|
Getting your Trinity Audio player ready...
|
Bruce Thornton and others have usefully dubbed it “scientism”: “Dressing up ideological beliefs or even fads in the quantitative data and forbidding jargon of real sciences like physics or engineering.” It allows progressives who actually know and care nothing about science to boast that they “believe in science” or “follow the science” whereas their reactionary opponents, presumably, do not. For some years now, the premier prophet of scientism in America has been Neil DeGrasse Tyson, who since 1996 has been the director of the Hayden Planetarium in New York, and who, like his fellow astrophysicist Carl Sagan before him, has won fame as a promoter and popularizer of science.
There’s one crucial difference between Sagan and Tyson, however, and it’s this: unlike Sagan, Tyson routinely puts scientism ahead of science. He’s totally on board, for example, with the cult of climate change. During the COVID lockdown, he was a reliable supporter of Fauci and company; appearing last January on the Patrick Bet-David podcast, he not only defended the vaccines but also, rather cold-bloodedly, defended the dismissal from their jobs of Americans who refused the jab:
There’s a public health contract that you have signed, implicitly, as a citizen of a country where in part we depend on each other for our health, our welfare, security, and the like. And that contract is, in the best scientific evidence available at the time, if you do not get vaccinated, you will put other people in this organization at risk, and this organization does not want to take that risk, and so you do not have that job anymore if you decline it.
Aside from inventing out of whole cloth the notion of a “public health contract” and ignoring the fact that what Fauci was serving up wasn’t always necessarily the “best scientific evidence” at all (not to mention Fauci’s dissembling on the Wuhan lab and other matters), Tyson ignored the fact that the childhood vaccine mandates and school closedowns made no sense given COVID-19’s very low rates of lethality in younger persons, that the guidelines on masks and public distancing were capricious at best, and that the big promises about the single vaccine’s efficacy proved to be utterly bogus.
Under intelligent questioning by Bet-David, Tyson mocked concerns about the vaccine’s side effects (“I’ll take the risk that in ten years I’ll grow a third arm”), was blithe about the authoritarian nature of the lockdown measures in various jurisdictions (as well as about their massive psychological impact), and referred to the scientific “review boards and agencies and CDC” in the kind of devout way that a pious Catholic might speak of the magisterium. In short, he was a total scientific-establishment toady, absolutely insensitive to the tyrannical conduct of supposedly democratic governments in the name of public health and, one might add, thoroughly condescending toward Bet-David, saying to him: “I’ve read all the things you have, but I’ve read it [sic] as a scientist.”
But never has Tyson abandoned science for scientism more completely than he has when discussing gender ideology. Last May, when he was a guest on the Stephen A. Smith podcast, he replied to a question on the topic by serving up a ten-minute routine (which could easily have been reduced to thirty seconds) about a recent ride on the New York subway during which he noted that he could tell the male and female passengers apart because of “secondary and tertiary” features such as the way they dressed and wore their hair – his point apparently being that while X and Y chromosomes aren’t visible to the naked eye, such superficial signs of gender are visible, and can in some cases reflect an inner sense of identity that is, in fact, at odds with chromosomal identity. Tyson contended that it’s common to feel “80% female” on some days and “80% male” on others. (Really?)
In any event, he demanded, “why do you care?” Why, he asked, can’t people say “I’m a little of both”? He cited “tomboys” as examples of children who cross the gender line and Joan of Arc, who “dressed like a man,” as “an early example of someone who didn’t fit a gender category held by others.” In using these examples of cross-sex conduct and attire, Tyson implicitly misrepresented gender ideology, which insists that such matters aren’t just about passing feelings and style choices (or about the need to put on a soldier’s uniform to save France), but about deep-seated identities that transcend mere biology. He then asserted, rather breezily, that the conflict over biological men in women’s bathrooms and sports is easily solvable: instead of dividing teams by biological sex, for example, why not divide them by hormone levels? In sum, he insisted, it’s “intellectually lazy” not to “embrace transgenderism.” Smith didn’t challenge a bit of it.
Then, the other day, Tyson was interviewed on Britain’s popular Triggernometry podcast, whose savvy hosts, Konstantin Kisin and Francis Foster, went viral last year when they exposed Sam Harris, once celebrated as a hero of rational thought, as a sufferer of Trump Derangement Syndrome at its most irrational. Could it be that Tyson wasn’t aware of that interview, which all but destroyed Harris’s career? Had Tyson not heard of Kisin’s impressive book, An Immigrant’s Love Letter to the West (2022), or of his bravura Oxford Union presentation that went viral on YouTube last January?
I suspect not, for Tyson certainly seemed – at least at the beginning of the episode, which was entitled “Have We Lost Trust in Science?” – to feel that he was talking to a couple of easily manipulated simpletons. (Perhaps that feeling comes naturally when you’ve just done, as he admitted, a series of interviews with local TV news reporters.) After civil exchanges with Kisin and Foster about space exploration and environmentalism, the conversation moved on to the pandemic. Once again Tyson spoke in reverent terms about the “scientific establishment” – saying nothing about the many members of that “establishment” who’ve faked lab results and who kowtowed to Fauci because he holds the government purse strings, or about the wise dissenters from Fauci’s orthodoxy who signed the Great Barrington Declaration.
Then Kisin brought up the trans issue. Tyson had his usual schtick ready. “When you see another person,” he asked, “do you see their chromosomes?” Kisin snapped back: “No, you see the phenotype.” Tyson, visibly thrown by Kisin’s use of the word phenotype, chided him for it, then went into his overlong subway story, explaining, as he had to Smith, that by observing his fellow passengers’ “secondary and tertiary accoutrements” he could tell who was male and who was female. But, he added, “if who you decide is male and female in the street is a construct of style and trends and what the beauty-industrial complex wants you to see, if that’s how we establish gender, then maybe somebody wants to be fluid within that gender. So they’ll wear a skirt but have a beard.” If they want to “mix and match,” and thereby “express…their freedom in a free country,” he asked, who are we to deny them that?
Upon hearing this, Kisin instantly shot back: “I don’t know a single person who wants to prevent people from dressing how they want or behaving how they want or choosing any name that they want.” In other words, Tyson was deliberately misrepresenting the trans issue. Kisin stressed that the controversy centers on such matters as ladies’ restrooms and women’s sports teams. Tyson, visibly riled, asked if Kisin had a third example, and, without waiting for an answer, sniffed obnoxiously: “Probably not!” But Kisin had other examples: in the UK, he told Tyson, there are “female-only shortlists for positions in Parliament,” plus “diversity targets” for women in corporations. “Therefore,” said Kisin, “when you make a claim that you are female, you are attempting, whether intentionally or not, to insert yourself into categories that are specifically designed to protect women’s interests.”
As on Smith’s podcast, Tyson claimed that solving such problems is easy, proposing that teams be separated not by sex but by hormone levels. But where Smith had nodded along, Kisin shot back instantly that the differences between men and women aren’t just hormonal, but include such attributes as hip angle, lung capacity, and bone density. Tyson seemed gobsmacked. When he suggested that the challenge of “trans women” in sports could be met by introducing weight classes, as in wrestling, Kisin replied that it would be unfair, for a plethora of biological reasons, even for men and women of equal weights to wrestle each other. Bringing to mind his snotty comeback to Bet-David, Tyson said, condescendingly, to Kisin: “I respect how active your brain is, but I’ve thought about all this.” But he kept proving, rather, that all he’s thought about is ways to push gender ideology on the politically woke and intellectually lazy. Eventually, after being calmly told by Kisin that one of his answers hadn’t “address[ed] the question at all,” Tyson took refuge in the lame claim that gender ideology is here to stay and that its opponents, quite simply, aren’t “fully informed” and are clinging to an “older view of the world” that, he said, brings to mind the era of separate black and white water fountains.
Tyson, of course, is black. And in going for the water-fountain line, he was playing the race card. By the end of the show, then, he’d left actual science far behind. It was a sad performance for any viewer who’d expected Tyson to address the trans issue as a scientist and not a booster. But if his rank scientism was disappointing, it was a pleasure to look through the hundreds of comments by YouTube viewers, who were almost united in their sanity – and in their disdain for Tyson’s twaddle. “Neil’s transition from scientist to influencer is complete,” wrote one. “He is one of the major reasons why there is a trust issue with science,” maintained another. And a third lamented: “Neil loses all his credibility with his take on trans issues. How does he not see that?” And perhaps the comment that summed it all up was this one: “In times like these I wish Carl Sagan would still be with us.” Alas, it’s hard not to see the decline from Tyson to Sagan as mirroring the social and cultural and, yes, scientific decline that has afflicted America since the days when Sagan sat next to Johnny Carson on late-night TV, enthusing over the Apollo program, imagining the space explorations of the future, and talking eagerly about the “billions and billions and billions” of stars in the night sky – yet all the while managing never to try to use his scientific clout to try to make the latest popular but scientifically indefensible flimflam sound remotely legitimate.
Neil De-Grasse Tyson is not a scientist, what he is, is a Propagandist.
He reminds me of this young actor named Bill Nye who appeared on a NBC pilot variety show type program in the Seattle market in 1989-91 and one of his characters/skits Bill Nye the science guy got picked up.
Tyson is as much of a “scientist” as the actor Bill Nye is “the science” guy.
Ahh….Bill Nye, the mechanical engineering guy.
Nothing wrong with that; MechE is a very important and honorable field. But to claim to be a scientist is simply ridiculous. An engineer is an engineer and a scientist is a scientist.
Bill Nye the douchebag guy.
Every single one of these over educated scientists has been complicit in the death of millions of innocent people.
They created the virus and they created the mRNA injections that are currently killing millions around the world.
The people need a Nuremberg trial but there’s nobody powerful enough to do it because the leaders are the UNITED NATIONS and they currently rule the world.
”Tyson, of course, is black. “” That is incorrect. He is genetically more white than black like most European Jews who are more white than semitic.
Bill N ye….AKA “Speedwalker”
“Science was born as a result and consequence of philosophy; it cannot survive without a philosophical (particularly epistemological) base. If philosophy perishes, science will be next to go….
The disintegration of philosophy in the nineteenth century and its collapse in the twentieth have led to a similar, though much slower and less obvious, process in the course of modern science.” – Ayn Rand
“Science by its nature, is an undertaking based on reason, and therefore on a rational epistemology. This is why modern science arose in an Aristotelian period. It is why scientists have relied (in their professional work) on the remnants of Aristotelianism for a longer time than men in areas such as art or politics. And it is why, when those remnants dwindle past a certain point, the spirit of a scientific method begins to disintegrate.
Decades ago, the exponents of purposefully guided, objective cognition — which is what scientists had once been — began yielding to two newer breeds: the narrow technicians and the punch-drunk theoreticians. The former are intent on amassing disconnected bits of experimental data, with no clear idea of context, wider meaning, or overall cognitive goal. The latter — trained in a Kantian skepticism by Dewey, Carnap, Heisenberg, Godel, and many others — turn out increasingly arbitrary speculations while stressing the power of physical theory; not its power to advance man’s confidence or make reality intelligible, but to achieve the opposite results. Quantum mechanics, the theoreticians started to say, refutes causality, light waves refute logic, relativity refutes common sense, thermodynamics refutes hope, scientific law is old-fashioned, explanation is impossible, electrons are a myth, mathematics is a game, the difference between physics and religion is only a matter of taste. If all of it is true, what is the future of science?” – Leonard Peikoff, “The Ominous Parallels: The End of Freedom in America”
Ah yes, the man (along with his foil, Lenard Peikoff) of little to no accomplishment lecturing us on what science is.
Tell us please, your list of great scientific accomplishment.
He covers himself in a cloak of Aristotle 🙂
That cloak is getting a little threadbare.
Why did science begin?
Thanks Bruce! A well-deserved takedown.
I once was off the internet for awhile, and amused myself by reading the 1960 Encyclopaedia Britannica, including a lot of animal studies. Classification of male/female was often like 99% of the issue, with maybe 1% outliers. So male/female classifications aren’t a 100% perfect explanation of animal behavior, etc. But rather a very good model that deals with about 99% of the issues.
Tyson sells snake oil, but Sagan was arguably a socialist (plug into YouTube search: ‘Ted Turner asks Carl Sagan if he is a socialist”), hated Reagan, and—related to that—went on about “nuclear winter” the way Tyson goes on about climate change.
From NATURE regarding Sagan’s hysteria about so-called nuclear winter:
‘Carl Sagan…went so far as to posit `the extinction of Homo sapiens’…Some regarded this apocalyptic prediction as an exercise in mythology. George Rathjens of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology protested: `Nuclear winter is the worst example of the misrepresentation of science to the public in my memory,’ and climatologist Kerry Emanuel observed that the subject had `become notorious for its lack of scientific integrity.'”
There are better role models out there than Carl Sagan.
Agreed. But you must admit that the hobgoblin of a nuclear winter much to did bring world leaders to the negotiating table, as in the START talks. Maybe Sagan’s lack of “scientific integrety” served a useful purpose afterall. But Tyson’s still an idiot.
While Carl Sagan was not an inept snake-oil hustler like Tyson, he for sure leaned Left, as he revealed himself to be especially in the last years of his life.
I have to look for this interview to see Tyson get smoked.
Hence the nickname: “Smokey” de Grass Tyson.
It is refreshing to see the deconstruction of the scientism cult. Thanks for the lesson in logic.
Sagan was no better. He had blind faith in Darwin’s nonsense (based on ignorance of genetics and biochemistry) and recommended silencing anyone who disagreed with him about this. Believers in the religion of materialist atheism are as dogmatic as any other religious fanatics, or more so.
Yeh, The Theory of Noah’s Ark makes so much better sense.
How did Noah find two kangaroos and two platypuses in the Middle East? Oh, that’s right, by the waving of a supernatural magic wand in the hand of the Wizard of Yahweh. Now THAT is an explanation any child can understand! In fact ONLY a toddler can understand!
“Verily I say unto you, Except ye be converted, and become as little children, ye shall not enter into the kingdom of heaven.”
Darwin’s ideas about the origin of the vast interconnected complexity of life (most of which he was unaware of due to the primitive state of biological science in his time) are complete insanity, as many modern scientists agree.
I mentioned nothing about Biblical literalism or belief at all, and the fact that you immediately change the subject to that question shows your lack of ability to respond to what I pointed out.
The Bible is not a science book. To attack or use the Bible as a science book , is just silly. As for the Young Earth Creation people, I ignore them.
My apologies to the down vote, must be young Earth crowd. I should have used different words lets agree to disagree, and forget it.
You make a religion out of criticising religion.
Too bad for you the evidence of a world wide flood and the existence of world wide flood narratives in all the peoples spread over all the earth.
And the animals came to Noah. They knew what was coming. They still do. Genesis 7:15. No magic. No wand.
How did Noah find two kangaroos and two platypuses?
God provides and you can’t prove otherwise, especially with your limited vision and knowledge of science and the world.
I hope someday you realize just how incredibly stupid and arrogant you truly are.
Still racking up the downvotes. Wake up, loser.
Yeh, The Theory of Noah’s Ark makes so much better sense.
How did Noah find two kangaroos and two platypuses in the Middle East? By the waving of the supernatural magic wand of the Wizard of Yahweh?
Now that’s a theory any child can understand. In fact ONLY a child can understand.
“Verily I say unto you, Except ye be converted, and become as little children, ye shall not enter into the kingdom of heaven.”
For those not under the propaganda of modern uniformatarian historical geology, there is considerable evidence of a world wide universal flood. This evidence is in the vast sedimentary beds with the vast array of entombed fossilized organisms plant and animal. Only rapid burial can account for the nature of the fossil evidence. If anyone has real interest in the subject they should visit the Ark Encounter in Kentucky. There they will see a very impressive scale model based on the measurements found in the Bible. They will also find a well organized series of displays on the Noachian flood and other related topics
Gee, didn’t you post this one already? Just remember, follow the science like your lord and master government says. How about another jab and an extra mask to go with that arrogance
Let’s see now. Zero upvotes. 20 downvotes. I wonder how long it takes for you to get the message. No one is buying your bitter Objectivist grift
Just to clarify, I meant that Darwin was ignorant of modern genetics and biochemistry (because these fields did not exist in his time in any real sense). I don’t know how much Sagan knew about them, but it is irrelevant, since he was a mindless Darwin-worshiper.
And yet… at the end of his life I wrote to Dr. Sagan to ask for his Hebrew name so that I could include him in my prayers for the sick. He wrote back a very kind letter, gave me his Hebrew name, and thanked me for my concern and prayers. Either he was a very nice man (he had a reputation for being so) or there are no atheists in foxholes… or both.
So beautiful. Thank you for sharing this.
Science has been under the stranglehold of Atheists for tooo long. They try to force evolution to be true because they can’t face the alternative.
Materialism has been debunked. Quantum physics PROVES we are special and God is real, but the public will never be informed.
We could have already answered so much in QP if millitant materialist would shut up and calculate!
They HATE the truth, and sit on the answers..
“In other words, Tyson was deliberately misrepresenting the trans issue.”
One more missing example is the insane “transitioning” of minors, including very small children, which constitutes child abuse according to any rational definition.
No one can deny that the “trans” agenda is all about coercion and destruction of freedom, the diametrical opposite of how Tyson tries to portray it.
I remember when he came on the scene, I knew the minute he opened his mouth that he got the job for his ethnicity and his political leanings.
I only paid enough attention to him to hear him say something full of crap, as I expected he would, point out to the kids why what he said made no sense, tell them to never believe him or other television/government experts, then turn the channel.
Ministry of Truth employee of the month.
Kinda like how lackluster Kamala Harris & Jean whats-her-name got their jobs.
Use affirmative action to hire; get affirmative action results.
The opposite of the best results obtained by Mama Nature, aka, Natural Selection.
Sleepy Biden himself is a case of affirmative action in its White Privilege form.. Many people in the United States get advantages in education, jobs …..because they happen to be White/part of the majority. When you mention affirmative action you shouldn’t also forget White Privilege.
Racism, discrimination and affirmative action/White Privilege are part of the American society since the US history was founded on injustice, looting and murder.
America is great with its flaws.
I don’t know how anyone can be surprised by Tyson’s behavior any more. He’s always been a low info and quite often unscientific celebrity “scientist”. This has been his schtick since day one and yet people still consider him a legitimate scientist. Maybe it’s because he’s black, soft bigotry of low expectations and all that…
Tyson made a bet that no wind machine could go faster than the speed of the wind. He lost. Some clever fellows build a pusher propeller vehicle and used, some sort of gear transfer box, to win the bet. Sounds like Tyson isn’t a very good mechanical engineer. The video is on YouTube.
Correction (Correcting myself) Tyson is an astrophysicist not a mechanical engineer
Right. Bill Nye’s the MechE. I wonder if he would have made a bet like that.
This is feeble. “Scientism” as a term predates Thornton and others. Bawer is like today’s children who think everything started just recently. And Sagan pushed “nuclear winter”.
C. S. Lewis wrote about scientism in the late 1930’s. I know that, I’m an uneducated retired mechanic, and you think the author doesn’t know more than you or me?
What C.S. Lewis book was that in?
The Screwtape Letters. If I recall scienctism was list as replaced for Christianity along with eugenics, communism, and I can’t remember the rest of the list.
Eyesore is correct scienctism has been around, well as far as I know the Soviets invented it, but if I said that some wise guy would say no the colonialist invented, or somebody somewhere further back in history, the point is it’s reared it’s ugly head anew. And as my wife says historians are gifted at tell you things you don’t care about.
Tyson is a classic example of a “very smart” guy who is, at the same time,
VERY STUPID!
Emotions and beliefs always overpower reason in people like him.
And because he has a “air of authority” people are foolish enough
to believe everything he says
If someone “feels” 80% one sex on a particular day, and 80% the other sex on another day, that’s a probably harmless feeling, albeit one with no scientific basis whatsoever. And the notion that sex (which the Left constantly and intentionally confuses with “gender”) is identified by things like hairstyle and clothing rather than genitalia, secondary sex characteristics such as breasts and androgenic body hair compounds the problem and is absolutely ludicrous. Wokelings are like incredibly naive children in mid Victorian society who don’t know how the sexes are differentiated- are they really that stupid? The danger is the are actively castrating and mutilating people, creating fake analogs for the genitalia of the opposite sex, and putting people (including pubescent children) on a permanent regimen of cross sex
hormones.
So called “gender affirmation surgery” is completely unscientific plastic surgery and mutilation. It has always been quackery. One of the earliest transsexuals, Lili Elbe, died if heart failure caused by infection after the unsuccessful transplantation of ovaries in 1931. Today we have atrocities such as Jazz Jennings, who became a morbidly obese, permanently anorgasmic eunuch tomplease his Munchhausen by proxy mother and to titilate viewers of TLC who were bored with hoarders, half ton women, gross toe deformities and green card marriages.
To elaborate, I believe gender affirmation surgery is nothing more than expensive sterilization, and as such it is just one more head of the multi-headed hydra known as population reduction, along with bugs-for-food, fentanyl, clot shots, etc.
Just another ignorant fascists who should not be in the position he is now.
Neil DeGrasse Tyson’s shtick is presenting arcane, interesting trivia with a booming voice and flamboyant style. He is an astrophysicist. 98% of what he talks about isn’t about that.
And on some stuff, even physics, he’s just wrong. e.g Tyson: “Hydrogen bombs don’t produce fall-out.” How can he be so ignorant about the hydrogen bomb testing in the Pacific?
He may be entertaining. But nobody should put any import in what he says.
Scientism is a good one word description for what I’ve always called “political science.” Either these phonies actually believe this tripe OR large checks are the reason.
I listened to Tyson …ONCE. Then I realized what he was: Affirmative Action Hero.
So many today parade around as superior…and they are lower than BLM.
Tomboys don’t cross the gender line. Tomboys are girls-I was one-and they know they’re girls.
Thanks. We only had one Tomboy in my elementary school. She was very popular and was the only girl who could compete in the boys sports.
“The decline from Tyson to Sagan?” Don’t you mean “the decline from Sagan to Tyson?
“
The propagandists love to accuse the skeptics as “anti-science.” It’s an absurd allegation that should tell you all you need to know about political charlatans. If we challenge your assertion that 2 + 2 = 5, we’re not anti-math. Your answer is just wrong.
I always felt he was a fraud. He just seemed off.
Tyson is a commercial hit, but is nothing more than “Feelings, nothing more than feelings” wrapped in walnut stained credentialism.
Don’t forget Carl Sagan pushed the “Nuclear Winter” hysteria. An early example of scientism.
Too stupid to be a real scientist. But the right colour to be a ‘science presenter’. The ability to read (an auto cue) helps
Total d*ckhead
Sounds similar to what Michio Kaku is always rambling on about:
Black holes and dead stars and billions of light-years of blather.
As for Sagan, I lost respect for him due to his treatment of Immanuel Velikovsky, who proferred a “catastrophist” theory of earth history that challenged the prevailing Darwinian view of things. He fought to prevent the realization of Velikovksy’s desire to present his views at relevant forums for evaluation. This went on for about 25 years. Then, after Velikovsky’s death, Sagan came out with an article in Parade Magazine advocating a view that the earth has experienced many catastrophic events of global significance. It was almost pure Velikovksy. I was shocked reading the article and thought “Sagan—you clever plagiarist/fraud.” Disgusting use of a guy’s theories that he had ridiculed relentlessly over decades.
You all are morons, if it wasn’t for science we’d still be living in the dark ages. 99% of the things you take for granted are because of discoveries by science.