Izvērsts un interesants raksts par to kā Scientific American kļuva par Unscientific American.

At the same time, SciAm dramatically ramped up its social-justice coverage. The magazine would soon publish a flurry of articles with titles such as “Modern Mathematics Confronts Its White, Patriarchal Past” and “The Racist Roots of Fighting Obesity.” The death of the twentieth century’s most acclaimed biologist was the hook for “The Complicated Legacy of E. O. Wilson,” an opinion piece arguing that Wilson’s work was “based on racist ideas,” without quoting a single line from his large published canon. At least those pieces had some connection to scientific topics, though. In 2021, SciAm published an opinion essay, “Why the Term ‘JEDI’ Is Problematic for Describing Programs That Promote Justice, Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion.” The article’s five authors took issue with the effort by some social-justice advocates to create a cute new label while expanding the DEI acronym to include “Justice.” The Jedi knights of the Star Wars movies are “inappropriate mascots for social justice,” the authors argued, because they are “prone to (white) saviorism and toxically masculine approaches to conflict resolution (violent duels with phallic light sabers, gaslighting by means of ‘Jedi mind tricks,’ etc.).” What all this had to do with science was anyone’s guess.


But what does it mean to “focus on science”? Many of us learned the standard model of the scientific method in high school. We understand that science attempts—not always perfectly—to shield the search for truth from political interference, religious dogmas, or personal emotions and biases. But that model of science has been under attack for half a century. The French theorist Michel Foucault argued that scientific objectivity is an illusion produced and shaped by society’s “systems of power.” Today’s woke activists challenge the legitimacy of science on various grounds: the predominance of white males in its history, the racist attitudes held by some of its pioneers, its inferiority to indigenous “ways of knowing,” and so on. Ironically, as Christopher Rufo points out in his book America’s Cultural Revolution, this postmodern ideology—which began as a critique of oppressive power structures—today empowers the most illiberal, repressive voices within academic and other institutions.




https://www.city-journal.org/article/unscientific-american