A lot of criticism of SA seems to be from those who don't read the magazine. It is still mostly just thorough coverage of developments in physics, biology, engineering, and other pretty uncontroversial science topics and this coverage has not 'gone downhill'. It is a lot of work to do good reporting of an area of science by talking to a range of experts in that area and SA still does good work here. Some topics are politicized, but that doesn't mean you just don't report on the science in those areas. Almost everyone who thinks 'SA used to be good now it is woke' are either revealing they don't read it or just don't seem to like how the consensus in an area of research might now conflict with their worldview.
They do have an opinion section, like many journalism outlets, which sort of by definition have to be 'hot takes' (e.g. you don't publish opinion pieces that 99% of people will already agree with). Out of thousands it is seems hard to avoid having some bad ones (all major outlets seem to have opinion pieces that are dumb). Most of the flack they get seems to be from these dumb pieces, and it is sad that the entire brand gets tarred with it. You could argue that SA just shouldn't have opinion pieces at all, but ultimately opinion pieces are pretty good at drawing readers and SA is not a non-profit. Additionally, while there are some that overstep the research and are 'click-baity', some opinion pieces are thought-provoking in a valuable way. Nonetheless, perhaps it would be better to get rid of the opinions just to avoid hurting the reputation of the rest of the magazine, but running a journalism magazine is a tough business and it is easy for commenters on the internet to pop in and say stuff like this who don't actually have to run a magazine. I would rather they exist with occasional bad opinion pieces than not exist at all, as their coverage in general is still great.
This guy seems to really not like their coverage of science around gender non-conforming individuals, though I don't see why I should trust his representation of the research over theirs as he seems to have an agenda as well. He then cherry-picks a few examples of some bad opinion pieces not written by their journalists that overstepped the research and then paints the entire outlet with it, and that is frustrating because most of the science coverage reporting is still excellent.
The author of this article very (in)famously re-launched his career as a writer (prior to GNC youth he wrote mostly culture pieces) by misinterpreting a scientific paper on the subject he now claims to be an expert on. I don’t think he did this maliciously, but I do think, like many writers, he struggles to digest scientific literature accurately.
Back in 2016 he wrote an article in The Cut titled "What's Missing From the Conversation About Transgender Kids."[1] (which, incidentally, has since been silently corrected by The Cut's editors). It draws some pretty major conclusions from a single study [2] where he seems to overlook some pretty glaring issues that contradict his conclusion. [3]
Signal, to his credit, admits the error, although he goes on to argue it actually strengthens his argument (It does not IMO).
The criticisms of Singal's piece are pretty weak, and often resort to refuting things he never actually wrote. He explicitly notes that data is sparse - this is one of the most controversial research subjects - but it does indeed suggest a desistance rate of 50-60% absent medical intervention. Contrast that with the common claim that desistance in gender dysphoric children is a myth which is just totally contradicted by the available evidence.
Andrea James the obsessive stalker and harrasser, Julia Serrano the abusive misogynist who thinks lesbians should be shamed for not wanting dick, Ana Valens the creep who openly fantasizes about raping women in breeding farms.
If these horrible males are angry at Singal then I can only assume he's doing something right.
The titles are clickbaity, but based on a quick skim of the content of those articles it doesn't feel too removed from reading the print issue ~15 years ago. Especially if you look at the featured articles from the most recent online issue [1]
I grant that the horse one looks pretty solid and interesting.
But it's the choice of topics.
SciAm has an extremely narrow view of what science is worth publicizing, one that aligns very closely with online causes du jour. Looking at the recent technology topic articles, I see: AI causes e-waste; turning a car into a guitar; AI uses too much water; misinformation is an epidemic; voting is secure; zoetropes; another e-waste story; UN should study effects of nuclear war; bird going extinct; another misinformation story; AI and fungus; AI and (yet again) misinformation.
I guess there's a market for this stuff, but I'm not in it.
I know that I and many others switched to American Scientist years ago. SA has definitely gone downhill since the 80's. I would describe it as as bit softer/popular when I made the switch. I have no experience in the last few years.
The downhill slide was already underway by the 1990s. Readership was in a slow decline and the publishers turned to various marketing gimmicks to maintain solvency. More pictorial articles, more po-sci articles, cover wrappers suggesting that it was worth subscribing even if you didn't read the whole magazine etc. I stopped reading around 2000, when I bought an issue and noticed I had read the whole thing in under 4 hours rather than the usual 5-6. A comparison indicated they had changed the font size and line spacing slightly, so as to maintain the same page count but with about 15% less content.
I distinctly remember an article in the late 1990s (guessing 1998) which I read, but which I now can't find. It was about Y2K, and the bottom line was, we need more work to prevent disaster, but no matter how much is done, it will still be pretty awful.
I thought at the time he was exaggerating, and that Y2K was unlikely to be a big event. As everyone knows, a lot was done to fix the problem, and January 1, 2000 indeed turned out to be a non-event.
I cannot find the article now. I know I didn't dream it up, and I'm pretty certain it was in SciAm--I remember it had the usual sorts of graphs, illustrations, layout etc. as all SciAm articles did back then. If anyone can find it, I'd appreciate knowing. It was a turning point in my own reading of SciAm--I mostly gave it up after that, despite having devoured it up until 1980 or so.
I don't think you are alone, or at the very least I will be buried on the hill nearby. But those with car-Stockholm-syndrome are still the politically dominant force (in the US at least).
I think there's a pretty large middle ground of society that could be reached, iff a credible and full plan for migrating from one modality to the other were presented. I have probably 30 years of ambulatory life ahead of me. My kids have twice that or a little more.
A plan that makes life worse for the next 20 or 50 years until we get to the other side where it's better is a non-starter. A vague, hand-wavy plan of "eliminate stroads; reduce parking" and no more steps is a non-starter.
I'm not sure if it's practically possible to switch an existing city from a car-centric mode to a pedestrian-centric mode inside of 10 years, but if we could evaluate and debate a credible plan to do that, we might make more progress than is currently happening.
Seattle took relatively minor steps that have had a huge impact on building more housing:
- eliminate parking requirements. Developers are still allowed to build as much parking as they want, but they are no longer required to. The impact on existing residents can be blunted by making the street parking timed and zoned unless you have an exemption permit, which is granted to all existing residents and doesn’t expire, but decreased over time to new ones.
- mandate separating parking from rent. Renters only pay for parking if they use it. In practice, people will debate if having a car is worth it every time they change a lease.
- employers over 100 employees are required to have commute management plans, and are incentivized/required to achieve lower single-person car commutes. Notably, how they do it doesn’t really matter, but it can help mitigate a large portion of car dependency which is the suburbanization of jobs into areas only accessible by car.
The last one I actually think is the most important, and it’s also the easiest because it doesn’t impact residents and if anything mitigates the most common complaints about new jobs.
And there are going to be compromises in any case. Lots of residents will want to own cars to go to surrounding areas not all of which are ever going to be easily reachable by public transit and vice versa.
And cars work so well on snow and ice? Some cities in Finland have lots of people cycling in the winter and last I heard they get lots of snow and ice. You can get snow tires for bikes just like you can for cars. You can also plow bike lanes like you can plow the roads.
How are you calculating how expensive a suburb is to maintain versus a city? A suburb can't exist without a city, basically by definition. A city would have fewer wealthy commuters without the suburbs, which would reduce the size of the economy, but ultimately a city can exist without suburbs albeit in a diminished state. You cannot say suburbs are cheaper to maintain than cities when they cannot exist without cities.
While it is true that wealthy people live in suburbs and commute to the city and contribute to the economy, the same infrastructure is generally more expensive in a suburb than a city because it has to travel longer distances between houses. That is just geography and physics. Picking up garbage for a building with 10 apartments is going to be cheaper per household then driving between 10 different houses, for example.
The relationship between cities and suburbs is symbiotic in some ways, but in many ways suburbs rely on exporting costs onto cities. Suburbs exclude poor people by design (zoning rules and housing supply restrictions), so that they don't have to pay for all the social services used by poorer people. And when you say 'city infra is more expensive', a huge percentage of the city infrastructure (e.g. roads, trains, sewers) is used by people who commute into the city when they are in the city. Very few people living in the city go and use infrastructure in the suburbs on a daily basis.
Imagine if everyone in NYC tried to move out to the suburbs, it would not be remotely feasible. They wouldn't have the social services for the poor and wouldn't be able to get the tax revenue to maintain infrastructure between houses while preserving the spread out distances between houses without dramatically raising taxes. The rich would then probably just flee somewhere else and take their taxes with them. Additionally, lower income people couldn't even afford the houses/cars needed to live there in the first place.
There aren't many places with the access to as many high-paying jobs and the desirable walkability of NYC. That makes demand to live here high, and then we have on top of that artificial constraints on building new housing. Additionally, the suburbs outside of the city also have artificial constraints on building housing, and generally other cities that could become alternatives to NYC also have artificial constraints on building housing (and also don't build enough transit). All of that makes NYC more expensive and makes cities remotely like it (e.g. S.F.) more expensive.
So my understanding is Silicon Valley programmers have a liberal to progressive culture, but the VCs that fund tech companies have the reputation of being libertarian. Thiel at least a is a noted libertarian.
The stereotype is that rich investors have these 'libertarian' ideals where they believe that, freed from burdensome taxes and living in a world where bailouts don't happen, they will invest wisely and create a tech utopia thanks to 'survival of the fittest' principles. However, people feel these rich investor types behave more along the lines of 'libertarian principles when we make money, socialism when we are losing money'.
I don't know the extent to that which is true but obviously when rich people have their money threatened it makes sense that they would want a bailout even according to their own 'principles' they shouldn't get it.
I think a lot people in the U.S. see our car-oriented culture as clearly just the natural way of doing things, and see places like Amsterdam as more 'unnatural'. I don't think most people realize what a historical accident it is, stemming from a confluence of factors:
- Cars becoming affordable right about the same time as the U.S. was experiencing the postwar boom. If they had stayed too expensive cities might have expanded rail and other transport methods more in the postwar boom years.
- New construction methods allowing the building of certain styles of single family houses cheaply arose around the same time
- Several Supreme Court decisions like the banning of red-lining and the banning of public school segregation causes a lot of white people to move to more-expensive car-dependent suburbs as a way of preserving their ability to live in a segregated neighborhood. The GI bill was also structured in a way to exclude most African Americans from being able to buy homes. The resulting flight of wealthier white folks causes urban decay which causes more white flight to car-dependent suburbs.
- After initial suburbs were built out, the FHA set up regulations that made it more difficult to build suburbs that weren't car-dependent.
- Planners like Robert Moses hadn't been able to see the space inefficiency of when you have a huge network of suburbs trying to commute into cities via cars. Additionally, induced demand meant that highways into dense cities quickly fill up to capacity compared to more efficient methods of transport like trains or buses.
- The federal government went along with the car-dependent vision promoted by planners, partially because it hadn't been demonstrated yet. The costs of building car infrastructure and suburbs were heavily subsidized by the federal government. Maintenance costs are mostly localized, but not expansion, which encouraged more expansion of the suburbs to get more tax revenue from property taxes until maintenance bills come due and the cycle begins again (see strongtowns.org to read more about this phenomenon).
- As white people moved to the suburbs and drove personal cars, public transport became seen as something only poor-black people would do
- Alternatives like biking became dangerous because of all the fast-moving cars and not as practical in spread-out suburbs
- Status quo bias sets in, so we keep doubling down on existing patterns of development
I'm sure there are a lot of other factors that I am forgetting, but the US wasn't built for cars just because there was a lot of 'empty space' or whatever people like to say.
As opposed to forcing everyone to have to use cars? Cars are expensive, dangerous, and incredibly space-inefficient, and car infrastructure is very expensive. A car lane can move max 1600 people per hour, where as a bike lane can move up to 7500 people per hour (according to nacto.org). Note that even in Amsterdam you can still drive, it just is often a slower option than biking because you will have to take longer routes.
And remember, that a bike lane doesn't have to just be human-powered bikes: it could be e-scooters, e-bikes or perhaps even microcars.
There is a big problem in the U.S. where people don't trust bureaucratic regulation so we do it through the courts instead, which is much more expensive and 'random' because decisions are made by judges and not technocrats. Those technocrats are in theory more qualified to design regulations and are more accountable to voters who elect their bosses. You can go too far with regulations as well (see regulatory capture), but a new election can in theory more directly improve a regulator than it can improve the complex random set of rules set up by the courts.
With laws like CEQA and NEPA, lawsuits just keep layering condition upon condition that needs to be addressed to be compliant. Environmental impact studies have been getting bigger and bigger (and thus much more expensive). Fighting lawsuits is much more burdensome and time consuming than just having a regulator (which is not to say that regulatory oversight is never burdensome, just better than what we have). It also means rich people who can afford lawyers are more able to enforce regulations than poor people. This is a difficult hole to get out of unless we can persuade voters to push politicians to reform these laws.
They do have an opinion section, like many journalism outlets, which sort of by definition have to be 'hot takes' (e.g. you don't publish opinion pieces that 99% of people will already agree with). Out of thousands it is seems hard to avoid having some bad ones (all major outlets seem to have opinion pieces that are dumb). Most of the flack they get seems to be from these dumb pieces, and it is sad that the entire brand gets tarred with it. You could argue that SA just shouldn't have opinion pieces at all, but ultimately opinion pieces are pretty good at drawing readers and SA is not a non-profit. Additionally, while there are some that overstep the research and are 'click-baity', some opinion pieces are thought-provoking in a valuable way. Nonetheless, perhaps it would be better to get rid of the opinions just to avoid hurting the reputation of the rest of the magazine, but running a journalism magazine is a tough business and it is easy for commenters on the internet to pop in and say stuff like this who don't actually have to run a magazine. I would rather they exist with occasional bad opinion pieces than not exist at all, as their coverage in general is still great.
This guy seems to really not like their coverage of science around gender non-conforming individuals, though I don't see why I should trust his representation of the research over theirs as he seems to have an agenda as well. He then cherry-picks a few examples of some bad opinion pieces not written by their journalists that overstepped the research and then paints the entire outlet with it, and that is frustrating because most of the science coverage reporting is still excellent.