The New Tyson Fight Revisited
By Brian Clegg
A post from September 2014
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One of the interesting aftermaths of the Scottish Referendum debate was that I have seen a number of people saying ‘A lesson to learn is don’t trust the traditional media, get your information from social media.’ I know where they were coming from, but there are two dangers here – one is that (even more than watching, say, Fox News) you won’t get information you will get propaganda, and the other is that even when you aren’t being told what you want to hear by your friends and political allies, a lot of internet sources are unreliable. The Tyson story I want to tell you illustrates this doubly.
The Tyson in question is not Mike, but science populariser and astronomer, Neil deGrasse Tyson. I was surprised the other day to hear that Tyson was being pilloried for making up quotes to support an argument. The argument in question is that a lot of people (including many in the media and our elected representatives) are extremely ignorant about science and so (I presume) aren’t well equipped to make decisions about science teaching and science funding. This is an argument I strongly support – but clearly not by making up data.
There seem to be three quotes that have caused the furore. Tyson claims that:
- George Bush made a speech after 9/11 distinguishing ‘we from they’ by saying ‘Our God is the God who named the stars.’ Yet lots of named stars have Arabic names – Bush made a silly argument, claimed Tyson.
- A congressman uttered the sentence ‘I’ve changed my views 360 degrees on that issue.’ Which showed basic ignorance of what 360 degrees is.
- A newspaper headline in New York City: ‘Half the schools in the district are below average.’ – Tyson claims ‘we have to re-think the foundations of mathematics if this were false.’
- The Bush quote was not made after 9/11, but after the Columbia disaster and he actually said ‘The same Creator who names the stars also knowns the names of the seven souls we mourn today.’ This had nothing to do with Christians versus Muslims and was simple consoling rhetoric.
- There is no evidence of the 360 degree comment being made as quoted, though Representative Maxine Waters did say ‘You have done a 360 degree turn’ to someone.
- The information on schools below average in the headline, which no one can find, could well be false, so Tyson misunderstood statistics by claiming that you would have re-think the foundations of mathematics if it were false.
However, those who defend Tyson saying this is a fuss over nothing are also wrong. He is not a gutter press journalist, he’s a scientist. And he knows perfectly well that two of the biggest failures for a scientist are to make up data, and to rely on anecdotal evidence. And he has clearly done at least one of these here. It was a serious error of judgement, hence the need to apologise.
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Now Appearing is the blog of science writer Brian Clegg (www.brianclegg.net), author of Inflight Science, Before the Big Bang and The God Effect.
Source: http://brianclegg.blogspot.com/2024/09/the-new-tyson-fight-revisited.html
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