Science Doesn't Care About Your Feelings

How Democrats Ruined The Scientific American

Scientific American (SA) was once avenerable institution. A respected publication. An important contribution to the nation.

It is the oldest magazine in this country dedicated to science, dating back to before the Civil War. Over the years, many brilliant scientists and researchers have contributed to it. Albert Einstein wrote here, so did Nikola Tesla. Many Nobel laureates got articles printed here. Over the years, the publication was acquired, merged, re-acquired, and all the rest. In 2020, a woman named Laura Helmuth was named managing editor. Previously she had been Health and Science Editor at the Washington Post, a publication not normally cited for its contributions to science. Or accurate reporting.

Nevertheless, Helmuth had some bona-fides. She holds a PhD in cognitive neurosciences. But her tenure at the Washington Post must have affected her brain, since she became aredently interested in the topic of “misinformation.” She thought that journalism could fight “misinformation,” apparently unaware that the scientific method is based on ideas, countering ideas, and the gradual and sometimes painstaking search for the truth. In other words, you need information and misinformation both to do science. One scientist says the sun revolves around the earth. Another scientists says, no, the earth revolves around the sun. They duke it out with evidence and the truth emerges. That’s how you do science.

If you silence one of those scientists, not only do you not do science, you can’t find truth. First of all, how do you know which one to silence? And if you silence one, how is the other one forced to defend his position with facts and evidence? And if some journalist knows a scientific truth better than top scientists… why isn’t that journalist a scientist?

The idea that a journalist can somehow stop scientists from arguing is anathema to science and, beyond that, utterly absurd.

And the whole concept of misinformation is based on the annoying mantra, “I know better than you, so shut up.” How do you know you know better than I do? If you disbelieve me, come at me with some facts, don’t just put duct tape over my mouth.

One of the first things that Laura Helmuth broke was tradition. She smashed it in a million pieces, stepped on it, set it on fire, and then ran a steamroller over it. Then she swept up the crumbs and dumped them in a kiln.

In Helmuth’s quest to fight “misinformation” and prove she’s smarter than you, SA endorsed Joe Biden for President in 2020. This is the first time the journal endorsed anyone for anything political and it did nothing for the magazine. People don’t read SA to know how they should vote any more than the read the Washington Post to find out about genetics.

Furthermore, Laura Helmuth claimed that Trump “rejects evidence and science,” which seems a pretty major accusation. Ironically, she had no evidence to back up her claim that Trump “rejects evidence.” I wonder if she knows that Tump’s uncle was an MIT professor who was given Nikola Tesla’s papers upon his death so he could provide a summation for the government. Yeah, those Trumps, always rejecting science! I bet nobody in their right mind would ever ask Laura Helmuth to summarize the latter writings of America’s great scientist, Nikola Tesla. She probably thinks Tesla is just a car brand.

Not learning from her mistake, in 2024, Laura Helmuth again endorsed a candidate, this time Kamala Harris. And since her endorsements are always basically about Trump, she added that Donald Trump “endangers public health and safety and rejects evidence, preferring instead nonsensical conspiracy fantasies.” Ironically, she had no evidence that Trump was endangering public health or public safety. She had no evidence Trump rejected evidence. And as for saying that Trump preferred “nonsensical conspiracy fantasies,” she gave no examples and no comparators. Preferred nonsensical conspiracy fantasies to what? To having a root canal? To watching reruns of The View? To reading Helmuth’s stupid editorials in SA?

Grand Editrix Helmuth later went on the Bluesky social media to call Trump supporters “fascists” and the “meanest, dumbest, most bigoted” people on earth. That doesn’t sound very scientific, does it? She doesn’t even define the terms. And what evidence does she have, other than she doesn’t like Trump supporters?

The good folks on X responded right away and could be heard over Bluesky’s applause. The X contributors said that her comments were not exactly scientifically sound or evidence based.

But we weren’t alone in being singled out for the wrath of Helmuth. She also said Generation X was “full of f—ing fascists” and complained that Indiana—her native state—was sexist and racist. Again, a whole lot of hate without any evidence to back it up.

You know, the one thing that lefties do not understand about science—well, besides science itself—is that in science, two people can disagree with each other without calling each other names, without hurling invectives, and without getting emotionally charged up with hatred. Two or more scientists can have lively and years-long debates where they ardently and vociferously defend their positions and attack the other—without ever being disagreeable. But to a lefty like Helmuth, even the tiniest hint of disagreement will cause her to drop the f-bomb, swear at you personally, attack you, and try to erase every word you say by calling it misinformation.

It’s one of the reasons I don’t like to talk to lefties.

In this case, Laura Helmuth had gone visibly too far. Even she could see. Heck, Stevie Wonder could see it. Helmuth first apologized but then realized it wouldn’t be enough. It’s like the gang member who stabs his enemy awnd then realizes he’s not going to get back up because he’s dead. Helmuth had no where to turn.

So, she quit her job moments before I presume a giant hook was brought out to drag her off-stage.

Despite her flaws and lack of qualifications, Helmuth was no lightweight. She was once president of the National Association of Science Writers. She has a number of important-sounding national positions. But it just goes to show that you can give a lefty credentials, but they’re still lefties.

In her wake, Helmuth destroyed the legacy of SA. It’s as tattered as the Centers for Disease Control and Prevevention (CDC) after they had to apologize for the Tuskegee Syphillis Experiment. It’s as tainted as Black Lives Matter.

SA became schizophrenic under Helmuth. Some of the time, it acted like its old self and published articles on science. But Helmuth was an ardent activist and an ignorant leftist activist, at that. Whatever the latest cause was, Helmuth was willing to publish some crackpot story about it. Little boys can be little girls? Check. Men can menstruate and get pregnant? Check. Math is racist? Check. Roads are racist? Check.

In fact, she brought down not just SA but science itself. Here are some SA highlights under Helmuth’s reign of error:

• “Denial of evolution is a form of white supremacy”

• “The statistical concept of normal distribution is suspect” (translation: sometimes statistics show things that don’t support the lefty narrative)

• “Why the term JEDI is problematic for describing programs that promote justice, equity, diversity, and inclusion” (she argues that in Star Wars, the JEDI are quasi-religious figures and are guilty of toxic masculinity because they carry light sabers which are, you know, phallic—what are they talking about?)

• It claimed that gender medicine provided to pediatric patients reduced their risk of suicidality (this is a case of arguing a case without benefit of evidence; the actual evidence is limited but what we do have supports the opposite)

And there are stories the SA suppressed. The knew about but would not publish stories that the World Professional Association for Transgender Health (WPATH) withheld evidence and studies that did not support the transgender agenda. You see, SA is convinced that transgender medicine is good and wholesome and will not tolerate any evidence (regardless of how sound or who produces it) if it disagrees with that concept.

This is not science. It may be leftist, it might even be American, but it’s not scientific. You see Laura Helmuth wanted to drag science into her liberal fantasy world where you believe stuff and then make up data to support it while suppressing evidence to the contrary and shrieking hateful invectives against anyone who does not agree with every word you say.

Now Laura Helmuth actually did do some good things. So let me be fair and say that despite her egregious and unforgivable assssination of science, she did a couple of things right. I know, I know, this is like saying Hitler loved his dog. But here goes:

• Helmut helped SA during its transition from old-school print magazine to digitial platform

• She also helped expand the magazine

• And she was open to new ideas, although most of them were crackpot ideas. For instance, she thinks “social justice” is a scientific topic. She also is a true believer in climate change despite mounting contradictory evidence

• You can’t deny, she was a bit of a change agent. So was Stalin

Yet her main legacy is always going to be that she helped destroy scientific authority by transforming a once-respected American scientific magazine to a hotbed of politican inanity. She made SA assinine, and that’s no easy accomplishment. Just check out the tone of recent SA articles to see that Helmuth took it from a popular scientific magazine into a vastly dumbed-down publication. Right now, it’s something Joy Behar might read but nothing a scientist would want to read. Here are some articles from the December and November 2024 issues. (You don’t have to search much to see Helmuth’s handiwork)

• Birds are Goofy Runners and Dinosaurs Might Have Been, Too

• This is Your Robot Brain on Mushrooms

• Could Engineering the Ocean Help Stop Climate Change?

• See How Close We Are to Gender Equality Around the World

• Vote for Kamala Harris to Support Science, Health, and the Environment

• Basic Income Gives Money Without Strings.

• How to Make Progress in Health Equity

• Removing Bias from Devices and Diagnostics can Save Lives

• And my most favorite: The Staggering Success of Vaccines. Anyone who publishes an article with that title in 2024 after the greatest debacle in vaccine medicine in history—well, they don’t know science.

That isn’t even half of the knuckleheaded stuff in SA. It’s sad. But Laura Helmuth is gone now. Maybe SA can heal. I hope that eventually we’ll come back to the scientific method. Here’s how it works.

• Scientist A tries to explain something. He doesn’t know what’s true or not but he crafts a hypothesis based on many facts he does know. A shares this with his scientific peers either informally, at an academic institution, or by publishing his speculations

• Scientist B reads this and is interested, but he pokes some major holes in A’s hypothesis. He brings some new facts

• Scientists C and D do the same, but scientist E supports A

• Scientist A evaluates this input and makes some modifications. But not a lot

• Scientist B does a study to get data specific to the question. He publishes his data and challenges A again

• Scientist E replicates Scientist B’s study but she get different results. She publishes her data

• Scientist C drops out of the conversation, maybe he’s got a new project or he just lost interest. Not everyone goes the duration

• Scientist D can explain the differences and another study is run by Scientists A, B, and D working together

• Scientist A takes these new data and modifies the original hypothesis. Now Scientists B, D and E are on board

• These results are published and now Scientist F enters the picture with a whole new hypothesis

And on and on it goes. At no point do these scientists swear at each other, call each other pigs or fascists or racists. If one of them is a woman, she doesn’t scream misogyny if she’s challenged. If one of them is Black, he doesn’t scream racism when he’s challenged. And if one of them is a white liberal, she won’t scream sexism and racism if something does not go 100% her way. Nobody drops the f-bomb, nobody goes on X to launch screeds and call each other morons. Nobody seethes and rages.

Scientists are contentious people and disagree all of the time. To the best of my knowledge, they have never come to blows or even verbal tirades in the process. Edison and Tesla had different opinions on the value of direct versus alternating current. Tesla argued Edison was wrong, even set up demonstrations to prove it. He never wanted Edison’s ideas thrown out as “misinformation.” He wanted Edison’s ideas thrown out because they were bad ideas. (By the way, Tesla was right, Edison was wrong, and nobody was called a moron.) If Laura Helmuth had been there at the time, she would likely have suppressed one set of ideas and only published the other. She would have gone on X and called Tesla a fascist. Or maybe she’d call Edison a fascist. Either way, she’s demand one of them be forcibly silenced in her pursuit of social justice and equity. But fortunately, the better idea won back in the day, not the idea that lefty Laura favored.

Scientific arguments can go on for years, even decades. You would think we’d be done with gravity as a physical force, but several changes to the theory of gravity have been made in my lifetime. Science is one long, ongoing argument. It involves somebody saying something and other people challenging it, but usually not with malice or even personal agendas, just ideas fighting ideas.

Eventually the best idea wins. It’s like the Bible says, “iron sharpens iron.”

The truth is in the process. The idea that a journalist or some random expert can step in and “bring truth” is ridiculous. That’s dogma. It is the antithesis of science. And journalists are no experts. It’s part of the code of journalism: do not know much about anything ever.

Helmuth’s idea that she can fight “misinformation” by bringing journalistic authoritarianism to science is stupid. It’s like thinking cats can fly. Hey, here’s a new article for SA: Why It’s Fascist to Say that Cats Can’t Fly.

The scientific method does not have to limit itself to science. It would work in politics, too, if we had fair-minded balanced people who weren’t willing to distort the truth to advance their agenda. People who wouldn’t become enraged when someone challenged their ideas. People who listened to each other, who let facts fight facts. Yeah, lefties, I’m talking to you.