Episode 19: Science and politics

“Science is political”. How could it not be? It’s done by humans, whose political biases will influence not just the topics they choose to study but also how they study them. But does that mean it’s fine for scientists to blatantly bring their politics into their work? Does that mean it’s okay for scientific journals to endorse political candidates?

In this slightly unusual episode of The Studies Show (which doesn’t include very many actual studies), Tom and Stuart discuss the never-ending debate over where politics begins and ends in science, debate whether it’s possible for science to be politics-free, and cover the recent story of the scientific journal editor fired for expressing a (pretty mild, all things considered) political opinion on Twitter.

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Show notes

* Eisen’s joke about a worm which caused a racism/sexism row

* His fateful tweet about Hamas that eventually got him fired as editor of eLife

* Coverage of his firing in Nature News; in Science

* Nature endorses Biden in 2020

* Tom’s article in Unherd about politicising science

* Tom’s article in Unherd about the importance of “decoupling”

* Stuart’s Substack article about how science is political - but that’s a bad thing

* Astral Codex Ten article about the arrogance of presuming it’s not possible to be any more rational than you are right now

* Study of how Nature’s political endorsements affected people’s trust in the journal

* Stuart’s article in the i on this study; summary in Politico

* Nature’s editorial response, arguing that they’ll do endorsements anyway

Credits

The Studies Show is produced by Julian Mayers at Yada Yada Productions.

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