“Hey, you just have to trust me on all that stuff I made up“:
Eyewitnesses are a good thing. And if you believe Neil deGrasse Tyson is your lord and savior, his eyewitness testimony is of course sufficient for verifying, for instance, that George W. Bush quote.
But what about those of us who are not in the Tyson faith-based community? Are we “anti-intellectuals” to not trust in his unverified claims? I suppose that will be the continued approach by many in the media, some folks in the Wikipedia community (whose trust in Tyson puts the most devout religious piety to absolute shame), and the other fanboys.
I’ve never been as impressed with him as those who consider themselves my intellectual superiors have been demanding, but wow, he really is a piece of work.
[Update a while later]
Tyson finally admits that he botched the Bush quote:
Tyson claims to be a man of science who follows the evidence where it leads. The evidence here clearly shows Tyson screwed up. Whether knowingly or not, he regularly repeated a false account in order to cast aspersions on another public figure. The only proper thing to do is recant and apologize. That is what a person of integrity does.
I won’t be holding my breath.
In some versions of multi-verse theory, there exists a universe where a George W Bush said exactly what Tyson claims.
Science!
I can’t help but expect that, in said other universe, the resident Neil Tyson still told a whopper that didn’t resemble the documentable facts.
Tyson may be truthful on Bizarro World.
“Tyson may be truthful on Bizarro World.”
That’s the world in which statist economics actually produce prosperity, and Bizarro Lois Lerner is liberty’s Number One champion.
George Burns, who wrote several autobiographies, readily admitted to putting a “vaudeville shine” on facts concerning his life.
I view Tyson as an entertainer, like George Burns. I’m bothered less by his confabulations than the way the media portrays him as one of the world’s leading scientists (a view which he obviously relishes and encourages) and his tendency to expound on a wide range of topics, far removed from his field, which he actually knows little about.
What possessed George W. Bush to appoint him to a commission on human spaceflight, for example? (Okay, it was George W. Bush. Maybe that explains it.) And the media quotes him constantly as an “expert,” even though a typical PhD program in Astrophysics does not involve any coursework in that field.
Yet, I still see Tyson talking about Elon Musk’s “mistakes.”