This morning, I read a pile of bullshit about Tyson written by an anti-intellectual reverse-snob — he thinks he should be proud of being so blatantly pro-mystery and anti-science.
Neil deGrasse Tyson is, supposedly, an educator and a populariser of science; it’s his job to excite people about the mysteries of the universe, communicate information, and correct popular misconceptions. This is a noble, arduous, and thankless job, which might be why he doesn’t do it. What he actually does is make the universe boring, tell people things that they already know, and dispel misconceptions that nobody actually holds. In his TV appearances, puppeted by an invisible army of scriptwriters, this tendency is barely held in check, but in his lectures or on the internet it’s torrential; a seeping flood of grey goo, paring down the world to its driest, dullest, most colourless essentials. He likes to watch scifi films, and point out all the inaccuracies. Actually, lasers wouldn’t make any sound in space; actually a light year is a unit of space rather than time; actually, none of this is real, it’s just a collection of still images projected at speed to present the illusion of movement, and all the characters are just actors who have never really been into outer space.
There’s a hint of a point to his long-winded diatribe; scientists who simply drily list the facts or point to a pretty picture from the Hubble telescope aren’t really promoting understanding. But we also need to dispel the nonsense that that writer seems to think are essential, like clouds inhabited by angels
or his Lord Jesus Christ
. It’s disgraceful when a scientist dismisses poetry or philosophy, but you can also go too far in the other direction, and dismiss reality. Both are deplorable.
I was ready to go off on a rant about that this morning, and then Tyson had to open his mouth and leave me completely deflated. An interview was published that just left me muttering, “Why, Neil, why?”.
He’s going to double down on his claim that species with painful sex would go extinct, by making the goal posts dance.
“With regard to the sex, that was interesting because some biologists jumped on me claiming that it’s just false. And people love nothing more, apparently, in revealing or finding that I’ve said something that’s wrong. Now, so do I. I take great joy in finding if I said something wrong, because then I’ve learned something.
“But what happened in the case of the sex hurting and the species going extinct, biologists and people were quick to say, ‘Oh, he should stick to astrophysics.’ Well, why? Oh, because there are species where sex hurts and is quite painful.
“There is a woman who has a blog (Emily Willingham, writing at www.forbes.com), who wrote a whole thing giving examples of painful sex. And in every single case, it was describing the pain of one of the partners in sex, not both.
“In another case, she was describing the praying mantis. The female praying mantis, after they mate, bites the head off the male. But was it enjoyable up to that point? Right? She doesn’t bit the head off before they mate!
“So yes, of course, there are situations that are painful. So I wrote back to her. She said, ‘Clearly he doesn’t know all these cases,’ but of course I knew all those cases. What I don’t know, and maybe they’ve put it out there, I’m looking for a case where both parties to a sexual encounter experience pain. Because if only one experiences pain, that doesn’t prevent reproduction. Because it could be so pleasurable for the other party that, who cares? They just go on in.”
I was left breathless by 1) the arrogance, as if biologists know so little, 2) the ignorance, because he is so unaware of the facts that even when he’s told about them, he denies them, and 3) the complete lack of imagination — sex feels good for humans, therefore pleasure is the only drive imaginable. Throwing in the cavalier mention (and dismissal) of “a woman who has a blog” is just the shit icing on the cake.
Nature does not rely on making things feel good to gently compel organisms to do them. It also uses pain. And often it doesn’t even bother with these kinds of perceptual games.
Here’s an example we’re all familiar with: we have to poop approximately every day. Is it because it feels good? While of course some people can fetishize it, and there is often relief when the mission is accomplished, the primary impetus to do it is discomfort and pain. Abstain, and the pressure builds, and the awkwardness grows in your bowels, and it may lead to cramps and severe physical pain if we avoid the duty long enough. But we aren’t (well, most of us) aren’t dancing about in joyous anticipation of release.
For many organisms, pleasure and pain aren’t even relevant. Nematodes, for instance, are driven by a clock — they have a sphincter that opens rhythmically, with a relatively fixed period for which we even have mutations with different period lengths. You can even measure their behavior by looking for the regular trail of little fecal dots they leave behind.
“But that’s not sex,” I can hear Neil protesting. Sex is different.
No, it’s not.
There are times when sea urchins spawn. There’s nothing intimate or personal about it — the males and females just simultaneously spew out clouds of sperm and eggs in such volume that they can make the sea milky. Do they do it because it feels good? I don’t know. Echinoderms are notably lacking in expression. They’re also lacking in an inclination to masturbate, so these sporadic expulsions of gametes have more the character of a compulsion, a drive triggered by water conditions and tides and seasons and hormones. It’s also an expensive behavior, marked by stress. Sea urchins lack a brain — they have a nerve ring with five radiating peripheral nerves — so even associating the behavior with a function like “pleasure” is problematic.
And then his excuse, that all that matters is that it feels good for one sex and that Willingham failed to mention any case where both sexes suffer, is so pathetically bad that it just confirms that he doesn’t know much of anything about biology.
His example of mantises is awful. How does he know that the male or the female is doing it for pleasure up to the moment she bites his head off? Mantises are only slightly more capable of expression than a sea urchin. Apparently, Neil deGrasse Tyson imagining that they’re having fun counts as data.
I’ve watched spiders mate — the females sometimes eat the males there, too — and if I had to attach an emotion to the male’s activity before hand it wouldn’t be “happy anticipation of a pleasurable dalliance”, but “stark raving terror”. They sneak about and dart in, hoping not to be caught. It’s a need, not a fun choice for an afternoon’s pleasure. I have no idea if they have the equivalent of an orgasm when they reach her oviduct, but it’s unlikely — they make their sperm packet before running in to stuff it into the female’s opening.
And Willingham addressed his excuse with her very first example: semelparous fish, like salmon. Neither sex gets a lot of joy out of reproduction. They batter themselves half to death trying to get upstream; they exert themselves to such a degree that their flesh is like an exhausted desintegrating bruise by the time they get to the spawning grounds, and then they die. Is Tyson seriously going to suggest that these animals with very tiny brains are doing this in anticipation of the orgiastic ecstasy of the one time they get to have sex, an event that they have never experienced, and which they haven’t even read about in letters to the Penthouse forum?
They suffer because they must, because their physiology compels them, and I very much doubt that they’re deliriously joyful at the agonies they must undergo to end their need. To infer that Nature must make them happy in addition to making them strain to die is to bestow an unwarranted beneficence on biology, without evidence.
Neil Tyson, learn a little humility. Biologists actually do know more about biology than you do. These are questions that biologists have been thinking about, and trying to answer, for over a century, and your excuses sound more like natural theology than natural history.
It’s disappointing. It’s bad science. And it’s spectacularly atrocious science education.
Im not sure why so many of the scientists, who assume the mantle of public education, end up spiraling down the rabbit hole of egomania but it does seem to happen with significant regularity.
Tyson seems to be getting worse as time goes on. Arguing with flat earth believers is not worth the tweet characters he wastes and his recent comments on inheritance and reproductive physiology only serve to demonstrate that he has not read the worthwhile books of his fellow atheist club member Dawkins.
One of Tyson’s heroes is Carl Sagan who was a complete twit, in my humble opinion. We were somehow expected to be inspired about science by watching Carl stare profoundly into the distance while thinking, what we are obviously expected to believe were, great thoughts. The same jerkoff sued Apple because they used the name “Sagan” as a code name for a new product under development. Then he sued them again when they changed the name to “astronomer butt head” It was all about the brand and had nothing to do with science. Carl Sagan was interested in protecting his niche in the monetizing of science than in enlightening anyone.
Many of the science educators come to their role with a lot of education but no scientific credentials to speak of. Tyson, Sagan, and Harris are the ones that come to mind. None of them were successful in the world or scientific research. In one sense I can understand why a witty looser, in the science game, would try to come up with a way to make a living using what he learned in school.
What is more mystifying for me is how someone like Richard Dawkins, who made serious contributions in his chosen field, would get caught in the spiral, late in life, and start channeling Sagan’s dopey stare and try to turn interest in science into some sort of personality cult. Selling books is probably part of the explanation and it may have something to do with aging.
The same guys try to cash in on atheism by making a simple and logical decision into something complex enough that we must buy books on the subject to guide our thinking. Nobody tried to sell me a book to help me through the process of growing beyond belief in Santa and I really dont feel like I need to book to reassure me that religion does not make much sense. The burden is really on the mythology sales people to convince me, not the other way around.
Real scientists, like Stephen Hawking , can provide all the validation one needs in a single sentence and is to busy with real science to bother trying to cash in.
Tyson has obviously decided that he needs to find subject matter that is suitable for the really stupid people he has decided must be his constituency.
“Oh I love finding out I’m wrong and learning something new, now let’s talk about how I’m totally not wrong about any of this.”
All things considered though, it really doesn’t surprise me. Tyson has always struck me as a confrontational kind of guy. He may be excitable and energetic about science, but he’s also the kind of guy that wants to go in guns blazing when someone challenges him. The problem of course is that like another scientist we’re all familiar with, he reacts that way not just when challenged in his own area of expertise, but also when challenged on statements outside his area of expertise.
@1, John Lewis:
“None of them were successful in the world or scientific research.”
You might want to rethink that. Both Tyson and Sagan have quite a lot of published research under their belts. Sagan was instrumental in researching the planet Venus, especially its climate. He’s the one who predicted it was a runaway greenhouse with surface temperatures in the hundreds of degrees and working with the Mariner missions. He worked to select the landing sites for Viking 1 and 2 as well as working with NASA on Pioneer 10 and 11 as well as Voyager 1 and 2 (and not just to put the gold record on). He correctly theorized that Titan had liquid on its surface and that Europa would have liquid water under its. He’s one of the people who figured out that the reason Mars would get hazy is because of dust storms, not any biological or seasonal activity. He also did work on the synthesis of organic compounds such as ATP. At Cornell, he was the director of the Laboratory for Planetary Studies.
Tyson did most of his work in astronomy, including the COSMOS project and has published articles on various supernovae.
To claim that these people have “no scientific credentials to speak of” is a plain falsehood and one wonders where you got the idea that two PhDs in astronomy with plenty of published articles don’t have any.
“Real scientists, like Stephen Hawking , can provide all the validation one needs in a single sentence and is to busy with real science to bother trying to cash in.”
So Hawking didn’t write _A Brief History of Time_? He didn’t appear on _Star Trek_? He didn’t do _Steven Hawking’s Universe,_ or _Into the Universe with Stephen Hawking_ or _Brave New World with Stephen Hawking_ or go on about having to leave the planet because of various reasons (self-inflicted destruction, space aliens coming to destroy us, etc.)?
The strangest thing about this for me is that very few species having sex for pleasure is one of the most well known science tidbits around. It always comes with the exact same three examples: humans, bonobos, and dolphins. It’s exactly the sort of pop science factoid that “populizers” like Tyson come up with to get people interested. That he’s apparently never heard any version of it is baffling.
Going by that logic, rape is perfectly okay, as long as one person has fun. For fuck’s sake, Neil, shut up.
If to encourage producing kids evolution has produced sex that is only enjoyable and never painful, why isn’t the same true for delivering the kid? Shouldn’t it be super enjoyable as well to encourage more kids? And the pregnancy too? Shouldn’t it also be a pleasure from beginning to end?
Caine,
That’s extrapolating a bit too much. He’s making false claims about evolution not morality.
Wow, that’s a very callous dismissal of rape.
Beatrice:
I don’t think it is, at all. I’ve seen too many people use body betrayal as “proof” there’s no such thing as actual rape, because it’s still possible for the forced person to orgasm. Sorry if you think it’s a bit much, but after hearing such shit for years on end, and living through Dawkins’s idiocy when it comes rape, I can see where these types of statements will go, whether Tyson goes there or not. Other people will.
Caine
It also frames rape again as a crime of lust, a reproductive strategy, completely dismissing the power aspect that is usually at its core. Rapists aren’t people who get carried away with how good it feels to get their dick wet and who then pass their dick-wetting genes on to their dick having offspring…
Well, first off, I do have at least a little sympathy with the first quote – I find Tyson and every other person that nit-picks escapist fantasy media for scientific accuracy profoundly annoying.
Secondly, I’m with Caine. If you’re going to declare that sex isn’t actually painful because one party is enjoying it, you have some weird ideas about how reciprocity and sex works. Just imagine plugging in consent for pain.
“After all, is it really nonconsensual if only one party didn’t consent? For the other partner, it’s perfectly consensual.”
@11, Vivec:
“Well, first off, I do have at least a little sympathy with the first quote – I find Tyson and every other person that nit-picks escapist fantasy media for scientific accuracy profoundly annoying.”
And that isn’t what he does. People ask him and he gives his comments, but it’s not like he makes a habit of discussing issues in movies. If you don’t want to know, then don’t ask.
As an example, a friend of mine works for JPL in their Mars rover division. She’s the first woman to have laid down tracks on Mars. She actually designs and builds the robots. She has some comments about _The Martian_…but only if you ask her about them. She knows it’s popular entertainment, but she’s got a point that if they’re going to go for the realism, then they made some big errors.
Rubber wheels? Air-filled, rubber wheels?
If I can get her to clear some time on her schedule, she’s going to do an episode for my podcast where we discuss the wheels, why you don’t have air-filled, rubber wheels on Mars, and exactly what goes into the design and engineering of wheels for extra-planetary use. It’s actually quite fascinating.
I don’t ask, I don’t follow him, and I have no interest in him whatsoever.
My friends like to retweet his like “lol spaceship battles would be silent/why didn’t sandra bullock’s hair float” tweets, which is why I have the impression of him being a nitpicky wet blanket.
Like, for real, if you make tweets like “Why do people enjoy sci-fi more than real life astronomy?”, I feel pretty comfortable calling you a wet blanket.
Re. Caine at 5 and Giliell at 8:
That Tyson wrote that seems particularly disturbing in the context of previous reports about him: http://freethoughtblogs.com/pharyngula/2016/01/27/disgraceful-exploitation/ .
Don’t slugs stab each other to mate in a nasty way? there ya go. painful for both. easy-peasy.
(now i’ll find out i’m wrong and should have doublechecked, but meh. :P)
It’s a popular misconception that the Dunning Kruger effect is something exhibited by stupid people. Quite the opposite. Smart people are even more prone to it.
Giliell:
Exactly. And it’s not a good idea to give anyone the impression that’s how it really, truly works.
michaelbusch:
Yeah, I know about that. If Tyson really thinks this way, well, it might mean his personal views on sexual assault and rape may be less than stellar, and that’s saying the least.
rrhain@12,
I disagree. That’s pretty much exactly what he does.
And even if he does it in response to questions (it’s possible there was a “what did you think of Gravity” question somewhere in his timeline there), I don’t think that’s much of an excuse, especially when you’re a famous person with zillions of followers who ask you all sorts of questions. It’s a little like someone saying “Donald Trump only talks about Obama not being born in this country when someone asks him about it.” Well…. yeah, and so? Twitter isn’t a deposition; you’re not obligated to answer every question someone asks. If you choose to go off on a rant about someone because one of the many questions you get triggered it, it’s fair for other people to comment on your decision to rant about it.
“Just Answering Questions” isn’t really that different an excuse from “Just Asking Questions.”
@20, screechymonkey:
You need to pay better attention. This all started because Tyson was asked his opinion about _Titanic_ all those years ago and he made a single comment about how they got the stars wrong. And the only reason he said that is because Cameron was making a big deal about accuracy. Not only were the stars wrong, it was mirrored: The left half of the skyfield was a mirror image of the right. And when it was re-issued, Cameron fixed it.
And then it became a “thing” for Tyson. He understands quite well that it’s all just a movie, but people really do want to know the difference between what the movie is saying and what reality dictates. It’s why Mythbusters spent so much of its time on movie myths in the later years. Can you really jump a bus like in _Speed_? (Busted) Can you really survive off the air in the tires of the sinking car like in _A View to a Kill_? (Busted) Is the “high ground” really an advantage in a sword fight like they said in _Star Wars_? (Busted) Can you shoot a gun across the floor like you see in so many movies? (Confirmed) They had an entire episode devoted to _Breaking Bad_ where most of the physics was just wrong (you can’t dissolve a body like that, it won’t dissolve the bathtub, mercury fulminate isn’t that explosive, etc.)
People really do like understanding the difference between movie physics and real physics.
Hey, if you don’t like that he does it or the manner in which he does it, that’s fine. It’s not like he’s your buddy and that’s all he talks about when you get together. If you don’t want to hear from him, you never have to.
But let’s not pretend you understand *why* he does it.
Yeah now that I think about it, pleasure only servers one purpose – to make you do the same thing again.
In the case of salmon or any other creature that only has sex once in its life, pleasure would serve absolutely no purpose whatsoever. Not for either partner, ever.
And yet you decided to get all offended at me saying that people like him that overanalyze movies are profoundly annoying wet blankets.
The “he’s just doing what people ask” defense doesn’t really change that. I don’t do everything people ask me to, even if they might like it, because I’d look like a total tool. And, as far as I’m convinced, Tyson looks like a total tool.
rrhain@21,
No, you need to actually write what you mean and stop moving the goalposts.
You started by claiming that NdGT only nitpicks movies in response to questions. Now you’re saying that he does it because some people like it. As opposed to what? Did you think anyone here was saying that literally nobody likes his tweets on those subjects?
Gosh, that’s mighty magnanimous of you. News flash, dipshit: that’s exactly what this conversation has been about, some people expressing their annoyance that he does this and the way in which he does this. Then you barged in to declare that he was Just Answering Questions, as if that negated everyone’s opinions.
Oh, fuck off, you condescending asshole. I know exactly why he does it.
rrhain:
Let me get this straight. He’s on TV, in movies, publicized widely on the internet, and so forth. We could all just go back to living in a cave and ignore everything.* Or we could do what basically anybody does whenever someone (Dr. Oz, let’s say) engages in mass communication about anything, which is to criticize them. Sometimes it’ll be positive criticism, sometimes negative. Whether positive or negative, sometimes it will be constructive and well-reasoned and worth paying attention to, sometimes it won’t be. Is that supposed to be some kind of a problem?
If you do like what he does, the manner in which he does it, and you do want to hear from him, you never have to. I don’t know what the point of a statement like that is supposed to be, but there you go: it’s just as helpful as your advice.
I suppose he does it because he thinks he knows things, and he gets some kind of satisfaction out of educating people about what he thinks he knows. He has said as much himself, but of course, like anyone else, he’s not always and necessarily a reliable source about his own motivations. A large variety of things could be causing that behavior.
What difference does it make? Sometimes, he actually knows what he’s talking about, and in other cases he’s misinforming the public. The latter behavior is problematic, whether or not we can explain why it’s happening, no matter how certain we are about the provisional explanations we’ve come up with. Analogously, if we weren’t certain about the causes of an earthquake or some other natural disaster, as most people were for millennia, we should nevertheless help the survivors. If we thought maybe recent human activities aren’t a dominant factor in climate change, we’d still have to deal with the fucking fact that the fucking climate is fucking changing. That’s just not fucking relevant.
If we don’t know why Tyson occasionally says shit that’s just plain wrong, of course we don’t have to listen to him. Of course we don’t need to do anything about it at all, if we are listening. The questions still ask themselves: How the fuck is that relevant? Why shouldn’t we do something?
Notice here that, if we “do anything about it,” it mostly consists of saying stuff. What’s the fucking problem? If you don’t like it, you don’t have to listen either, whatever the fuck that’s worth.
*True Fact, with extra Science on top: we weren’t living in caves to begin with. Myth officially busted.
Flatworm penis jousting looks painful to me. Wonder what NDT would think of it. Also am I wrong, or is it usually physicist (in this case an astrophysicist) who think they know about biology when they don’t? At least from examples PZ has shown me.
All physicists and other math-oriented types are jealous of the biologists and chemists getting to wear those snazzy lab coats every day so they pick on them all of the time.
@23, Vivec
“And yet you decided to get all offended at me saying that people like him that overanalyze movies are profoundly annoying wet blankets.”
No, I point out that you are projecting your opinion onto him. There is a difference between, “I think that is pointless,” and, “That is pointless.” You’re essentially making the argument that knowing how optics works to make a rainbow somehow diminishes the rainbow.
He likes doing it (I presume…I’m hoping nobody is forcing him to do it.) People like him doing it (or they wouldn’t be reading his comments). To pretend that he is some sort of buzzkill simply because *you* don’t like him doing it is presumputous at best.
You don’t get to tell him what to do.
Hint: You’re being a tool.
@24, screechymonkey
“No, you need to actually write what you mean and stop moving the goalposts.”
No, you need to pay better attention. I gave you the history of how this started and it has now become a thing. People like that he does it and I presume he likes doing it. As he has directly pointed out many times when this comes up (you really think this was the first time anybody talked about his commentary on sci-fi movies?) he doesn’t go to movies specifically to find their flaws. It’s that there are people who want to know and so he tells them.
And gosh, that’s mighty impressive of you to insist that he conform to your standards. News flash, putz, you don’t get to tell others what to do. If you don’t like it, then do yourself a favor and stop obsessing about it. The more you think about what other people do that doesn’t involve you, the more upset you make yourself.
I didn’t declare that he was “Just Answering Questions.” That was you. That was all you.
What I said was you have no clue as to why he’s doing what he’s doing. He’s actually said why, but heaven forbid he should have a better idea of his own mind because you are the standard by which all others are judged.
@25, consciousness razor:
“Let me get this straight. He’s on TV,”
Somebody’s making you watch him? He’s on every single channel? I haven’t seen him since he did a bit on _The Nightly Show_ back in January. What is it about your life that has you running into him everywhere you turn? I mean, I get if he’s your next-door neighbor and you run into him every evening when you go home. But you were talking about TV.
“in movies,”
Same problem: Somebody’s making you watch him? The last movie I saw with him in it was Zoolander 2 (and what a sad piece of work that was). He’s apparently got bit parts in the upcoming Batman v. Superman and Ice Age movies, but I never saw Lazer Team and that’s it as far as movies he’s made. What movies are you talking about? Is he doing a lot of uncredited stuff?
“publicized widely on the internet,”
Same problem: Somebody’s making you read his work? He’s got a Twitter feed, but he isn’t on mine. Did someone make you put him on yours?
“We could all just go back to living in a cave and ignore everything.”
Huh? You seem to be saying that he’s to the Science Channel the way Kim Kardashian is to the E! Network.
Yeah, he’s popular. But he’s hardly everywhere such that you have to actually put in effort to avoid him if you don’t like him.
Go ahead and criticize him. He’s made some pretty boneheaded comments. But, “And your hair’s funny, too!” isn’t really up there on the criticism scale.
“If you do like what he does, the manner in which he does it, and you do want to hear from him, you never have to. I don’t know what the point of a statement like that is supposed to be, but there you go: it’s just as helpful as your advice.”
That’s because yours makes no logical sense. I say that if you don’t like something, you don’t have to engage with it and you respond by saying that if you do, you don’t have to engage with it. I think you’ve got a negation error in there somewhere.
“I suppose he does it because he thinks he knows things, and he gets some kind of satisfaction out of educating people about what he thinks he knows.”
I see you weren’t paying attention. Let’s try it again:
Let’s not pretend you understand *why* he does it.
Because he has said why. Is there a reason why you think you can substitute your opinion about his life for his? I see there may be a creeping issue of confusion of subject. That is:
“If we don’t know why Tyson occasionally says shit that’s just plain wrong.”
What does that have to do with his comments about, say, Gravity? Communications satellites really are at 230 miles up? Are you confusing his bone-headed comments regarding biology and philosophy with his commentary about movies? We’re back to the, “And your hair’s funny, too!” line of argumentation.
“If you don’t like it, you don’t have to listen either, whatever the fuck that’s worth.”
I see…so it’s OK for you to tell others to fuck off, but anybody daring to apply that same attitude to you is, what was it screechy monkey said? Oh, that’s right: A dipshit.
Physician, heal thyself.
“It’s disappointing. It’s bad science. And it’s spectacularly atrocious science education.”
And it’s very similar to those recent dismissals of philosophy.
So I’m allowed to not like him and think he’s profoundly annoying, but I’m not allowed to say that I think he’s profoundly annoying? Because that’s all I said in my original post, which you objected to.
Yeah, but I can insult him for being an annoying tool as much as I want.
No, I’m making the argument that I find him to be an annoying buzzkill, because he does things that I consider annoying and buzzkill-ish.
Perhaps, we should have some biologists intentionally butcher astrophysics.
Perhaps, discussing the corona and electromagnetic things in a way that sounds like the idiotic electric star insanity.
Then, talk about fission in the stellar core, followed with Neil, you screw up my field, I’ll screw yours to hell and gone. Stick in your lane!
I’m infamous for a flat earth joke, “The earth is actually flat. The gravity twists is all around to look round”. The punch line is the math and what the gravitational field would be like to actually make it happen.
Or perhaps, stick within physics for Neil. “Neil, you’re not even wrong”.
rrhain:
Huh? You’re talking about his discussion of the fake sky in Titanic. I don’t recall the details now, but we was already a fairly well-publicized science popularizer when he went onto whatever talk show it was and registered that complaint. It’s not like some random person on the street asked him a question, then suddenly it became “a thing” that people listened to him. He was already given a platform. Your history is really fucking distorted if you’re leaving all of that out.
For what it’s worth, I do agree with him that attention to that kind of detail is nice in a movie (if not the actual sky for that specific date/location, at least a real or realistic-looking sky). In a huge, expensive blockbuster like that, you’re already spending loads of cash on making sure the fancy china (or sets or period clothing or whatever) looks just like the real stuff on the real historical Titanic, so you could at least exert some minimal effort to try to portray the rest of the physical world somewhat accurately. So ask an astronomer about the sky then and there, because they can easily calculate shit like that for you. It’s not that hard or costly to do. That’s a good criticism to make, although it’s not the sort of thing most professional film critics would even notice, much less make a big deal out of it.
Some people wouldn’t even want to listen to an ordinary film critic. Who cares that this shot or this bit of dialogue isn’t an appropriate way to tell the story, doesn’t make for a believable character, doesn’t help the audience engage with the material, is problematic morally or socially, etc.? You’re ruining all of the fun that I have, with a movie I enjoy, by saying stuff like that. That’s what they’ll say. I don’t think it makes sense to complain about the existence of constructive criticism like that. But the critics themselves (just like Tyson) certainly aren’t infallible — their work can be scrutinized too.
No and no. How could that be relevant?
Okay, case closed. But I didn’t need your permission. You made it sound like I did.
I know that I don’t have to do it. I’m sure everybody fucking knew that already. But thanks for reminding us? What exactly is your point?
Who said that? Are you just making this up?
What you’re saying makes no sense. It’s irrelevant that I don’t have to. I do. And I probably should engage, even though I’m not compelled to do so, if he’s making “some pretty boneheaded comments.” Or if he says something I thought is really important or really good, I have to say anything about it either, but I can and will if I fucking like it.
I don’t need to be compelled, and I never said I was. That was entirely your invention, but it makes no fucking difference whether or not I “had to” engage with it. You don’t “have to” save a child who’s drowning in a lake either, but you should.
If you think that’s some kind of an appropriate response (“you don’t have to do this”), which is supposed persuade anybody that they ought to change whatever they’re doing, you’ll need to run that argument by me again. Because I don’t fucking get it.
Because it’s not an opinion. There are facts about the causes of human behavior, because we’re natural objects like everything else. Whatever it may be, and whatever his “opinion” is, people can be wrong about what causes their own behavior. People aren’t good at introspecting, they’re not honest about reporting the results of introspection to others, and even in ideal cases introspection doesn’t give you access to all of the relevant information anyway. Isn’t all of that true?
Besides, I didn’t give an opinion that failed to respect what he actually has said about it, since he can give us some decent evidence: I said that he likes to educate people, which is what he himself has reported to us on multiple occasions. And I believe that. But I’m sure it’s not the only answer, and taking a person’s word for it no matter what is simply foolish. If he said he went to heaven and received mystical wisdom from Jesus, and that’s why he does what he does, I wouldn’t just take his fucking word for it. If I’m not simply going to act like a completely gullible fucking idiot, I’m honestly going to be evaluating what I think is a plausible explanation, which doesn’t necessarily agree with the one given by the subject in question, because there’s more than enough reason to do so.
If that agrees with his own evaluation, great, no problem. If not, I still had good fucking reasons to ask myself what I think is probably the case, whether or not I’m correct. And if you’re going to pretend that you don’t do the same thing all of the fucking time (and that really would require a lot of fucking pretending), I’m not going to believe you either.
williamgeorge@27: “All physicists and other math-oriented types are jealous of the biologists and chemists getting to wear those snazzy lab coats every day so they pick on them all of the time.”
At the University of Zaragoza, where I worked for a semester eons ago, we mathematicians did get to wear snazzy coats that looked like lab coats (but were really just to keep the chalk dust off our real clothes; the actual Spanish [male] professors tended to wear dark suits beneath their lab coats).
Literally all of this over a throwaway comment about how I think that nitpicking escapist fantasy is being a bit of a wet blanket. If that’s your thing, cool, but I’m just being truthful by saying that I find it annoying.
@34 leerudolph;
Did you get to wear the safety goggles as well?
My mental cliche also suggests clipboards are part of the uniform but I’m not sure about that.
“So yes, of course, there are situations that are painful. So I wrote back to her. She said, ‘Clearly he doesn’t know all these cases,’ but of course I knew all those cases.”
But of course he knew alllllll those cases! Fucking hell, palpable arrogance.
rrhain @28:
Oh, I see now. You’re one of those idiots who flips out if people don’t write “IMHO” before every statement. That’s so cute. I haven’t seen your kind around in years.
And I think it’s hilarious that you’re compulsively defending NdGT in this thread while telling the rest of us that nobody is forcing us to read him. If you had two brain cells to rub together, you’d spot the irony.
Seriously, this is like usenet all over again. It’s so precious. It’s like you just discovered the internet last week.
Ah, he waved from inside the hole and then buckled down for some more digging. Pleasure being any part of sex or reproduction is more of an anomaly in nature. It’s ironic that NGT mentions changing one’s ego by deconstructing it from a universal perspective, only to reconstruct it to immense proportions when he is called to deconstruct his ego from a biological perspective instead of anthropomorphising animal sex. Instinctual behaviour, basic primal drives and urges presumably don’t exist in his world.
And even taking his challenge at face value, humans also happen to be a species where people can and do copulate and reproduce due to social expectations and a desire for children, even in cases where the sex act is unpleasant to both partners (I remember a story about two lovely Russian gay and lesbian couples living in flats side by side pretending to be heterosexual couples. They had kids from both mums while none of the copulators were enjoying the procreative sex. Wow, NGT, you’ve just disproved there’s any genetic component to sexual orientation!
Also rrhain, you made a few good points but you’re really coming off as an ass-mask with your nitpickery. Just drop it, please.
Writers and speakers become famous for their words, because they said something that enlightens the public or that people agree with. I fear that some of them start thinking they can say anything and people will accept it, that it is themselves that people now gravitate to and not their ideas. I don’t want to use the word, but hubris is the one that fits.
Or even if sex isn’t involved, why do animals do certain things? Honey bees die when stinging to protect the hive. Do they know they are being sent to their deaths and accept it (e.g. like the conditioning of soldiers) or is it just a chemical response with no sense of self-preservation? On the other hand, some ants don’t do search and rescue on lost ants they can’t see, but will organize to rescue one that they can see. Is it an evolved trait to rescue others, or a choice based on efficient use of resources?
Isn’t that anthropomorphising a lot? Likening a bee to a soldier? Asking questionings about reasoning in ants, with its massive quarter million neuron brain?
If comparing sexual behavior, wouldn’t it be more appropriate to discuss sexual behavior between species?
As for other exchanges, it reminds me of a joke, ‘How do you start a riot at a taxonomists convention? Shout a question in the bar, is it Pan Sapiens or Pan Sapiens? For that matter, is it Homo Troglodytes? Then, run”.
If only there was a discipline that taught people about fallacies and encouraged them to examine & question their own biases and ignorances.
Hey, none of that philosophy talk here. This is big boy science town where anything softer than a year-old baguette is navel gazing nonsense.
Aw.
Is anyone here reminded of Michio Kaku?
It’s as if these guys are maneuvering to be Carl Sagan or something.
What a rotten spit on the attempt to educate the public.
As an aside, for a physicist who valued philosophy as a tool, you’d be hard pressed to find a better example than David Bohm. I highly recommend Wholeness and the Implicate Order; Bohm takes his understanding of quantum physics and endeavours to apply it both ontologically and to language, in order to help align how we think about the world with what he believed to be the reality.
Physics without philosophy is like atheism without morality: a pointless, masturbatory exercise.
@#1, John Lewis: I personally knew and worked with Carl. Your comment is not supported by the actuality. Sagan was not only a fine scientist but also – unlike the vast majority of his peers – a stalwart proponent of educating the public in an engaging way.
I will readily agree with you (as Sagan himself confided to me) that the shots of him “staring into the distance” as if it conveyed some profound scientific posture, were almost impossible to watch without (as Carl himself put it) a “serious gag reflex”.
Regardless of your personal opinion, Sagan was a significant exponent of public education and the promotion of awareness of how the explorations of science impinges on the daily lives of people. Nothing will ever detract from that fact.
Your laughable assertion that a ‘real scientist’ like Stephen Hawking ought not to be castigated under the very same criteria that you direct towards Sagan (an example who is beyond argument far beneath the scope of Sagan when it comes to clarity in written manuscript, especially when it comes to introducing people to the philosophy of science and the merit of scepticism) is an indication that you are speaking off the cuff on a personal opinion unadorned by any attempt to understand the motivations that moved Sagan to help the public understand science, and understand the pitfalls of commercial necessity that he had to endure to get that important message across.
As a published planetary scientist Sagan’s record is quite clear. Any comparison with NdT is, quite frankly, preposterous.
You may be dismayed (if not amazed) to learn that Carl was denied acceptance into the vaunted legion of the AAS because his peers didn’t like the idea that a scientist appears to set himself apart by daring to communicate with non-scientists, particularly because of the “celebrity” status that he found himself mired in. His popular books (especially starting with “The Cosmic Connection”) and his appearances on the Johnny Carson show (Carson, who was himself an avid amateur who actually owned and used a telescope and read -gasp- science-oriented books because he had a genuine interest in science) previous to the premier of his PBS “Cosmos” series were great hits with the public, yet were viewed by many of his academic peers as an exercise in self-aggrandizement.
Today we are faced with people who are less dedicated to actually instructing the public in favor of the kind of sordid celebrityhood we see in the likes of NdG and Michio Kaku. Its a culture bent on dumbing down rather than authentic explanation. (Anybody who knows science who looks at the offerings of cable TV knows that we are living in a Dark Age). This state of affairs is diametrically opposed to what Sagan sought to bring about,
Just because you couldn’t stomach his gazing out into the distance doesn’t mean he was enthused about the direction and editing, and however unfortunate that commercial pumping is, it certainly doesn’t mean that Sagan’s eloquent words as expressed in his books have done far more to acquaint the public with science than Hawking – now celebrity extraordinaire by virtue of his superior in public communication who laid the groundwork for such platform – ever has.
BTW: you do realize that Hawking needs a great deal of help to “write” “his” papers and popular books. Perhaps those individuals deserve a little credit for his success too..as a kind of industry.
@anchor, your words recalled to me an Omni magazine cartoon of Sagan, entitled, “Millions and billions of Carl Sagans”. It had a mass of him drawn in a huge group.
I’m sure he’d have enjoyed the humor involved at the time.
He was a unique person, who did indeed contribute to the popular understanding of science, the likes of which we’ve lacked since we lost him.
Today, with our current media, an old physics joke for parties, “The earth really is flat, it’s gravity that twists it into a sphere” would be taken and run with by the press with a headline, “Science proves that the earth really is flat”. Added to support it, sound bites taken of scientists trying to explain the joke, but so butchered as to sound as if they supported it.
Add in the climate of anti-intellectualism, it’s astonishing that these same anti-science people go running to the doctor for medical care when ill or injured. Surely they’d adhere to their anti-science belief and not be a hypocrite when ill or injured! ;)
Today’s science is mixed in, goobered down to thin dilution science, sandwiched between bigfoot hunts and the Loch Ness monster in Pennsylvania (seriously, there was just such a program on last night).
STEM is fought against for political reasons, manufacturing is nearly gone and we merely entertain, rather than educate.
Give it another generation, we’ll be a proper developing nation.
Oh well, if that occurs, it’ll have one blessing: there will be nobody around who knows how to maintain a nuclear weapon.
#46, Matthew Trevor: YES. Emphatically agree. Bohm was a top-notch communicator…as well as a great physicist.
#48, wzrd1: Yes, much to agree with, and appreciated.
I hate to be facetious, but i can’t resist pointing this out…{forgive me):
“(seriously, there was just such a program on last night)”
Seriously? I thought there is something like that on not only every night but almost constantly.
I was about to check my available channels to see what manner of nonsense was on at the moment, but the prospect was so dismal and depressing I could not follow through.
@wzrd1: “Oh well, if that occurs, it’ll have one blessing: there will be nobody around who knows how to maintain a nuclear weapon.”
Geez…the problem is that that technology is all too easy, easy enough to be the last thing we deem important enough to maintain at the expense of anything else we might consider maintaining, and THEN (not long thereafter) there will be nobody around who knows how to maintain anything else, however easy.
@anchor, considering that tritium is critical to a modern nuclear warhead’s functioning, that implies the loss of nuclear reactors and the entire train of lost knowledge that leads to such loss of knowledge. :)
That said, even money, that would be the last vestige of our society that would be protected.
“…biologists and people were quick to say, ‘Oh, he should stick to astrophysics.’…
Neil, show us you are doing decent research in astrophysics (aside from, say, your second job as celebrity ‘scientist’ and ‘communicator’) and I will not insist you stick to what you pretend to be.
In the meantime you may allow that many people suspect you are inadequate in both.
First things first: get rid of the clever attitude. Its unbecoming of even those are not scientists. You – like Michio Kaku and several others – wear it like a badge, which makes it even worse. It turns many people off. Zero communication, ok? There are, after all, people who are smarter in the same universe you guys exist in, and most of them recognize the scent of bullshit when they are exposed to it. You guys might try pretending you are serious again.
Come on, man, quit the celebrity gambit and get back to what you are…a scientist.
52wzrd1: Indeed. But we all know how easily maintenance (however complex or complicated) becomes a matter of specialized ‘skills’ under sufficiently ‘well-trained’ servile patterns of behavior in lieu of any fundamental understanding of the means, let alone any purpose or consequences. (Geez, I can’t believe I actually worded such an ugly contraption in response…many pardons). ;)
@anchor, not a problem.
There is highly specialized knowledge in maintaining critical warhead components, such as replacing tritium, due to its limited half-life, corrosion prone elements that I’ll not discuss and radiation effects upon the components of the warhead.
Add in explosive that decay, due to their chemical nature, the experience base ranges from the task oriented “do this, then that” through detailed understanding of the physics and operation of the physics package.
Frankly, I’d love for knowledge of the technology to fade, however, we’d also lose the technology for x-ray telescopes and a great deal of our nuclear medicine.
As a recent recipient of diagnostic imaging through nuclear medicine, I was pleasantly surprised in regards to the scaling down of the gamma camera. That requires the far from helpful technology in order to direct gamma radiation to the detector.
One can only wish that we will soon outgrow the toys that could destroy our civilization.
@30, Vivec:
“So I’m allowed to not like him and think he’s profoundly annoying, but I’m not allowed to say that I think he’s profoundly annoying?”
Wow, you really are bad at the comprehension part of reading, aren’t you? Let’s try it again.
Have your opinion. Express your opinion.
But don’t forget that it’s *YOUR* opinion. There is a difference between you expressing your displeasure and jutsification for that displeasure and pretending that you are the standard by which others should be judged.
Especially when your justification is based upon you somehow psychically determining someone else’s motivations. When you read someone else’s mind, does it lock in like a radio where you only hear that one person, or is it like a cocktail party where you have to strain to hear one voice out of the multitudes?
“Because that’s all I said in my original post, which you objected to.”
No, you said more than that. Here’s your comment:
“I find Tyson and every other person that nit-picks escapist fantasy media for scientific accuracy profoundly annoying.”
And here’s my response:
“And that isn’t what he does. People ask him and he gives his comments, but it’s not like he makes a habit of discussing issues in movies. If you don’t want to know, then don’t ask.”
You will note that my response was based upon your presumption of understand what Tyson was doing. Yeah, he’s pointing out scientific flaws in popular movies. Not because he’s trying to “nit-pick,” as you put it, but because he’s doing what he does: Educate on science. He never slams the movies because of their use of movie physics. He understands completely that it’s just a movie. When all this started, back in Titanic, the only reason it came up is because he was asked and he responded in the context of James Cameron, a man who is known to be a perfectionist, so he pointed out something that was trivial but so oddly present from someone who is a perfectionist: A fake skyfield that was so lazy that they only made half of one and mirrored it. It’s on the level of the various “Goofs” you find listed in IMDB entries. You ever go to see the Rocky Horror Picture Show? Even the audience makes fun of the goofs. Check out the scene where Frankie is sliding the pommel horse back behind the elevator during “Charles Atlas.” You can see the stage hand sticking his hands out to receive it.
So yeah, someone who goes out of their way to point out errors, does so as some sort of indication that the person who made the movie is an idiot, does so as some sort of sign that they’re so much more superior than others, when that’s the only thing they ever seem to talk about, yeah, that’s annoying.
But that’s not what Tyson does.
I never said you shouldn’t feel what you feel. I said you should be aware that your assessment of what Tyson is doing is inaccurate. That may not mean a damned thing in the end with how you feel. But let’s not pretend that you understand what you’re doing.
“Yeah, but I can insult him for being an annoying tool as much as I want.”
And I you.
Seems you can dish it out but you can’t take it.
@33 consciousness razor:
“I don’t recall the details now, but we was already a fairly well-publicized science popularizer when he went onto whatever talk show it was and registered that complaint.”
Precisely. That’s why he was asked. As someone who was popular as a science educator, dealing with a movie by a director that is a self-described perfectionist, he pointed out something when asked about it. And it became a thing. He doesn’t do it out of some sort of spite or an attempt to show he’s superior. Complaining about it is akin to whining about those videos on YouTube that show various mistakes in movies. How many of us saw the “making of” for Star Trek 2 that showed that during the Genesis Effect demonstration, the video camera was coming up on the rising mountain and they realised that the camera was going to crash into it? They didn’t have enough time to resequence it so they hacked it by carving a canyon into the mountain just as the camera approaches…and then carved the initials of the CGI artists on the walls.
I’m sorry…did I ruin the movie?
“How could that be relevant?”
You tell me. You’re the one who brought it up. You’re the one who brought it up. Or have you forgotten your own argument:
“Let me get this straight. He’s on TV, in movies, publicized widely on the internet, and so forth. We could all just go back to living in a cave and ignore everything.”
So you tell me…you’re the one saying that he’s got a large media presence and thus the only way to avoid him is to “just go back to living in a cave and ignore everything.”
It would seem that the obvious response is to ask if someone is making you watch him. Yeah, he’s got a large media presence, but not so large that you actually come across him every day. He doesn’t have the daily Tyson Twenty where all broadcast media interrupt their programming for 20 minutes so he can deliver his latest missive.
It’s not like you even have to actively avoid him. You’ll only encounter him if you go looking for him.
“But I didn’t need your permission. You made it sound like I did.”
No, I made it sound like you’re going to be critiqued in turn. It seems you, like Vivec, can dish it out but you can’t take it.
“There are facts about the causes of human behavior”
Yep. And somehow you think you know more about his motivations than he does. For all your ranting about failing at “introspection,” people are just as bad as guessing the motives of others based off of no information but their selective memory. You have heard of cherry picking, yes? Confirmation bias? You’ve got an opinion and you’ll ignore all evidence to the contrary because it doesn’t fit your opinion. Have you considered that perhaps the problem is that you’ve got a problem with introspection? You don’t see your own failure?
“taking a person’s word for it no matter what is simply foolish.”
You mean like taking yours?
“I’m honestly going to be evaluating what I think is a plausible explanation, which doesn’t necessarily agree with the one given by the subject in question, because there’s more than enough reason to do so.”
Or, you know, not. You may think you have “more than enough reason,” but the evidence is against you.
QED
That fits every definition of nit-picking I’ve ever encountered.
Sorry that your science education hero is a wet blanket
Nit-picking by request of your fans is still nit-picking.
Also, idk where your “you can dish it out but you can’t take it” line is coming from. I never questioned your right to call me a tool.
rrhain @56:
Too bad he’s not very good at it. That, and the nonsense in Cosmos about Robert Hooke and Giordano Bruno, made it clear he doesn’t give a shit about educating. The recent bollocks just provides further evidence.
@53: anchor:
“Neil, show us you are doing decent research in astrophysics (aside from, say, your second job as celebrity ‘scientist’ and ‘communicator’) and I will not insist you stick to what you pretend to be.”
http://www.haydenplanetarium.org/tyson/curriculum-vitae
When you become a research associate and a reviewer for astronomy and astrophysics journals, you can complain about the research of others.
Surely you’re not about to say, “But he hasn’t published since 2008!” are you?
rrhain:
I’m not avoiding him. I can fucking criticize him if I think it’s worth my time. Your supremely helpful advice was that “If you don’t want to hear from him, you never have to.” Who cares?
Wake up and try to read what I’m saying here: I’m interested in what he has to say, a lot of the time. I enjoyed his version of Cosmos, for instance, although it was far from perfect. Star Talk is sometimes okay, but usually a little boring. He had a great lecture at Beyond Belief that I saw many years ago, which I’m sure is still on the internet somewhere. The point being, I have deliberately spent my time watching/listening to him, because I sometimes appreciate what he has to say. Not avoiding. Criticizing. Because sometimes, he says stupid shit, like a lot of people do. If I want to do that, don’t fucking tell me I should have shut my eyes or buried my head in the sand or that I didn’t need to watch in the first place. I already knew that. I knew that he wasn’t everywhere. It makes no difference at all that I didn’t ever have to hear from him. I chose to do that, and sometimes I’ll choose to criticize him. Get the fuck over it.
Do you comprehend that? Is this even making a dent? Or are you just trolling?
Take what? What exactly do you think you’re dishing out? So far it’s just a bunch of noise.
I didn’t ask you to take my word for anything. But that is what you expected of me. For the record, it doesn’t take fucking psychic powers and I never claimed I know more than he does. I haven’t counted how many blatant fallacies you’ve made in this exchange so far, but it’s got to be in the double digits.
Evidence about what? Does this mean anything to you?
This is some strange stuff (blockquote added, to make it more readable):
Let’s see how this is supposed to work. “nit-pick” is an explanation of a behavior instead of a description of it. So:
Nope, that’s nonsense.
Still nonsense.
More nonsense.
Looks like “nit-pick” isn’t explaining a motivation of anything. That’s not how anybody uses or interprets that word. It is a thing that many people find annoying. But if it’s not attributing a motive to begin with, it doesn’t make sense to blame somebody for having attributed a motive.
hey, be happy! you actually can add Dawkins to the rest of your list, because you are mistaken about his actual contributions to evolutionary biology.
he had an idea that was discounted even before he managed to disprove it himself. I know. I studied with serious evolutionary biologists as a grad student, and not a single person either grad or prof was even remotely considering anything Dawkins had proposed as serious research.
Tyson’s research really amounted to scut work helping establish the value of using Supernovae as space measuring sticks.
really really. it mostly was about processes for data reduction.
I think I’ve explained like thrice now that I actually don’t care what Tyson’s reason is; that doesn’t change how annoying I find his nit-picking.
@Vivec, why do you care about the nit pick?
After all, not picking the nit results in infestation with lice. ;)
Put down that trout!
The only thing I have seen by NDG that I found educational was a TED (?) talk that concerned theoretical physics, and how they pose and answer questions scientifically using theories and models, etc, etc… large hadron collider.
Picking apart SF movies for getting the stars backwards may make NDG feel all superior and smart, but I don’t see how its teaching anyone about science. Every example so far could just as easily been verified by an astrophysics student. Smarmy condescension isn’t making the movie or the science better.
I wish Archaeology had some famous, charismatic dumbasses to make everyone look at us and point and … wait
no I don’t
@chigau (違う), I can think of a few. Zahi Hawas ring a bell?
wzrd1 @70: Oh, yeah. I call him Gordon Ramses.
Rob Grigjanis @71, I don’t know why. He has less personality than Gordon. ;)
Never heard of him.
Chigau:
Entertainment: http://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/the-fall-of-zahi-hawass-32319337/?no-ist
Bonus: He’s on Twitter.
Caine
Yeah, I did some googling.
Egyptology is not something that interests me much, which is probably why I hadn’t heard of him.
In my #29, I was thinking eccentrics rather than crooks.
It seems Tyson has just done a wonderful job explaining the sexual morality of Xenomorophs. I mean, the Facehugger is clearly into it, so its all good, right Neil…?
Even in the context of a purely academic discussion, this casual throwaway language surrounding non-consensual sex – better known as rape, let’s not forget – is insensitive at the very least.
Well clearly planets enjoy running into stars which is why they revolve around them.
You don’t see humans hanging around people they don’t like and NDGT’s logic that human sensations are what drives all matter around us is sound.
My question is, does Twitter actively turn people into walking examples of the Dunning-Kruger effect, or does Twitter merely provide a release for latent dumbassery? Either way, this is only confirming my dislike of Twitter.
^^that.
@62, consciousness razor:
Then why did you say that we should “just go back to living in a cave and ignore everything”?
If you didn’t mean what you said, why did you say it? Do you comprehend your own argument? Or are you just trolling?
Seems you can dish it out (criticism, since your reading comprehension skills are so low, but what can we expect from a troll), but you can’t take it (this would be the same antecedent: Cricitism.)
Once again, we see that you can’t even remember your own argument. Here’s your entire quote:
First, you contradict yourself (“I believe it”…”I’m sure it’s not the only answer.”) Then, you deny that you ever indicated you were expecting anybody to take your word for it. So which is it? On both levels? Is he doing it because of the educational value or is he doing it for some nefarious purpose that you with your mind-reading abilities are able to suss out despite all evidence to the contrary? And are we to believe you when you say you believe it’s for the educational value or when you say there’s some other nefarious purpose that you with your mind-reading abilities are able to suss out despite all evidence to the contrary?
You’re trying to have it both ways. You’re getting called out on it. And you’re digging in.
No, I expected you to have done your homework and made yourself knoweldgeable about the history of Tyson and why and how he started doing his tweets about the science in movies rather than just opening your yap without any comprehension of what you were talking about.
And you’re making my argument to you: I haven’t counted how many blatant fallacies you’ve made in this exchange so far (you’ve got a recursive one going in just that one snippet I quoted), but it’s at the point that pretty much everything you say is either false or a contradiction of something you said…sometimes what you said literally in the previous sentence.
About why he comments about the science in movies. You know…the subject we’re talking about? Are you so much of a troll that you’ll even feign ignorance about that?
Yes.
But it apparently doesn’t mean anything to you.
Which is what we expect from a troll.
@63, consciousness razor:
The trolling continues:
Indeed, that is nonsense because there are times when you would like to know the science of it. Let’s take, for example, The Martian. Might you be interested to know if the scenario presented could actually happen? They did a lot of work in making sure it would be accurate. But, since it’s a movie, they had to take some liberties. As I mentioned, a good friend of mine actually works for JPL on the Mars rover missions. She builds the robots. She was the first women to lay tracks on Mars. She liked the movie.
But she’s got some comments.
And I would really like to know what they are because they’re fascinating to know about. The topic I’m hoping to get her to do for me is the wheels. In the movie, they had rubber, air-filled tires on the vehicle. You wouldn’t do that on Mars. The temperature extremes would never let it happen. They’d crack and lose pressure. You need some sort of tire that can survive in the environment and maintain its shape despite the ravages of the terrain. The tires on the moon rover were made of steel and aluminum.
Here’s an image of one of the wheels from Curiosity: http://www.space.com/images/i/000/048/646/original/Curiosity_Wheel_tread.jpg
Notice that it’s dented, cracked, and has holes in it. And that’s just from a few miles of use moving at a speed of a few cenimeters per second.
That’s not “annoying” to hear that they screwed up the wheels. It’s a starting to point to find out more. So why rubber wheels in the movie? Because it’s a movie. They’re shooting on the Earth, not Mars. The story has him needing to cross a huge swath of land in days, not years. So, they apply movie physics and let him have a vehicle that can drive miles in a day and thus, rubber wheels on Mars.
Try again. This time, instead of replacing a verb with a specific meaning with a verb phrase that doesn’t actually indicate anything (I mean really…”reason X”?), a prepositional phrase, or an infinitive phrase, why not try to replace it with words/phrases that are comparable. Here, let me help you with your grammar:
See, that makes you sound like the jerk that you are.
Looks like “nitpick” is actually an explanation of motivation. I hate to be argumentum ad dictionary, but let’s look at it: To be excessively concerned with or critical of inconsequential details. Yeah, that’s got emotional baggage written all over it. Who gets to define what is “excessive”? Or “inconsequential”? That very much depends upon the context, doesn’t it?
Look, we get it. You just want to shriek, “It’s just a mo-o-o-o-vie!” and that have stand for your argument as if you’ve said something profound. But you know that the response is going to be, “Yeah. We know.” And you don’t have any response to that. So rather than just walk away, content in the knowledge that there are people out there who like things that you don’t like, you’ve decided to throw a tantrum.
Then why call it “nit-picking”? To pretend that isn’t ascribing motive is disingenuous at best.
@65, Icthyic:
You really need to do more research about Tyson’s research.
“The Cosmic Evolution Survey (COSMOS) was initiated with an extensive allocation (590 orbits in Cycles 12–13) using the Hubble Space Telescope (HST ) for high-resolution imaging. Here we review the characteristics of the HST imaging with the Advanced Camera for Surveys (ACS) and parallel observations with NICMOS and WFPC2. A square field (1.8 deg^2) has been imaged with single-orbit ACS I-band F814W exposures with 50% completeness for sources 0.500 in diameter at IAB ¼ 26:0 mag. The ACS is a key part of the COSMOS survey, providing very high sensitivity and high-resolution (0.0900 FWHM and 0.0500 pixels) imaging and detecting a million objects. These images yield resolved morphologies for several hundred thousand galaxies. The small HST PSF also provides greatly enhanced sensitivity for weak-lensing investigations of the dark matter distribution.”
That’s the abstract for the COSMOS project. I should think that the evolution of galaxies and investigation of dark matter is more than “scut work.”
Then there was his work regarding Uranus and Brunini’s suggestion that the orbit of Uranus is better explained by a cosmic impact within the last 100 years (but which didn’t leave any features to be seen on the surface) and how it is unlikely.
Yeah, he’s done a fair amount of work in supernovae. To call it “scut work” is a bit…shall we say…”snobbish”?
@68, Tethys:
Then how fortunate that that’s not what he did nor why he did it. He was asked a question. He gave an answer. He certainly didn’t do it to “feel all superior and smart.” He just pointed out that a perfectionist like Cameron made a bone-headed mistake…and a lazy one at that (notice that the skyfield is mirrored…the left half is the same as the right half.)
What it teaches us about science is that the stars are not some mysterious thing. They actually are objects in space, they have a known position and motion, and you can use physics to determine where they would be in the sky at a particular date and time when seen from a particular location on the earth. That’s actually quite deep. It shows the connection of objects that are separated by vast distances. There are people who to this day don’t understand that eclipses aren’t some magical thing. They are a byproduct of orbital mechanics and we understand them to the point that we can predict when they are going to happen.
It’s not guess work.
If this had been any other movie director, it wouldn’t have been nearly as much of a “thing.” Nobody would think that J.J. Abrams would care what the stars were in the sky on the night the Titanic sank. It’s that it’s James Cameron who spent money on a deep sea expedition to explore the remains of the ship on the ocean floor, who studied the china patterns to make sure that the set pieces matched exactly, who is known to obsess about these tiny details that nobody is going to notice.
So it’s kinda funny when one of the more popular astronomers in the country quietly points out, when asked about the movie, “You got the sky wrong.” You can practically hear Cameron shouting, “D’oh!” It was just for chuckles. But when they re-released the movie, he had fixed it.
So given the silliness of this first time, it became a “thing.” Tyson knows it’s just a movie. But by knowing where the movie physics departs, you might become interested in how it could really work.
It’s why the last few years of Mythbusters was pretty much all movie physics.
So, does having the stars correct improve the movie? Did getting the stars wrong matter to the plot one whit, or alter the positions of the stars? Verisimilitude is great and all, but NDGTs recent spate of pedant whining on twitter is mostly his ego in action. I don’t care how many degrees he has, he is being a disrespectful, sexist ass.
Yes, that is my position. Thanks for restating it for me for the fiftieth time.
I still fail to see what your deal is with me finding Tyson annoying for nit-picking scientific inaccuracies in movies.
Dude, you’re the one that’s blown up with like twenty fucking posts over a throwaway comment I made about me finding him annoying.
you need to actually read the papers themselves, and see what his actual contribution was.
it’s pretty clear you don’t know what you’re talking about.
He primarily worked on data reduction techniques.. AS I SAID.
*looks at HUGE wall of text trying to defend something that they also insist is just a matter of personal interest*
sure that’s where you want to go with your argument?