Neil deGrasse Tyson -- a liability

HopDavid said:
When Tyson tells you gravity falls exponentially with distance, he certainly isn't teaching you Newtonian mechanics. For orbits to follow the paths of conic sections, gravity needs to fall with inverse square of distance.
Click to expand...

Really? falling with the inverse square of distance is a special case of falling exponentially with distance. There's not a damn thing wrong with that statement.
 
Who is Tyson a liability for?

He gets people engaged in science. He gets the interest of those who were uninterested. He gets appreciation for those who do the actual work. He gets important developments into the news. He gives pedants nits to pick at. There is something for everyone. Even bad ties!

And lets be clear, I took the apple skin/atmosphere thing with a grain of salt until marplots went to the trouble to show how *********** accurate it actually is. NDGT promoting science and skepticism!

Among car guys he is oft cited for neglecting aero effect in estimating max corning speed on a race track. He was catastrophically wrong. In a tweet. It was fantastic. Everyone came out of the woodworks to explain the awesome power of aero effects on race cars and I learned a lot about stuff I thought I already knew a lot about.

So again, what is the liability?
 
CORed said:
Really? falling with the inverse square of distance is a special case of falling exponentially with distance. There's not a damn thing wrong with that statement.
Click to expand...

Eh? Where did you get this from? If you want to defend Tyson better do it with valid arguments.

Hint: Inverse square law -> there is -2 in the exponent. Exponential -> there is x in the exponent.
This makes for a really huge difference.
 
TheGnome said:
Eh? Where did you get this from? If you want to defend Tyson better do it with valid arguments.

Hint: Inverse square law -> there is -2 in the exponent. Exponential -> there is x in the exponent.
This makes for a really huge difference.
Click to expand...

But read the actual statement. Decreasing (falling) with the square of distance (which is exponential, yes?) is exactly how gravitational force behaves. That is what NDGT was pointing out. This is the same as stating the gravitational force between two objects is related to the inverse square of distance.
 
Giordano said:
But read the actual statement. Decreasing (falling) with the square of distance (which is exponential, yes?) is exactly how gravitational force behaves. That is what NDGT was pointing out. This is the same as stating the gravitational force between two objects is related to the inverse square of distance.
Click to expand...

Inverse square law is polynomial, not exponential. They behave quite differently.

I'm quite sure Tyson just misspoke. Still I find it a little bit surprising that a scientist in a field that is heavily rooted in math could confuse the two.
 
Last edited:
TheGnome said:
Inverse square law is polynomial, not exponential. They behave quite differently.

I'm quite sure Tyson just misspoke. Still I find it a little bit surprising that a scientist in a field that is heavily rooted in math could confuse the two.
Click to expand...

On the subject of misspeaking:
Here I should have said rational :o

But at least polynomial and rational functions are closely related, the first being a subset of the second :p
 
Dr. Keith said:
Question: is the difference really huge if x = -2?
Click to expand...

r-2 and -2r are very different, even though both give the same value when r = -2.

Similarly a broken clock is very different from a working one, even though it's still right twice a day.
 
HopDavid said:
Snip... I believe Tyson is making the populace even dumber... Snip
Click to expand...

You did catch a few mistakes or exaggerations, and I suggest that everything he says must be absolute witchcraft.

He is, in fact, a liability.

Neil deGrasse Tyson is clearly the enemy of rationality. Let's definitely start waging the war for critical thinking by crucifying him. I can't think of anyone else who is more responsible for compromising the coalition for reason than he is.
 
Roboramma said:
r-2 and -2r are very different, even though both give the same value when r = -2.

Similarly a broken clock is very different from a working one, even though it's still right twice a day.
Click to expand...

NdGT stated (what- once, several times ?) that gravity falls off exponentially with distance, which is actually true for this special case. He did not state that the equation was itself an exponential one. I would say that he slipped too closely into the vernacular use of exponential to incorrectly include power series. Which is none the less quite common usage, particularly for when the base is 2. Relatively few among the general public would understand the distinction.

A missed learning opportunity? Yes, but I certainly doubt he as an astrophysicist lacks this understanding himself...

And he is no broken clock.
 
Giordano said:
NdGT stated (what- once, several times ?) that gravity falls off exponentially with distance, which is actually true for this special case. He did not state that the equation was itself an exponential one. I would say that he slipped too closely into the vernacular use of exponential to incorrectly include power series. Which is none the less quite common usage, particularly for when the base is 2. Relatively few among the general public would understand the distinction.

A missed learning opportunity? Yes, but I certainly doubt he as an astrophysicist lacks this understanding himself...

And he is no broken clock.
Click to expand...

I don't quite understand your insistence on calling the usage of exponential in this case as correct because I think it definitely is not.

You wouldn't call a parabel to grow exponentialy, would you?

Look I don't think this was a huge mistake by Tyson but it did convey a wrong picture. Celestial mechanics would look very different if gravity would fall off exponentialy with distance.
 
Roboramma said:
r-2 and -2r are very different,
Click to expand...

Yes, but as someone who has a bit of familiarity with math I would say they are both exponential relationships as opposed to linear. I think that is the important distinction that many lay audiences are not familiar with: as you go twice as far from a body the gravity is not just halved.

He could have been more accurate, but in simplifying for a lay audience I think he was accurate enough to make his point. If you think he was trying to misrepresent the formula for calculating gravitational forces or that he doesn't understand that formula, then I think you have a burden to support that claim.

I deal with a very narrow aspect of the law on a regular basis. How I discuss it with my friends, clients, and colleagues are three completely different vocabularies. This was also true when I was an engineer who had a fairly narrow specialty. I tend to assume it is true of most subjects. Even astrophysics.
 
TheGnome said:
I don't quite understand your insistence on calling the usage of exponential in this case as correct because I think it definitely is not.

You wouldn't call a parabel to grow exponentialy, would you?

Look I don't think this was a huge mistake by Tyson but it did convey a wrong picture. Celestial mechanics would look very different if gravity would fall off exponentialy with distance.
Click to expand...

I like this argument. Yes, for those who could even form that picture in their head completely and accurately, in other words, those intimately familiar with the subject, they would be mislead by his inaccurate terminology? Surely you jest.
 
HopDavid said:
Tyson is a B.S. artist. Not as influential as Trump but a B.S. artist regardless. Both Trump and Tyson rose to prominence on the wave of an ignorant populace that values entertainment over rigor and accuracy.

Fareed Zakaria talks about Trump as a B.S. artist. Zakaria quotes Harry Frankfort: “Focus is panoramic rather than particular... with more spacious opportunities for improvisation, color and imaginative play. This is less a matter of craft than of art. Hence the familiar notion of the ”Bull **** artist”. Later in the clip Fareed further quotes Frankfort: “Liars and truth tellers are acutely aware of facts and truth. The B.S. artist, however, has lost all connection with reality. By virture of this, bull **** is a greater enemy of truth than lies are.”

Neil deGrasse Tyson will study a topic with half his attention and then build a story around it. Which is usally entertaining but often wrong. I don’t believe it’s his intention to convey misinformatiom. It comes from combining his flamboyance with sloppy scholarship. And his fantasies are often colored by his preconceptions and prejudices.

What is telling is the acceptance of Tyson’s bull. Most of Tyso’s fans are self proclaimed skeptics. But if his misinformation seems to support their prejudices, they will swallow it without scrutiny. In their own way these self proclaimed skeptics are as credulous as Trump’s birthers.

Paying lip service to skepticism is not sufficient. A true skeptic must question all assumptions whether or not they find the message pleasing.

TAM6

The James Randi Educational Foundation (JREF) used to hold an annual conference stylized as The Amazing Meeting or TAM for short. At TAM6 Tyson gave a presentation. I’ll look at different segments of this presentation.

Terminal Cancer

16 minutes 36 seconds into his presentation Tyson talks about terminal cancer. He argues surviving terminal cancer doesn’t demonstrate divine intervention. Which is fine.

But then he launches into a rant against idiot doctors, the American Medical Association and pre-med students.

The problem with this rant is Tyson’s ignorance on how a prognosis is delivered. A doctor doesn’t tell a patient “You got six months.” Rather a patient is given statistics. Does someone living longer than expected mean the three doctors were idiots? No. It demonstrates there are statistical outliers on a bell curve.

It is ... astonishing. Astonishing Tyson and the Physics 101 prof aren’t familiar with freshmen level statistics and probability. It is also astonishing that they think someone who flunked physics 101 would make it to med school. There are idiot physicists, I assure you.

Dr. Novella called Tyson out on this (scroll to Those Darn Physicists). Tyson’s response to Dr. Novella? Tyson writes:



and Tyson goes on to say:



Well, astrophysicists also resort to giving probabilities when data is incomplete. For example, the probability of asteroid impacts. Tyson likes to talk about the potential destruction of the asteroid Apophis. We can look at the history of Apophis impact estimates. In 2004 chances were in 1 in 233. In 2013 the possibility of a 2036 impact were ruled out. By Tyson’s lights the folks who came up with the 2004 estimate were incompetent idiots.

About Tyson’s TAM6 presentation Dr. Novella writes:



Except for the the part Dr. Novella didn’t like. Dr. Novella evidently wasn’t paying close attention to the rest of the lecture.

Two Thousand Milligrams of Cocaine

A little further into his TAM6 lecture Tyson talks about his jury duty. He takes a judge to task for calling a quantity of cocaine two thousand milligrams. Tyson, not being aware a normal cocaine dose is 150 milligrams, seems to think two grams of coke is a trivial amount.

LSD doses are measured in micrograms. A gram is a million micrograms. Does Tyson think a gram of LSD is a small dosage?

Maybe that is how Tyson managed to conflate 9-11 with the Space Shuttle Columbia disaster.

George Bush and Star Names

https://3.bp.blogspot.com/-HW9rB1dQOXs/VdvEpsD0deI/AAAAAAAABa4/jeM64-n0n3I/s640/Tyson+Bush.jpg

Fifty minutes into the TAM6 lecture Tyson gives an account of President Bush’s response to the 9-11.

9-11 was a very emotional time. There was a lot of anger directed at Arabs in general. Tyson has Bush responding with a speech “attempting to distinguish we from they.” Sowing division during that time of turmoil would have been reprehensible.

But Bush’s actual speech was a call for inclusion and tolerance. Bush was exactly the opposite of the xenophobic demagogue from Tyson’s fantasy world.

Moreover, Bush and his administration have repeatedly condemned anti-Muslim rhetoric. Colin Powell helped Corporal Kareem Kahn’s sacrifice to wide attention. Tyson’s shallow stereotype might fit some Republicans. But not all.

It turns out Tyson conflated Bush's 9-11 speech with his eulogy for the Space Shuttle Columbia astronauts. Bush did quote scripture in that eulogy. But he wasn't attempting to distinguish Christians from Muslims.

The Bush and Star Names fiction was part of Tyson’s routine starting in 2006, perhaps earlier. He stopped telling this story in September of 2014 after Sean Davis ran his exposé. How on earth did the self proclaimed skeptics swallow this story for eight years without question? It is because it is an unflattering portrait of a Christian president. Just like Trump’s birthers, they are happy to accept falsehoods if it supports their prejudices.

With some arm twisting Tyson admitted the story was wrong. Not only wrong time but wrong context and wrong intent. There was no Arab baiting in Bush’s eulogy for the Space Shuttle Columbia astronauts.

Hamid al Ghazali Single Handedly Ended the Islamic Golden Age

About 55 minutes into his TAM6 lecture, Tyson Blames Hamid al Ghazali for ending the Islamic Golden Age. According to Tyson, Ghazali’s writings contain the statement that manipulating numbers is the work of the devil. Which is odd since Ghazali praised the disciplines of math and science saying they are necessary for a prosperous society.

When challenged, Tyson back pedals and changes the goal posts:



I think we can safely say there is no Ghazali text containing the assertion that math is the work of the devil. Except maybe in the same fantasy world where Bush was bashing Arabs in the wake of 9-11.

Did Islamic innovation in math and science come to a dead stop with Hamid al Ghazali (1058-1111)? Absolutely not. There were Islamic mathematicians and scholars up until the 1600s. The father of symbolic algegra, Abul al-Husan, lived from 1412 to 1482. The “Golden Age” ended more when the mideast ceased to be a trading hub where diverse cultures would meet and trade ideas.

Tyson will point to the 1.3 billion Muslims presently alive and ask why aren’t they getting as many Nobel prizes as the 15 million Jewish people? It’s Ghazali’s fault! Well, the people of India also number about 1.3 billion. How many people living in India have earned a Nobel prize in science? One - C. V. Raman in Physics. Citizens of China is another group of about 1.3 billion. How many Chinese have earned Nobel prizes in science? Three. About a dozen if you include Chinese people not living in China. And both India and China have also enjoyed periods of creativity in math and science. In fact it was the Indians who invented the so called Arabic decimal system, not the Arabs as Tyson falsely claims.

So Tyson’s numbers don’t demonstrate exceptionally bad performance on the part of Muslims. Rather they demonstrate the spectacular success of people coming from Judeo Christian backgrounds. Jewish Nobel prize winners. And Christian Nobel prize winners.

Rising Religiosity is Destroying American Scientific Curiosity

About 57 minutes minutes into his TAM6 talk Tyson shows an anti Big Bang Theory bill board as an example of Christian stupidity. He seems unaware that it was a Catholic priest, [url=https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Georges_Lemaître]Georges Lemaître, who formulated the Big Bang theory.

Tyson often nostalgically looks back to the Apollo era. But more people were going to church when we were putting men on the moon. It is hard to make rising religiosity the scapegoat for our declining competence. Religiosity has also been on the decline.

Newton Invented Calculus On A Dare

About an hour into his TAM6 lecture, Tyson portrays Newton as a super human saying Newton invented calculus on a dare.

Well, no.

Two thousand years before Newton Eudoxus was slicing stuff into small bits to get more accurate approximations of volume and area. His methods were well known when Descartes invented analytic geometry (also known as graph paper with an x and y axis). With Descartes’ invention y=x^2 became a parabola. x^2 + y^2 = 1 became a circle with radius one. Descartes’ way of looking at things enabled us to scrutinize conic sections and other curves with symbolic algebra.

After Descartes invented analytic geometry, it was only a matter of time before someone used Eudoxus like methods to get good approximations of the slope of a curve or the area under a curve. Which was done by Fermat among others. Fermat was the father of calculus. After Fermat the discoveries of Newton were inevitable as evidenced that Leibniz made them at the same time.

Rick Stryker paints a more accurate picture -- The development of calculus was the collaborative effort of many.

After thinking he had established Newton’s super powers Tyson flatly asserts Newton could have knocked out perturbation theory in an afternoon. “You know this!” Tyson shouts to his enthusiastic audience. Well, no. I don’t. And neither does Tyson or his credulous audience.

Euler took a crack at perturbation theory and n-body mechanics. As did Lagrange. Both these men were giants in their own right but did not make satisfactory models. 100 years after Newton, Laplace built on the work of Euler, Lagrange and Newton. To say Newton could have done it in an afternoon is disrespecting Laplace, Euler and Lagrange. It is also profoundly ignorant.

In Tyson’s alternate history Newton would have easily done Laplace’s n-body work had he not been stopped by his belief in the “God of The Gaps”. Tyson states this as a flat out fact. But an alternate history is not a testable hypothesis. We can’t rewind history and see what happens with different parameters.

I’ll offer my alternate history. An agnostic Newton would have been a normal young man who spent his spare time in taverns chasing women. No splitting of light, no laws of motion, and no contributions to calculus. His accomplishments would have been zip, zero, nada. Like Tyson’s alternate history this is nothing more than idle speculation. But you won’t see me shouting the absolute certainty of this fantasy to a roomful of so called skeptics.

In Summary

On the stage of TAM6 Tyson pushed out one steaming pile after another. And his fans ate it up.

Tyson demonstrates the self proclaimed skeptics are actually credulous. The JREF folks should be deeply embarrassed.

I expect Tyson to be increasingly used as an instrument to discredit the skeptic community much like Anthony Weiner was used to discredit Democrats. He is a serious liability.
Click to expand...

Soo..... what exactly are you saying?....
 
Dr. Keith said:
I like this argument. Yes, for those who could even form that picture in their head completely and accurately, in other words, those intimately familiar with the subject, they would be mislead by his inaccurate terminology? Surely you jest.
Click to expand...

So he's using the Lie-to-childrenWP method to engage with people who may otherwise switch off the "boring science stuff". What's the problem again?
 
Dr. Keith said:
I like this argument. Yes, for those who could even form that picture in their head completely and accurately, in other words, those intimately familiar with the subject, they would be mislead by his inaccurate terminology? Surely you jest.
Click to expand...

I guess I just don't understand you guys.

Or maybe you just don't understand the difference between a power law and an exponential law?

I mean every time we read of an exponential growth rate in the news paper (and we do from time to time, though it is quite often misapplied), it could just mean a square law, right?

And this has not much to do with a complete and accurate understanding of the underlying issues.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.

Back
Top Bottom