should be ordered or distorting politically inconvenient findings.

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Source: https://reason.com/2024/11/18/how-scientific-americans-departing-editor-helped-degrade-science/