Media Criticism, Political Commentary, Science And Society, Social Commentary

Neil DeGrasse Tyson

30 Comments

Just making s**t up?

The point is that it’s not hard at all to prove that politicians, as a class, are some of the dimmest, dullest, and least inspiring group of people you could possibly imagine. It takes a special brand of lazy hack to feel compelled to manufacture evidence to that effect.

Not unusual for him. Also, while many people confuse median and average, Tyson has no excuse.

[Wednesday-afternoon update]

Tyson repeats the “space pen” myth.

Has anyone actually read his PhD thesis? I’m starting to wonder about the quality of it now.

[Bumped]

30 thoughts on “Neil DeGrasse Tyson”

  1. The one where he’s bitching about someone saying “1700 milligrams” and he comes back with something like “That’s 1.7 grams, moron” is just weird. Yes, we know they’re equivalent. But it isn’t ‘straight to moronville’ for failing to convert immediately into publication-quality formal formatting. It’s basically screaming at someone for saying “7 cups”. AKA: Just dumb.

    In fact, were it me, my response would be along the lines of “No, you innumerate moron, you lost my significant figures that way. Plus, everyone in the room other than you understood the comment as intended.”

    There are entire fields of science and engineering where they -have- converted to SI … but often discuss things in metric-esque (or “old metric”) terms as being flat more convenient for the quantity of interest. Megawatt-hour for one. Angstroms, wave numbers, ergs, dynes. Whatever dude.

    1. Tyson was showing off, trying to make the other person look dumb. This probably occurred during the jury selection, rather than the trial proper. As a result, he got kicked off the jury.

      As in any job interview, it was a dumb thing to do. Unless (as is likely) he was trying to avoid jury duty.

      Lawyers (both prosecutors and defense attorneys) have a built-in bias against jurors who are highly educated. Even if Tyson behaved himself, he would likely be dismissed, just because he has a PhD — that’s a legitimate complaint against the justice system. Getting dismissed because he was being a smarta** is not a legitimate complaint. He got what he was asking for.

      1. Lawyers (both prosecutors and defense attorneys) have a built-in bias against jurors who are highly educated.

        It’s really quite amusing. I made it on a jury, but the look on their faces as they asked my educational background and occupation to fill the last slot (because they’d just dumped someone after all the challenges were exhausted by begging the Judge to admit the prosthetic-arm-from-industrial-accident guy can’t judge a remuneration-for-industrial-accident case) , priceless.

    2. Judge’s insistence about using milligrams instead of grams when discussing drugs giving you a headache? Take two aspirin. Just make sure you get the full-dose (325mg), not the baby-dose (81mg).

  2. Don’t know much about Tyson, but this is all no big deal.
    1) The statement “half the schools in the district are below average” is a stupid statement regardless of which definition you use for average. The speaker is obviously trying to elicit a reaction from the listeners, like “How terrible! What is wrong with our schools?” Finding a skewed distribution isn’t going to make that reaction sensible. I’d agree with Tyson that the statement is indeed illiterate. (Obviously if no one ever said it, that’s a different story.)
    2) The word average doesn’t mean “mean”. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Average. It’s a fuzzy term that includes various ways of finding central value, including mean but also including median. Statisticians are careful to use more precise language. Not that this matters much; (1) is the main evidence for the statistical illiterateness of the original speaker. I don’t know what Tyson could have done, assuming that the quote is accurate – should he have changed the word the speaker used to “median” to make the mistake more complete?
    But making a fuss about a wrong (though colloquial) understanding of the meaning of the word “average” doesn’t speak well for the one attacking Tyson.

  3. Considering how much of his ‘innumeracy’ schtic is dunce-cap wrong, I wonder if he’s a cynical misanthrope that likes to amuse himself, reinforce his depression, and make money by attracting and subtly insulting throngs of lovers of all things ‘sciency’.

    It would be a source of depressing hilariousness if that was your worldview, helping the morons that adore you to gleefully identify themselves as morons (unbeknownst to them) by laughing at others that are ostensibly morons, so meta. A way to painfully amuse yourself while contemplating a hopeless future and inevitable oblivion. I guess it beats cutting yourself.

    I’m thinking his typically stereotype dorky getup (although not quite as bad as Bill Nye) is like the nerd equivalent of the Hot Topic couture that the Emo and Goth subcultures dress up in, his ‘sad clown’ suit so to speak, minus the facepaint or body piercings. Being a huge (non misanthrope) nerd myself, I never understood the appeal.

  4. Like the old joke, reprised in a Dilbert cartoon, about management aghast at the “fact” that nearly 40% of all sick leave was taken just before, or just after, the weekend: that is Monday or Friday.

  5. I had a lot of fun shredding most of the narrative and “facts” in his Cosmos series in a forum full of liberals who watched him in wide-eyed wonder. Aside from the whole Bruno fiasco:

    He dreamed of the day we could harness the power of photosynthesis to power our civilization, which is stupid because photosynthesis is only 3 or 4 percent efficient. We’ve never made a solar cell that bad.

    His portrayal of Hypatia of Alexandria as a martyr for science was horribly wrong, since she was murdered as part of a struggle between the Church and secular Roman rulers over what the power structure was going to be, one of the early conflicts between kings and the Pope. It had absolutely nothing to do with science. Tyson also moaned about the Christians burning the library of Alexandria, which is rather shocking because it was burned decades before Jesus was even born, during the reign of Caesar, and burned again about 10 Roman emperors prior to Constantine, the first Christian to rule Rome.

    It’s probably the first science documentary I’ve seen where you get dumber and more misinformed just by watching it.

    1. George, thanks for that history. Hard to believe that historians have been whitewashing the Roman burning of Alexandria.

      And let us not forget the great Socialists who have also burned libraries in the name of Progress: Hitler and Mao. And Mao learned this trick from Qin Shi Huang.

    2. Well, they didn’t even mention the final book burning to take place in Alexandria, in 642 AD, since there’s no way they’d quote Caliph Omar as saying “If those books are in agreement with the Quran, we have no need of them; and if these are opposed to the Quran, destroy them.”

      But even those lies, omissions, and misstatements were just part of a larger lie, which is that there was just one shining city where learning was prized (before evil anti-intellectual George W BushHaliburtonBigOil supporters burned it). The claim is absurd. A lot of the contents of the library of Alexandria came from other great cities with other great libraries, such as when Mark Antony gave Cleopatra a gift of 200,000 scrolls taken from the great library in Pergamon, Turkey.

      1. I think the number given depends on how early on in the reaction chain you focus, as it keeps on losing efficiency as it converts the energy into useful chemical compounds like sugar. The point is that a big part of that episode was devoted to filling liberal’s heads with a ridiculous green fantasy. Truth is, if we could replicate the magical efficiency of photosynthesis, we would be powering our civilization with trees and would be hard pressed to beat a preindustrial firewood burning civilization.

      2. We’d better not let them find out about it!

        The last thing we need is hordes of killer plants roaming around, murdering for improved photosynthetic efficiency…

  6. I’m writing in defense of Caesar. I think it’s unlikely that he burned the Great Library deliberately. In fact, I think he claimed it was accidental. He’d ordered his men to set fire to that part of Alexandria as a firebreak against the Egyptian troops who were advancing on his position. And even if it wasn’t accidental, I’m sure he regretted it anyway. After all, he was a Roman gentleman (at least by Roman and his own standards), which meant he’d received what we would call today an excellent liberal arts education. Don’t make too much fun of this please. A liberal arts education was the only form of higher education available at the time.

    I still don’t understand how a salad was named after him. In all of his actions he was usually pure carnivore.

    If I’m wrong in any of my facts I stand corrected.

    1. The burning was indeed an accident. Some of the destruction that occurred in later wars was because the library happened to be pretty much ground zero between opposing armies, which destroyed a vast area of the city. In 391 they destroyed an associated set of temples called the Serapeum, but no witnesses say there were any scrolls or writings there at the time. This leaves us with zero historical accounts of a mob looting and destroying a library in Alexandria, for any motivation whatsoever, until the Muslim conquest, by which time there really shouldn’t have been much left because of all the accidents, wars, and passage of time.

      And the Caesar Salad was actually invented in Tijuana (by Italian Caesar Cardini). Because of prohibition, as he was drawing customers from San Diego. The Cobb salad was invented by Bob Cobb at the Brown Derby restaurant in Hollywood 13-years after the invention of the Caesar salad. Those were salad days in California (1924-1937).

    2. I think the Caesar salad was named after its inventor, a Mexican chef named Cesar ____. who ran a place in Ensanada, just south of the border, which a lot of Hollywood types went to during Prohibition.

  7. I didn’t find these made up quotes all that upsetting. It seemed rather obvious that they were just made up statements to illustrate a point. He picked on politicians and journalists, the shocking part is he didn’t include a made up quote from a lawyer.

  8. I, too, found the criticism nit-picky. I haven’t paid enough attention to Tyson to have formed an opinion of him. But, if there are any substantive reasons to criticize him, such quibbling detracts from it, and makes it appear all criticisms are probably quibbles.

    1. He’s supposed to be a man of science, where truth means everything. Making sh*t up to make a point is something politicians, lawyers, and entertainers do. Scientists aren’t supposed to make sh*t up. If Tyson wants to be an entertainer now that’s fine with me, but he’s going have to lose the cloak of authority his PhD. gives him.

  10. There’s a real howler in Tyson’s rant which, surprisingly, no one has commented on.

    He says Christians and Muslims worship “the same God.”

    Really???

    Christians believe Jesus is God. Muslims don’t. That’s common knowledge.

    Even if you’re an atheist, you ought to know that much about religion. If you don’t, maybe you should keep quiet and not ridicule other people for being ignorant on the subject?

    1. Exactly. Cosmos had a lot of smug atheism. For being smart people, the atheists on that show really didn’t do their history.

    2. They didn’t do their science either. I was shocked when NGT said that the Earth’s oceans were all boiled off by impacts, and that to survive life had to hide in the blast fragments floating through space, later re-seeding the planet. Astrophysicists estimate that the Earth got struck by about 70 Chixculub size impactors. To have enough impact energy to completely boil the oceans would require thousands of such impacts to hit at about the same time. NGT should’ve talked to an astrophysicist and avoided the panspermia pleadings.

      As I recall, in the final episode he said humans were going to soon evolve into something more just because we travel into space, and I wondered if he was going to be on the international genetic purity committee that keeps some couples from having children based on their DNA profile. Significant evolution in such a large population requires highly unequal reproduction rates – or lots of death. Part of the point of technological advancement is to adapt environments to us instead of sitting around seeing who survives episodes of mass death because we’re too dumb to stop whatever is killing us.

      1. Astrophysicists estimate that the Earth got struck by about 70 Chixculub size impactors.

        Chicxulub?!?! That was a pinprick! Sometime around 4.5 billion years ago, the proto-Earth probably got hit by something the size of Mars (with the Moon as a result). There is speculation that life could have gotten started three or four times on Earth before the extinction-level events stopped happening, around 3.8 billion years ago (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Late_Heavy_Bombardment). “70 Chicxulubs” refers to the period between 3.8 and 1.8 billion years ago (http://www.space.com/15424-asteroids-battered-earth-collisions.html).

  11. It’s a shame too, because I really wanted to like it. Instead of taking us on a grand journey around the Universe, they pushed a very obvious agenda. Sagan was just s much an atheist as Tyson, he just didn’t let it get in the way of the story he was telling.

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