Neil deGrasse Tyson: pedantry in space | Hacker News Reader

Neil deGrasse Tyson: pedantry in space

samkriss.wordpress.com

29 pointsjgrahamc17 comments

FYI, this article may have ulterior motivations. The author is a leftist political writer (has supported violent resistance to Trump[1], compared him to a toilet full of feces and declared America fascist[2]). There has recently been a scuffle around NDT's tweet defending Americans who support Trump[3].

This is not to dismiss the contents of the article, but to provide context.

[1]:https://samkriss.wordpress.com/2016/03/12/on-the-violence-of...

[2]:https://samkriss.wordpress.com/2016/01/21/american-aphanisis...

[3]:http://www.redstate.com/moe_lane/2016/03/12/neil-degrasse-ty...

Wow that redstate article is a stretch. Of course people against Trump for president don't want other people to vote for Trump.

The article seemed pretty transparent to me: the author thinks NDT is dumb.

I think NdT (and many others) illustrate perfectly the problem of being an expert in one field and then straying into other fields thinking that somehow your expertise in Field A carries over to Field B. In most instances it absolutely doesn't![1] This is where humility comes in -- it's something most scientists should have been taught by failed experiments, failed classes(!), &c. NdT (el al) probably had humility early on, but I think the spotlight may have gotten to them. Richard Dawkins seems to have fallen into the same trap wrt. feminism ("Dear Muslima" and all that crap).

Plus, Twitter -- it seems -- can make idiots of all of us. Without someone vetting it's just way too easy to say the first thing that comes to mind... which is usually the wrong thing... and then you're stuck defending it because PRIDE.

[1] By way of example he recently ventured into commenting on biology... badly. I'll spare you the details, but if you want to investigate, here[2] is a decent takedown by an actual expert with links back to the original. (Not that you need an expert to see the idiocy of NdT's remarks, but if you want authority, you've got it.). I believe NdT has also previously spouted off about the uselessness of Philosophy... which requires a pretty ignorant view of Philosophy.

[2] http://freethoughtblogs.com/pharyngula/2016/03/17/some-days-...

(Too late to edit, apologies for the self-reply.)

I take back the "thinking that somehow" phrasing. Actually, I think it's more like "being convinced that somehow". There isn't usually much thinking involved.

Correct me if I'm wrong, but the argument behind this piece seems to essentially be "ignorance is bliss and science is bad because it takes away the mystery"?

It's hard to imagine a more anti-intellectual view than that. :P

I could dig into this for being a borderline Poe's Law[1] troll, or for the hypocrisy of accusing Tyson of having a bad attitude in such an insulting manner. Many pages could be written on the inaccuracies, anti-intellectualism, and projection that fills most of the article.

But... this isn't fark.com and it's not really worth the effort.

In any case, Bill Nye is clearly the best at deflating Tyson: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n0-jKmcNr_8

[1] bottom of article claims "Filed Under: ... Vague Attempts at Satire", but the comments seem non-satire anti-intellectual

The article suggests intellectual activity extends beyond fact-collecting and saying "wow, gee whiz, isn't space incredible? And isn't it great that only dumb people believe in God? I'm so much smarter than non-sciencey god-believing peasants who don't even know what nebulae are"

It is deeply intellectual, far more so than NDT in fact. In particular note where it eviscerates his attempt to stray beyond physics into history, where his analysis is laughably false.

I don't know why but it's often the case that hard scientists, once they are established and respected for doing hard science, feel like they are entitled to go around pretending they can speak intelligently about any other field, no matter how little they understand it. Probably the learned contempt and disdain for the humanities that consumes and drives the culture of many of my fellow STEM folks.

The article attacks the rigid inability of these people to shift their thoughts from the strict empiricist/materialist framework (facts are what the world is) as if they had read Wittgenstein's first book but forgot there was a second -- and their inability to be intellectually flexible, which is the reason why inevitably their attempts to dabble in the humanities flop hilariously.

Quite the opposite. It is about how the lies, dullness and superficiality of Neil deGrasse points of view are destroying scientific thinking.

This article is highly subjective. Yes NDT can make a whole lot of things boring if you'd rather not know how they work and prefer the mystery of not knowing or taking a different perspective (whether correct or incorrect factually). However the majority of things he describes are things that are no longer mysteries to the existing scientific consensus. They are things we actually didn't know about the world only a few hundred years ago. That is not to say that the mysteries are gone at all. If you dig deep enough into any topic in science (it's not actually as deep as some may think) you ask a question where everyone who studies it says "we don't know the answer". The mystery is still there, it has just moved away from things humans have been able to systematically investigate up to this point in time.

Yeah, IFL science can get kind of annoying and its followers can come off as evangelical but we're human and that's tribalism.

It was funny reading this bit given the point the author is making about a shallowing of intellectualism. The author essentially shares the same thought that the people he's mocking are having:

> ...and you are then supposed to think yes, I knew that, and imagine someone else, someone who didn’t know it already, some idiot, and think: I’m better than that person, I’m so much smarter than everyone else.

Have to agree - bought his redo of Sagan's Cosmos and sat down with family to watch. Serious bummer.

On atheism he is tedious - so much prefer Feynman or Steven Weinberg on the subject.

The first part of this reminds me of what I think when coming back from a k hole.

TLDR: Mr Tyson pissed off the wrong people on Twitter (guess who) so now it's open season.

Complaints of this nature have been going on for a while, but they get flagged off HN in record time by assblasted Tyson fans.

They get flagged because they don't come close to belonging on HN.

Please don't post unsubstantive comments here.

Lawrence Krauss, Richard Dawkins and Neil deGrasse Tyson all project a proud, willful disrespect of philosophy, which has been noted and argued about on HN substantively. I'm sure Tyson's Internet superstardom with the Reddit and Imgur crowd has nothing to do with the instant backlash against only criticism of him though, right?

I'm not sure I understand why you're irritated. There's a pox on all of them at HN, and a pox there shall remain.

Controversies about these characters mostly aren't interesting (in HN's sense) whether they're in the key of zeal or the key of critique. Whoever's flagging them is doing us all a favor.

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