5 Matching Annotations
  1. Jun 2022
    1. https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/the-complicated-legacy-of-e-o-wilson/

      I can see why there's so much backlash on this piece.

      It could and should easily have been written without any reference at all to E. O. Wilson and been broadly interesting and true. However given the editorial headline "The Complicated Legacy of E. O. Wilson", the recency of his death, and the photo at the top, it becomes clickbait for something wholly other.

      There is only passing reference to Wilson and any of his work and no citations whatsoever about who he was or why his work was supposedly controversial. Instead the author leans in on the the idea of the biology being the problem instead of the application of biology to early anthropology which dramatically mis-read the biology and misapplied it for the past century and a half to bolster racist ideas and policies.

      The author indicates that we should be better with "citational practices when using or reporting on problematic work", but wholly forgets to apply it to her own writing in this very piece.

      I'm aware that the magazine editors are most likely the ones that chose the headline and the accompanying photo, but there's a failure here in both editorial and writing for this piece to have appeared in Scientific American in a way as to make it more of a hit piece on Wilson just days after his death. Worse, the backlash of the broadly unsupported criticism of Wilson totally washed out the attention that should have been placed on the meat of the actual argument in the final paragraphs.

      Editorial failed massively on all fronts here.


      This article seems to be a clear example of the following:

      Any time one uses the word "problematic" to describe cultural issues, it can't stand alone without some significant context building and clear arguments about exactly what was problematic and precisely why. Otherwise the exercise is a lot of handwaving and puffery that does neither side of an argument or its intended audiences any good.

  2. Jun 2021
  3. May 2021
  4. Dec 2020
    1. People who think that racial differences are all biological might say that all these non-White groups have suffered so much excess death because of that bottom circle, because of greater biological susceptibility.  Recent studies have evaluated this hypothesis and found that it’s not true.  Instead the answer is simpler: Black and Latino/a people in particular are dying of COVID-19 at such staggering rates because they are more likely to be exposed to the virus in infectious settings, particularly workplaces.
  5. Oct 2020