Did Priscilla also want to be living in absolute misery every single day of her life? The way animals are treated while they are alive is my main objection to our farming practices and the reason why i don’t eat meat.
An easy example is dogs. We have bred dogs for centuries to love doing work for us. If they hated doing the work, it would be easy to call it cruel. If they loved it by nature, it would be easy to call it kind. But since we created them into a thing that loves the work we need them for, where do the ethics fall?
Should we prevent them from doing what brings them joy? Should we make use of this win-win situation? If it is the latter, we are quickly approaching the ability to morph every species into something that gets joy from doing our work.
Dogs we changed by accident. The next one will not be an accident. Is it still a beings free will if the game was rigged from the start?
(I know your point wasn't about dogs either, it just reminded me of something).
I love Neil de Grasse Tyson's line in Cosmos: A Spacetime Odyssey:
"This wolf has discovered what a branch of its ancestors figured out some 15.000 years ago... an excellent survival strategy: the domestication of humans."
I think somewhat egotistically humans underappreciate how we have also been goaded by our "pets" into our own evolutionary journey. Most of the subjects of that documentary would not be alive if it were not for those dogs.
...on some things, because he's only human, and some pretty solid views on other things :)
Outside of that field, his takes are your typical "genius in one thing believes he's a genius in everything". Someone even made a list of his mistakes: https://hopsblog-hop.blogspot.com/2016/01/fact-checking-neil...
One of his tweets that HN will love: "Obama authorized North Korea sanctions over cyber hacking. Solution there, it seems to me, is to create unhackable systems."
I agree that the fundamental thing here is:
> "genius in one thing believes he's a genius in everything"
No disagreement here, and sadly I think this is an unfortunate part of human nature.
Other than that, I'd say the person who wrote that list has a beef with Tyson, there's a mix between honest mistakes and debatable things, a lot of nitpicking (with a dose of cherry-picking), and ultimately this doesn't prove that "most of [Tyson's] takes" are mistaken. I agree that some things he says are dumb (like the cybersecurity tweet you mentioned) but I wouldn't dwell too much on them. "Cosmos", in all of its incarnations, is amazing. Of course, I'm not arguing the script is his, but his delivery and screen presence are solid.
I see Tyson commented on that blog, and some of what he says makes sense (e.g. picking on his colloquial use of "exponential" seems a bit mean spirited, though he could have been more precise; some people misunderstand the spirit of his comments on scifi movies; etc). In general, his replies in that blog to what at some points amounted to personal attacks left me the impression that Tyson knows how to gracefully and politely handle flamebait.
His response was impressive I agree, he has matured. You can see that from his initial response to the Bush quote (claiming his memory is infallible, and then condescendingly talking about "absence of evidence is not evidence of absence" when the burden of proof is on HIM) vs. his comment where he said he'd made "inexcusable errors"
Full disclosure I'm not American so my main exposure to this guy is his tweets and occasional Reddit threads about how much they hate him.
Some of the comments in that blog, pushing back against the blog post, say more or less what I think about this.
> my main exposure to this guy is his tweets
In that case, I wholeheartedly recommend the sequels to Sagan's "Cosmos", "Cosmos: A Spacetime Odyssey" and "Cosmos: Possible Worlds". I think they have the potential to make you like Tyson!