Last week on the Scientific American blog network, Ashutosh Jogalekar wrote a piece called "Richard Feynman, sexism and changing perceptions of a scientific icon," in which he noted the great communicator could be kind of a jerk about women in his personal life.
Jogalekarwas surprised at the casual sexism of someone who has basically been beatified in the world of science communication, where a whole cultural industry has been built up around quoting him and gushing over him.
He wrote that some of Feynman's sentiments are "disturbing and even offensive" today, but "they were probably no different than the attitudes of a male-dominated American society in the giddy postwar years."
A little too flowery and a bit of a stretch for my taste, especially for a guy who claims to know science history, but okay, whatever. Jogalekar concluded "We can condemn parts of his behavior while praising his science. And we should."
On some sites, that is akin to hate speech.
Well, on Scientific American and Twitter anyway, where a tiny minority of people have very little to do except act out a weekly episode of Melrose Place Science. The ensuing backlash led to his article being removed and he was apparently 'fired' from their blog network. Then 4 days later his article was back. I guess someone at SciAm is actually old enough to remember when writing was about issues and not simply censoring and banning everything that doesn't pass a cultural or political 'tyranny of the majority' litmus test.
Scientific American editor Curtis Brainard issued a rationalization about removing it - and then another rationalization about restoring it - but Ross Pomeroy at Real Clear Science is not having any of it. Pomeroy notes that Brainard's nonsensical rebuke of "countervailing arguments and evidence" makes little sense. The countervailing part was apparently that a guest poster said Larry Summers, Democratic insider, Friend Of Obama, and former President of Harvard, was right in some of his beliefs that there are differences between men and women. And then Ash gave a positive review to a book some other people didn't like.
Really? This is why the sane part of the Internet just assumes this is their manufactured controversy of the week.
Pomeroy writes:
"A scientific topic cannot be declared off limits or whitewashed because its findings can be socially or politically controversial," Jogalekar sagely wrote in one of his pieces.
Apparently, Scientific American disagrees. And in their PC world, that means you lose your job.
Is there any merit to the complaints about his work? They have been complaining about him for months and he clearly had a target on his back for reasons that have nothing to do with his writing so it's hard to know what is real and what is just more hyperbole and obfuscation.
Regardless, some companies are clearly gaming the militant segment of science media culture these days. Science magazine recently did a cover about HIV and used legs to do so. It got predictably vilified all over the place and Science apologized for it, but it was a complete success, because it got people talking about both Science magazine and HIV, which hasn't happened in about 20 years. To the PR person at Science who came up with that marketing gimmick, a tip o' the Science 2.0 hat to you.
Credit: Science magazine. Link: Twitter
Scientific American's 'PC Police' Fires Blogger by Ross Pomeroy, Real Clear Science
Image: Shutterstock
