Sometimes, yes,
SciAm still acts like the leading popular science magazine it used to be—a magazine, I should add, that I received in print form every month during my childhood.
But increasingly, during Helmuth's tenure,
SciAm seemed a bit more like a marketing firm dedicated to churning out borderline-unreadable press releases for the day's social justice
cause du jour. In the process,
SciAm played a small but important role in the self-immolation of scientific authority—a terrible event
whose fallout we'll be living with for a long time.
When
Scientific American was bad under Helmuth, it was
really bad. For example, did you know that "
Denial of Evolution Is a Form of White Supremacy"? Or that the
normal distribution—a vital and basic statistical concept—is inherently suspect? No, really: Three days after the legendary biologist and author E.O. Wilson died,
SciAm published a surreal hit piece about him
in which the author lamented "his dangerous ideas on what factors influence human behavior." That author also explained that "the so-called normal distribution of statistics assumes that there are default humans who serve as the standard that the rest of us can be accurately measured against." But the normal distribution doesn't make any such value judgments, and only someone lacking in basic education about stats—someone who definitely shouldn't be writing about the subject for a top magazine—could make such a claim.
Some of the magazine's Helmuth-era output made the posthumous drive-by against Wilson look Pulitzer-worthy by comparison. Perhaps the most infamous entry in this oeuvre came in September 2021: "
Why the Term 'JEDI' Is Problematic for Describing Programs That Promote Justice, Equity, Diversity and Inclusion." That article sternly informed readers that an acronym many of them had likely never heard of in the first place—
JEDI, standing for "justice, equity, diversity, and inclusion"—ought to be avoided on social justice grounds. You see, in the Star Wars franchise, the Jedi "are a religious order of
intergalactic police-monks, prone to (white) saviorism and toxically masculine approaches to conflict resolution (
violent duels with phallic lightsabers, gaslighting by means of "
Jedi mind tricks," etc.)"
You probably think I'm trolling or being trolled. There's no way that actual sentence got published in
Scientific American, right? No, it's very real.
But what really caught my eye was
SciAm's coverage of the youth gender medicine debate. This is one of the few scientific subjects on which I've established a modicum of expertise: I've written articles about it for major outlets like
The Atlantic and
The Economist, and am
working on a book. I found
SciAm's coverage to not just be stupid (JEDI) or insulting or uncharitable (the Wilson story), but actually a little bit dangerous.
I know, I know: We're not supposed to call mere words "dangerous." Hear me out: The evidence for youth gender medicine—blockers, hormones, and (sometimes) surgery for minors to treat their gender dysphoria—is scant. We really don't know which treatments help which kids in which situations. Every major government or government-backed effort to look into this question, most recently the U.K.'s Cass Review, has
come to this conclusion. The supposed leading professional organization, WPATH, is mired in scandal, with evidence from court cases
strongly suggesting it has suppressed negative research results. One of the leading clinicians and researchers in the country
admitted to the New York Times that she and her team suppressed negative research results (
not the first time, I don't think).
Rather than cover these important developments,
Scientific American has hermetically sealed itself and its readers inside a comforting, delusional cocoon in which we
know youth gender medicine works, beyond a shadow of a doubt, and only bigots and ignoramuses suggest otherwise. Over and over,
SciAm simply took what certain activist groups were saying about these treatments and repeated it, basically verbatim, effectively laundering medical misinformation and providing it with the imprimatur of a highly regarded science magazine.
This was a chronic problem at
Scientific American. One article, to which I
wrote a rebuttal for my newsletter, contained countless errors and misinterpretations: Most importantly, it falsely claimed that there is solid evidence youth gender medicine ameliorates adolescent suicidality, when we absolutely do not know that to any degree of certainty. As far as I can tell, every article
SciAm published on this subject during Helmuth's tenure followed the exact same playbook of reciting activist claims — often long after they'd been debunked.
- Portugese Cheese Takes Gold.
