I read Scientific American from time to time. It's not what the Reason author claims it is. It's a popular, non-specialist science magazine that reaches out to the public (mostly through Dentist's office waiting rooms). It's OK for it to have a political point of view.

I see this a lot lately. Someone takes issue with something(s) in a magazine or journal and tries to burn them to a crisp because of it. Even on here, folks periodically roast Quanta magazine for something that's not exactly right from a subject matter expert perspective. It's a perfectly good magazine, also for the general public (perhaps a little more high-brow than Sci-Am).

The Reason article takes a very rigid and persnickety point of view, which is common in libertarian arguments. It's like the kind of rhetoric you hear from insufferable debate-club enthusiasts in high-school and college.

I agree. You're right.

On science reporting, Scientific American has been on par with Wired or Technology Review for more than a decade. SciAm wasn't mutated/destroyed by a few recent opinion pieces. (Whether those pieces were unhinged or not. I can't force myself to go and check, because see above.)

It's not even what's "published in the magazine" as such, they take issue with opinion pieces saying stuff like "the complicated legacy of E.O. Wilson". It's news to me that disagreeing with part of the work of someone in behavioural psychology (of all things) is "setting aflame the edifice of science", but here we are...

I wish my dentist had Sci-Am in the waiting room.

But seriously, those rants quoted in the article about normal distributions and the use of the acronym "JEDI" are really, really, pathetic. A science magazine needs to be science first and politics second. Anyone who wants to reverse that should work for a different rag.

> It's not what the Reason author claims it is.

The article literally describes Scientific American as "the leading popular science magazine". What exactly did the author mis-claim?

> It's OK for it to have a political point of view.

Not if that political point of view is anti-science, as others have elsewhere described in this comment page (post-modernism).

> The Reason article takes a very rigid and persnickety point of view, which is common in libertarian arguments.

I'm not a libertarian, But I also have no idea what you're talking about with the "rigid" and "persnickety" descriptions.

> It's like the kind of rhetoric you hear from insufferable debate-club enthusiasts in high-school and college.

I think it's a real problem when a popular science magazine doesn't just get the detailed facts wrong, but takes on a point of view that is hostile to objective scientific inquiry in general, and also attempts to inject poisonous identity politics into subjects as banal as the normal distribution or Star Wars.