Yesterday I said I was satisfied by Neil deGrasse Tyson’s response. Today, after reading a flood of comments and counter-arguments, I am convinced that there are many things wrong with it, from thinking that well-meaning explanations of intent after the fact are sufficient amends, to the weird handshake learned from a mysterious Native elder. All I can say is that when someone I have prior sympathy for says “Here’s why I didn’t mean to harm that person”, I should learn to cut through the excuses straight to the operative phrase, “I harmed that person“. OK, now what, Dr Tyson?

Also, an affirmation from someone with prior leanings in your favor is pretty much meaningless. He needs to listen far more to his critics, as do we all, and address their concerns. Most of all, he needs to respect the people he’s harmed, or their numbers will grow.

One last thing: I also looked at the comments of his other defenders. I was horrified to see how many of them are comparing Neil deGrasse Tyson to Brett Kavanaugh — I am not going to be one of them. I hope Dr Tyson is also appalled, and recognizes that this is a sign he’s going in the wrong direction.

As you’ve probably heard, Neil deGrasse Tyson has been accused of, and is being investigated for, inappropriate behavior with women. Three women have made accusations of varying severity, which is starting to add up.

Tyson has made a response to the accusations. I think it’s a good one. It is the case that if you are a popular celebrity with many encounters with the public, you’ll slip up now and then and cross a boundary that someone finds inappropriate, and the question is whether you can recognize that, draw back, and apologize with some sympathy for your accuser. Tyson demonstrates that here.

I’m sure it’s even more difficult for an exuberant fellow like Tyson. I’m recalling one event where he and I met for the first time, and he rushed over and gave me a great big bear hug — more than that, we practically had a wrestling match then and there. He’s passionate and enthusiastic and unreserved with everyone, and looking back on it…what if I were more reluctant to accept physical contact? What if I’d been a woman? How would that encounter have been interpreted? I can see how his wholeheartedness is going to occasionally get him into trouble, but I don’t want a timid, reserved Neil deGrasse Tyson.

As for the three accounts: 1) the production assistant who resigned from her job over the excessive intimacy: he apologized profusely, and he did not touch her inappropriately, nor has she accused him of that. He says, “had I known she was uncomfortable, I would have apologized on the spot, ended the evening”, and they parted on good terms.

2) The woman whose tattoo he examined a bit too intensely:

I only just learned (nine years after) that she thought this behavior creepy. That was never my intent and I’m deeply sorry to have made her feel that way. Had I been told of her discomfort in the moment, I would have offered this same apology eagerly, and on the spot. In my mind’s eye, I’m a friendly and accessible guy, but going forward, I can surely be more sensitive to people’s personal space, even in the midst of my planetary enthusiasm.

Isn’t that what we want, that people learn from their mistakes?

3) The Ahmet Tchiya accusations of rape: Something always seemed off about that, and Tyson admits to a relationship in grad school.

I remember being intimate only a few times, all at her apartment, but the chemistry wasn’t there. So the relationship faded quickly. There was nothing otherwise odd or unusual about this friendship.

That seems reasonable. This, though, is a case where a fleeting intimacy turned weird over the years.

For me, what was most significant, was that in this new life, long after dropping out of astrophysics graduate school, she was posting videos of colored tuning forks endowed with vibrational therapeutic energy that she channels from the orbiting planets. As a scientist, I found this odd. Meanwhile, according to her blog posts, the drug and rape allegation comes from an assumption of what happened to her during a night that she cannot remember. It is as though a false memory had been implanted, which, because it never actually happened, had to be remembered as an evening she doesn’t remember. Nor does she remember waking up the next morning and going to the office. I kept a record of everything she posted, in case her stories morphed over time. So this is sad, which, for me, defies explanation.

This behavior is also not unusual or exceptional or unbelievable. Barring other evidence, we have to accept it.

I also appreciate his final sentiment.

That brings us back to the value of an independent investigation, which FOX/NatGeo (the networks on which Cosmos and StarTalk air) announced that they will conduct. I welcome this.

What? He’s not going to throw a tantrum and sue everyone in sight? How refreshing. It is also how an innocent man would respond to an accusation.

Unless the investigation uncovers something truly sordid, I’m satisfied that Tyson wants to make amends, and is simply a guy who is perhaps a bit more exuberant than most. I’d accept a hug from him anytime, although maybe he needs to learn to ask permission first.

OK, he definitely needs to learn to respect boundaries more.

Two more women have stepped forward to recount instances of creepy behavior by Neil deGrasse Tyson. Up until now, he has just ignored the accusations by Tchiya Amet, which I think is the right thing to if the accusation is false. But now that there are further specific complaints — and these are accounts of inappropriate boundary pushing, not assault — I think he needs to step forward, explain himself, apologize to the women, and recognize that these were wrong actions that won’t be repeated.

Silence at this point is just denial, and it will look like these behaviors will be threatening to emerge again. I hope he does the right thing.

I’ve only seen a couple of episodes of the new Netflix series, and I only did that because I was surprised at the vitriol it was getting from the usual suspects on YouTube. It’s feminisssst! The heroes breasts are too small! The Skwoos hate it. All that kind of nonsense from people who probably despised the original series. As I did.

I’m old, so it wasn’t part of my childhood, but it certainly was part of my children’s childhood. Both He-Man and She-Ra were badly animated cartoons designed specifically to sell toys, and they were wildly successful: we had all kinds of weird action figures cluttering up our house, like the memorable moss-covered guy who was heavily perfumed, the one with the head that rotated within its helmet, the skeleton man, and of course, the nearly naked bulgy-muscle guy with the big sword. I watched the shows with my kids, and they were perfectly predictable: there were the good guys who were good, and the bad guys who were bad, and the bad guys would be foiled at the end of the show, but not so irrevocably that they couldn’t restart from the same premise next week. I was unimpressed, but the kids were getting a lot of imaginative play out of it, so it was…fine. They grew out of it, too.

A reboot was not particularly interesting to me. But then I heard that the showrunner was Noelle Stevenson, and I love her work. Have you read Nimona? Fantastic stuff: she really tears up the stereotypes. It’s about a girl with magic powers who is sort of working as an underling to your standard sorceror with plans for world conquest, but all sides, the “good” guys and the “bad” guys, have depth and humor, and they actually have reasons for what they’re doing, and they’re not simply evil for evil’s sake. Stevenson is a writer who likes breaking lazy tropes and making you think about all her characters as people. And by people, I don’t mean they’re all the same — her characters are all diverse. Check out Lumberjanes to see what I mean.

So I watched it. Unlike the originals, the story lines are much more complex, but not so complex kids couldn’t follow them. Their resolution involves more than pulling out a magic sword and whomping the bad guys so that they slink back to their lair. And the characters are also more interesting — She-Ra starts out as Adora, who is a soldier in the bad guy army, whose best friend is a cat girl named Catra (the names tend to be comically on the nose; one of the good guys who is an archer is named “Bow”), who discovers that the other side isn’t a hive of villainy, as she was taught, and joins the forces of light (and finds a magic sword, of course). There’s this wonderful tension as she has grown apart from her bestest friend ever, and Catra is resentful and angry, and some of the best moments in the story are when Adora and Catra are in collision, yet still feeling affection for each other.

I was thinking the whole time that if He-Man’s virtue was in inspiring imaginative play, this show would have encouraged even richer play. I’ve got to call up the kids and say sorry, we’re rewinding everything by about 25-30 years, we’re going to reboot your childhoods. Although, actually, they did all turn out to be pretty good Essjooos anyway, so maybe it’s unnecessary. Also, we’ve got grandkids to inculcate tolerance and diversity and progressive values into already.

You don’t have to watch it. It is a kids’ show, aimed right at a very young audience, but it’s got a good, more complex dynamic that might appeal to older people, too. I only watched one episode to see what all the hullaballoo was about, but it was good enough that I watched a few more. And now I laugh at those strange, obsessed people moaning about the lost mammaries of She-Ra, and how a girl without big breasts is really a man and a lesbian, calling the cartoon you can see at the top of this page “ugly” and “gross”. It’s another lazy buttfucking of history by leftists, claims sad creepy beard-man who deplores the fact that girls and boys will have nothing to look forward to if we don’t set up busty blond women as an aspirational goal for all.

I thought this article by Marina Koren was very insightful. I was unaware of some of the stuff she brings up. For instance, how Krauss tried to brazen it out at a conference after the accusations were made.

In another way, it was surprising. Two months before the conference, several women had accused Krauss of sexual misconduct, describing behavior that went unchecked for over a decade. By the time Krauss stepped foot on Stanford’s campus for the gathering, he had been banned from three universities, removed from multiple speaking events, and was under a formal investigation by Arizona State University, his primary affiliation. But Krauss had denied the allegations, and refused to withdraw from public life. “He chatted with peers. He ate with prestigious scientists. In the conference hall, he sat in front, where there were two rows of cloth-covered tables for VIPs,” Jason Davis, a science writer who was there, reported. “He even challenged a nasa engineer after one talk, declaring a proposed propulsion drive to be based on bunk physics.”

Some attendees were flabbergasted by Krauss’s appearance, and chastised the Breakthrough Initiative, the host of the conference, for admitting an alleged harasser in the midst of an investigation of inappropriate behavior in a professional setting.

He was probably right about the propulsion drive — he’s a smart guy. But not smart enough to recognize a subtle distinction: you can and should be bold and refuse to be cowed if you are falsely accused of things you did not do. Being bold about things you know you did, but think are not important or wrong for you to have done is a whole different matter. It makes you look like you haven’t learned a thing and are just going to keep on doing them.

But then, some scientists see perfection as something that will just inevitably happen, not requiring intervention and struggle by human scientists to accomplish.

Some scientists, especially vociferously atheist scientists like Krauss, pride themselves in their ability to rise above certain biases, in their work and in social systems at large. They believe that science, as a concept, will safeguard against them.“Science itself overcomes misogyny and prejudice and bias. It’s built-in,” Krauss said last year during a promotional event for one of his books.

Interesting. But how will Science accomplish that? By learning to recognize and purge itself of error. Science tries and fails all the time, we just have a system for detecting and winnowing out mistakes. I wonder if Krauss realizes that the process that led to his dismissal is part of that process of overcoming misogyny and prejudice and bias that he is so proud of?

Probably not. One of the most interesting parts of this article is that she read Krauss’s book, Quantum Man, a biography of Feynman. There’s no denying that Feynman was an absolute genius, one of the most brilliant physicists of the last century. But there’s also no denying that he was a terrible person who, in his own charming way, treated women terribly. But Krauss tends to dismiss the importance of all that.

Quantum Man is a tremendous exercise in hagiography. Krauss documents Feynman’s bad behavior, but couches it in language that removes any responsibility the scientist may have possessed.

He had continued an intense long-distance courtship with her, and she was causing another woman in Ithaca to lash out at him in jealousy.

And:

He often stayed with friends, usually married ones, and these visits frequently ended badly as a result of his sexual improprieties.

And:

When he spent a year in Brazil, he actually devised a set of simple rules for seducing women, including prostitutes, at bars. He became famous for seducing women at conferences abroad.

Krauss failed to mention that in this game, Feynman considered women who did not put out after he bought them drinks as “worthless bitches.”

It is strange to read Quantum Man now, as waves of women continue to come forward to tell their versions of male behavior that went long unchecked, that existed only through carefully constructed whisper networks, that, if they hadn’t said anything, could be diluted into the silly actions of a brilliant and edgy man. It feels like a time capsule, a snapshot of unbridled adoration for geniuses in a time long before #MeToo. But it remains a cautionary tale, not just for women, or just for men, but for everyone, that some stories can be left behind in favor of others. That some evidence, even when it is corroborated and convincing, can still be dismissed and ignored.

Some of those “simple rules” are outlined in Feynman’s own autobiography. He cultivated misogyny.

All during the next day I built up my psychology differently: I adopted the attitude that those bar girls are all bitches, that they aren’t worth anything, and all they’re in there for is to get you to buy them a drink, and they’re not going to give you a goddamn thing; I’m not going to be a gentleman to such worthless bitches, and so on. I learned it till it was automatic.

Krauss idolizes Feynman. I can’t help but wonder if he thought that his kind of behavior is just fine: if you’re smart and valued for being smart, you can get away with being an asshole to women. Feynman wasn’t censured or dismissed by his university or the public (although he should have been), so how would they dare criticize Lawrence Krauss?

He failed to notice that society as well as science works to overcome misogyny and prejudice and bias. It often fails — way too often it fails, as we look out on American culture today. But Krauss should take pride in the fact that in his case, it actually worked. His story is a story of progressive success. Hooray!

Buzzfeed has published a summary of the investigation by ASU into Lawrence Krauss’s behavior. You can read all the details there, but in summary of a summary…

Commenting on these incidents, Searle wrote: “It is inconceivable how a faculty member in the course of carrying out his work responsibilities could believe that the conduct would ever be appropriate.”

Searle described how Krauss discussed strip clubs with employees, encouraged staff to view fan mails including nude photos, and showed them a cartoon of a person bent over with their pants down, revealing their bare buttocks.

The report also described how Krauss and an employee, whose name is redacted, “engaged in conduct towards one another — hugging, touching, kissing — in the presence of staff, giving the impression they were involved in an intimate relationship.” Krauss and the employee denied there was an intimate relationship, and that the interactions were “a form of greeting.”

University investigators concluded that Krauss’s comments “created an offensive environment for some staff members.” Searle agreed that Krauss “was unprofessional and failed as a leader by contributing to and permitting his employees to engage in this behavior and create this type of environment.”

By voluntarily retiring, he has cunningly arranged to have the whole report tossed in a metaphorical trash can, to be ignored forever. He can now go on tour claiming that he was exonerated, because the findings were abandoned and never acted on.

No one can ever claim that Krauss isn’t an intelligent man.