umans love politics. They enjoy hating each other
because convincing themselves their opponents are evil makes
them think they must be good. But politics has no place in
science. Spinning every science story as a political battle
will destroy its credibility.
The bitter truth is that everything in the world does not revolve around US President Trump. It could even be argued that his policies are a return to policies of earlier leaders. The attack on Iran, for instance, closely parallels Jefferson’s attacks on the Barbary pirates. So why are half the people screaming that it’s World War III and the other half are screaming that it’s the greatest thing ever? No matter where you look, anyone expressing a dissident opinion gets verbally attacked.
Politics is important: we need informed, dispassionate analysis. But sneaking it into science stories doesn’t work. That’s because, as Hume might have said, truth is ‘is’ and politics is ‘ought’. You can’t argue from one to the other. That might not matter on social media, where everything is somebody’s idiotic opinion. But science writers ought to be smart enough to know that mixing political opinions into their stories destroys the credibility of their entire site.
Mix one part politics with a hundred parts science, the entire mixture is worthless. Readers will assume the only reason you wrote the story was to find something that supports your pre-existing opinion. Therefore your assumptions, methodology, and interpretation were all likely biased to support your pre-established conclusion.
That’s common in religious apologetics, but there are many scientific papers that also fit that pattern. Most people don’t read the primary literature of course, but get it from popular websites. Their quality is rapidly declining.
Ars Technica Once a technology site, now it’s a site that looks for ways of spinning technology stories into hit pieces on Trump. They attack RFK Jr. and even Jay Bhattacharya, who’s trying to implement much-needed reforms at NIH. At the moment they have 9 anti-Trump political articles on their main page, 0 pro-Trump ones, and 33 not-obviously political ones. This makes everything they write suspect—even when they write about bugs.
Phys.org publishes press releases from academics. Unlike the mainstream media, they sometimes get the facts right, and they even label those fake astronomy images as artist’s conceptions. But they have an abundance of global warming stories, such as one claiming that the Israel-Gaza war generated 33 million metric tons of carbon dioxide equivalent, making it a bad thing. It’s simply not credible that 25% of all scientific articles would be ‘warning’ about global warming.
Scientific American Believe it or not, Sci Am was once a reasonably not-too-bad pop science magazine. My former boss once published a popular-style article there. But that was decades ago, before they started running hit pieces on Bjorn Lomborg. Do they still exist? Who knows.
Nature Nature is a hopeless case, even worse than New Scientist, but even they seem to have finally figured out that tying their discoveries to science is unprofessional. They’ve cut back on the fake gender science and their demands for equal numbers of Nobel prizes for the two sexes, but as with Science mag they’re happy to publish article after article on global warming—which wouldn’t be so bad if any of them contained any evidence. Alas, there are only computer models, which are a dime a dozen and prove nothing.
They’re going behind paywalls now. That means the editors are ashamed of their articles. It also means they’re not credible because the’re now commercial for-profit articles. In a real sense, a paywalled article is a paid advertisement. You can’t quote a paid advertisement, and you can’t write about them because readers must be able to verify what we say. So both Science and Nature have now gotten sucked into black holes.
Even the Ig Nobel prize, once dedicated to poking fun at amusing scientific discoveries, has now turned political. They’re now holding their awards ceremony in Switzerland instead of the US because America is “not safe.” Their claim is that the participants are ‘worried’ that they would be detained at the border for social media posts criticizing President Trump. One participant supposedly said “In this moment, it’s too risky for a European to go to the USA if they do not agree with Trump.”
Where are they getting this nonsense? Either from social media, or from the mainstream media, which gets most of its stories from social media. We can’t just ignore it: science is the last remaining foundation of our post-Enlightenment civilization. If it turns political, we’re cooked.
In one sense, it’s a shame that academics can be this stupid. Maybe stupidity is a symptom of an institution in decline. If decline is occurring, but you’re afraid to state the real reason, you blame your political enemy. That’s not just true of academia, but any institution.
Quanta Some other tech sites, like quanta, are more subtle. They invariably include some woman scientist as playing a major role in every discovery, not because she did, but because she’s a woman. Whatever the goal may be, its effect is to discredit woman scientists (some of whom are actually good) by associating them with diversity/equity politics.
The reputation of science took a terrible beating in Covid-19. Scientists added pathogenic features to a deadly virus, then let it escape. They then lied about it. Others ran bad drug studies trying to discredit anyone who was ever praised by Trump. And accused skeptics of inventing conspiracy theories.
It will take decades for the reputation of science to recover from that level of dishonesty. And based on what science popularizers are saying, they’re not even trying.
mar 12 2026, 7:47 am
