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Notes -
Should Nature endorse political candidates? Yes — when the occasion demands it:
The growth of activism in ostensibly-neutral organizations is old news, particularly since this event took place three years ago. What stuck out to me is that they seem surprised by those findings, and have to reach for esoteric explanations like the "rebound effect". The simple explanation works just fine, and Bret Devereaux put it best: "Public engagement is how you build support for the field; activism is how you spend support for the field. Yet the two are often conflated; spending is not saving.".
Also notable is the primacy of feels over reals: Nature literally is not impartial, and Trump supporters correctly identified that fact based on the evidence they were presented. They didn't even pretend to grapple with the base reality: Instead of looking at trustworthiness, they look at feelings of trust. More broadly, instead of looking at personal finance, researchers and reporters look at feelings of stability and instead of looking at crime, they look at fear of crime.
"Magazine decides to become arm of political activism in support of the party of Tweedledee. Is shocked, shocked! when party of Tweedledum gets into power and amongst other matters cuts funding to magazine/its pet topics".
Well, at least now we know. I don't mind reading partisan media when I know which side of the fence they're on, and that can even be a valuable experience to hear from the other side. Some bunch pretending they are "the facts are impartially in support of our guys" are not neutral, whatever they may like to think.
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How tf do you get from the conclusion that endorsing Biden didn't help him at all but reduced public trust in your paper as an argument for doing more political endoresements?
Because the actual goal is to demonstrate that they’re team players for the blue tribe, not to do either of those two other things.
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I really want to see Nature doing a piece on how, if Biden runs again, being 80 years old at the start of his campaign and potential second term says nothing about his cognitive abilities and general state of health. I dare them. Because when my own father got to 80, I could see the slow, gradual, but definite decline in his health and capacity. So tell me that Biden is Super Joe, defying the laws of biology!
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Writing papers in the academic landscape of current year often means that the conclusion is already set. So if you want to argue X, you let your data speak to that effect and then tack on a hasty "but, uh, of course this shows that not-X".
We are just returning to the historical norm. A couple hundred years ago you were expected to squeeze a "so of course this all shows that God is magnificient and the church correct in everything" in your stuff as well.
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Not to mention the fact that Nature is British. I suspect they see themselves as global (and therefore American, or at least entitled to comment on American domestic politics), but the journal is historically British, the company that publishes it is the London-based subsidiary of a German corporate parent, and the editor-in-chief and most of the editorial team are based in London.
Foreign endorsements almost always hurt the endorsee. The most notorious examples are Putin's endorsement of Donald Trump and Obama's endorsement of remain in the Brexit referendum - both elections were close enough that there is an outside chance that the foreign endorsement flipped the result in the opposite way to the one intended.
I would expect Science to endorse an American political candidate and (to a lesser extent, because Science is published by the AAAS but Nature is not published by the BAAS, Nature to endorse a British political candidate) if science was actually at stake - for example if one candidate was expected to dramatically cut science funding or introduce political litmus tests for receiving it. Nature sort-of endorsed remain, reflecting the (correct) views of the vast majority of British scientists that Brexit would be bad for science. But for Nature to endorse a candidate in a non-British election is stupid.
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I find it utterly incredible how little self-awareness is on display here and this single article and the point you've demonstrated has actually lowered my estimation of the scientific community and Nature especially so. Even beyond the comically stupid and obvious immediate failure that you've pointed out, a study like this should be raising gigantic flashing alarm bells in the minds of anyone concerned with science as a field. They have here a sign that descending into the muck of partisan politics renders them less trustworthy and damages public faith in science, one of the worst possible outcomes for both science as a field and individual scientists. And their response is to double down?
These are the first steps on the well-travelled road that leads to Hypatia's fate.
I have bad news. It was always this bad and you just found out.
The only thing that happened was a cohort of Millenials thought that Science was a good replacement for Religion, and so convinced themselves that it wasn't populated with the same stupid, scheming, biased humans as every other profession. Now you know what your father knew, and his father before him. There is no one to trust, so get on with it.
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Why must "science" speak out? Science didn't.
The article doesn't bother to explain what the costs of inaction are. The endorsement didn't shift any votes, and to the extent it had a public impact it seems mostly to have pissed away some of whatever political capital Nature has. Even if you were to grant that Democrats are 100% aligned with reality and Republicans 100% opposed, the endorsement did nothing to further the cause of better public policy by maximizing Democrats' electoral fortunes. And it adds further to the Republican perception that "science" is just an institution driven more by fads and an ideological worldview with implacably opposed, non-empirical values.
I think it has to be understood less as Nature's editorial board trying to influence the election (implausible anyway) and more trying to position itself as a valuable ally to Democrats.
Funny you should mention Science. This may deserve its own top level post, but the Editor in Chief of Science today posted a tweet thread praising the decision by Nature and essentially making the claim that the role of scientists is not merely to provide evidence to be used in discussions of policy, but to demand that evidence is used exclusively to advance ostensibly left-wing goals.
To acknowledge the science and evidence underlying climate change, and develop a different policy prescription based on that is “unacceptable.”
Maybe I am naive, but I had some degree of faith in the scientist as a disinterested truth seeker. That is no longer the case. “Science,” and Science, have confirmed themselves as activist organizations only willing to expose (and, conversely, conceal) the truth in pursuit of political goals.
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