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Merged The Fabrications of Neil deGrasse Tyson

ravdin

Illuminator
ravdin
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Oct 16, 2005
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I attended TAM when Neil deGrasse Tyson was the keynote speaker, and I found him incredibly engaging. I also enjoyed the Cosmos reboot. So I'd consider myself a fan, but lately I've come across some disturbing allegations that Tyson has been making up quotes that do not exist. I'm disappointed to say the least.

Examples:

"Half the schools in the district are below average." -Newspaper headline
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https://twitter.com/albertocairo/status/509741551283478528/photo/1

It should be a red flag already that we don't know which newspaper, or the date. (Not to mention that there is a difference between the mean and the median... but I digress.) My google fu powers are insufficient to find the actual headline. Where did Tyson find it?

A congressman once said "I've changed my view 360 degrees." At least Olympic half-pipe snowboarders know their geometry.
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https://twitter.com/neiltyson/status/9268179933

No kidding. Which congressman? When?

"After the 9/11 attacks, when President George W. Bush, in a speech aimed at distinguishing the U.S. from the Muslim fundamentalists, said, 'Our God is the God who named the stars.' The problem is two-thirds of all the stars that have names, have Arabic names. I don't think he knew this. This would confound the point that he was making."
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Again, I can't find the quote. Here's the closest I can find from George W. Bush.

In the skies today we saw destruction and tragedy. Yet farther than we can see, there is comfort and hope. In the words of the prophet Isaiah, "Lift your eyes and look to the heavens. Who created all these? He who brings out the starry hosts one by one and calls them each by name. Because of His great power, and mighty strength, not one of them is missing."

The same Creator who names the stars also knows the names of the seven souls we mourn today. The crew of the shuttle Columbia did not return safely to Earth; yet we can pray that all are safely home.
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If this is indeed what Tyson was referring to, then there are at least three glaring problems:

1. Bush didn't utter the phrase as cited by Tyson.
2. The tragedy the speech was from was the 2003 Columbia disaster, not 9/11.
3. Bush did not make this speech to distinguish ourselves from Muslim fundamentalists.

So, wrong quote, wrong date, wrong context, wrong implication.

I'm now wondering if any citations or anecdotes of Tyson's are truthful.
 
He seems to treat twitter as ephemeral. He made some off-hand comment about auto racing that completely ignored half of the physics involved in auto racing. Car folks were not impressed.

Most likely these are quotes or stories passed on to him by people he trusts, maybe he just needs to focus on the verify part.

It does seem that he needs to be a bit more careful with twitter if he intends to stay in the spotlight as an example of honesty and truth.
 
Dr. Keith said:
He seems to treat twitter as ephemeral. He made some off-hand comment about auto racing that completely ignored half of the physics involved in auto racing. Car folks were not impressed.

Most likely these are quotes or stories passed on to him by people he trusts, maybe he just needs to focus on the verify part.

It does seem that he needs to be a bit more careful with twitter if he intends to stay in the spotlight as an example of honesty and truth.
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One of my examples was a Twitter post, which by itself is more than forgivable. The other two examples are from his talks. I'd think that he'd be more careful to vet his citations before giving a speech or putting up a slide.

I wouldn't think twice about it if there was a minor slip now and again, but this seems to be a pattern.
 
theprestige said:
He also apparently likes the Astronaut Pen canard:

http://www.goodreads.com/work/quotes/16946049-space-chronicles-facing-the-ultimate-frontier

A coworker defended this to me yesterday, arguing, essentially, who cares if it's the truth, so long as it's truthy enough to get people interested in science?
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It's a charming story (whether it's true or not), but setting that aside, couldn't an argument be made that pens would be cleaner/safer/healthier/easier to use in zero G than pencils?
 
ravdin said:
My google fu powers are insufficient to find the actual headline. Where did Tyson find it?
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Perhaps he isn't literally quoting any one particular headline, but making up an example headline that is similar to headlines he has seen. Similar to for example this, or this.
 
theprestige said:
He also apparently likes the Astronaut Pen canard:

http://www.goodreads.com/work/quotes/16946049-space-chronicles-facing-the-ultimate-frontier

A coworker defended this to me yesterday, arguing, essentially, who cares if it's the truth, so long as it's truthy enough to get people interested in science?
Click to expand...

An attitude known by the Italian phrase: Se non è vero, è ben trovato.

IOW, I don't care whether it's true or not, I think it makes a cracking good story.

Speaking as a bit of a pen collector (I try to keep myself in check), the notion that the Fisher "Space Pen" had anything to do with NASA, or American government money bein spent on it, is indeed nothing more than an urban legend. One I first heard decades ago. The reasons for the pen's actual origins are well-documented, and easy to find online. It's also not a "novelty item", but a commercial product still alive and well, and sold in proper pen stores (although I don't know how similar the products currently being sold are to the 1960s original). Entertainingly, far from using pencils instead, the Soviet space program bought some of them as well.
 
The first quote does not cite a specific newspaper. It's almost certainly paraphrased. And it's probably not specifically cited because that would be a dick move, and Tyson isn't a dick.

The second quote does not cite a specific congressman. Tyson is a high profile scientist who has testified to congress-- and almost certainly met with individual members of congress. Seems likely he's paraphrasing an interaction he had with congress. And that congressman is probably not specifically cited because, again, Tyson isn't a dick.

The last point: Uh, yeah. I'm pretty sure Tyson understands the difference between mean and medium. In common, imprecise use, describing more or less normally distributed data, saying "half of schools are below average" is stupid. Unless the mode is significantly removed from the median, and unless the headline and/or article actually explain distribution with any sophistication-- which is unlikely-- it's stupid.

Finally, the tone of that article is ****:

"Neil deGrasse Tyson is super smart. Super duper smart. Super duper scientist smart." Wow.

"Unfortunately, it does not appear that Tyson is smart enough to understand super simple statistics or proper quote attribution." FFS.
 
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dasmiller said:
Pencil sharpeners & shavings wouldn't be an issue for mechanical pencils. Bits of graphite would be.
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True. But the way I've heard the urban legend retold, several times, by several different people, involved the Soviet Union cosmonauts supposedly using plain old wooden pencils, not mechanical ones. Neither kind of pencil makes any sense for use in a spacecraft, of course, and would be highly dangerous. While safety standards in the Soviet Union weren't up to western standards, across a range of fields (cars, military vehicles, etc.), they wouldn't have entrusted the succcess of a space mission to the possibility of a bit of graphite floating around in zero gravity and messing everything up. At least I don't think so, but perhaps people with more specialist knowledge can correct me.
 
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bjornart said:
Wow, what shocking transgressions. :rolleyes:
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NDT said:
After the 9/11 attacks, when President George W. Bush, in a speech aimed at distinguishing the U.S. from the Muslim fundamentalists, said, 'Our God is the God who named the stars.' The problem is two-thirds of all the stars that have names, have Arabic names. I don't think he knew this. This would confound the point that he was making.
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Tyson used a made-up quote, a falsity to attack Bush. Rather than confound the alleged point of Bush, it confounds TYSON's point.

You're not suggesting, are you, that anything in support of a cause you think is good is okay, regardless of whether it's true or not?

And when I see someone use dubious evidence like this to support his point, I have to wonder why. He didn't have anything better to use?
 
Insist on your intellect and you call it into doubt. That applies also when the claim take the form "those people are stupid", building yourself up by running other people down (which describes half the threads in the JREF Politics sections, half the comments in the Global Warming discussion). I don't suppose that Neil deGrasse Tyson gained admission to Bronx Science High School or acquired his Astrophysics PhD through affirmative action, so why does he act intellectually insecure? More likely, he panders to an intellectually insecure audience. Still, Tyson's dismissing accurate corrections discredits his voice.
 
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