A few responses to Neil Tyson
There are many fine comments on Tyson’s “I’m sorry I’m too smart for you” post. I will share some.
David Gorski Notpology. You didn’t really apologize for what you said. You just apologized for not realizing how badly it would be received, which is an entirely different thing. do better.
Kavin Senapathy You’re *just now* learning that facts presented without crucial context can be “true but unhelpful,” which shows that you haven’t learned the lesson you need. Anyone with the most basic google skills could have “offered up” a list like this–it reads like something a dime-a-dozen smart-ass account with a handful of followers would tweet, not at all something that “would be helpful to anyone trying to save lives in America,” as you say. People doing the work to save lives in America not only have access to available facts, but know to appropriately contextualize them within the flawed systems that allow for preventable deaths. It wasn’t only offensive, it was poorly-executed and not at all contextualized among all of the other relevant “facts.” You haven’t apologized here for your actions, you’re “apologizing” to those who took offense, as if it’s on them–it’s not.
tl;dr: Your “facts,” presented so callously, were not only not helpful during a time of tragedy, but could never be “helpful to anyone trying to save lives in America,” no matter when you presented them.
Jean Kazez Seriously bad response. The problem with your tweet wasn’t the unanticipated reaction, it was your bad reasoning. There are good reasons why mass shootings like the ones over the weekend upset people more than accidental deaths from disease and the like. They make us unsafe in formerly safe places. They are evidence of extremely sinister attitudes in our fellow citizens. We are doing nothing to prevent them, where we do a lot to prevent the other tragedies in your list. You didn’t think this through. That’s the problem, not people’s reactions.
Mine:
Good grief. “I’m sorry you misunderstood me” is not an apology at all, it’s a passive-aggressive insult.
And you’re the one who missed the point here. We KNOW there are other causes of “preventable deaths” but that’s not the entirety of the issue, to put it mildly. Even other shooting deaths are not a complete parallel. There really IS something special about people going to schools or Walmarts or bars in order to kill as many people AT RANDOM as possible. Add the fact that the intent appeared to be racist and that the president of the US incites racism every chance he gets, and it becomes pretty obvious why we pay extra attention.
Smart in some ways, dumb in others. Was it ever not thus, for most if not all of us? Except that sometimes in some people, the dumb ways are seriously dumb..
Omar, but it’s a little odd to find that a man whose career is based on supposedly being a great science communicator has such difficulty with, you know, communicating, isn’t it? I think it’s probably largely the lack of an editor — he was very good on the re-do of Cosmos, but I think Twitter is not a good medium for him.
On a related point, I’m not sure that his shtick as Chief Science Nitpicker of Films is really coming across the way he seems to think it is. I know that on his own podcast, he tells the Titanic story as a happy tale of how he and James Cameron became buds because Cameron appreciated the critique, but then I heard an interview with Cameron that gave me a quite different impression of the interaction.
Speaking of NDT the movie critic, a couple of years ago he tweeted that he was planning on watching Armageddon but couldn’t because it wasn’t listed on Netflix. A day or two later he received a reply from the Netflix account: “It’s on now, Neil, if you want to spoil it for everyone”.
This analysis of Tyson’s tweet…
… shows Tyson’s naïveté is like xkcd 793: Physicists
I was amused a few weeks ago when someone sarcastically tweeted that they loved the “world’s worst cocktail party guest” bit that Neil deGrasse Tyson had committed himself to performing continuously.
Having said that, he deserved to get beat up a bit for this, but I think he’s paid his penance. There was obliviousness but no malice involved.
What is it about physicists? Do they believe so much their own press that they are the smartest people in the world that they are unable to see that isn’t true?
Skeletor, I don’t think it’s for you to decide if he has paid his penance. You are not one of the people who is grieving and has lost a loved one in this (if you are, my apologies for the fact that I was insensitive).
Not to mention — what is the harsh punishment being inflicted on Tyson? That some people are criticizing him on the internet? Like he does to people who worked hard for years to make a film happen, only to have some snide “science communicator” complain that the constellations aren’t right?
If anybody’s threatening him or calling for him to be fired, I would agree that’s out of proportion.* But I just see some good old-fashioned — and well-deserved — mockery. It’ll go away in a few days on its own, and he’ll be fine.
*–Though I do think Tyson needs to watch himself. He can’t afford too many more public blunders like this if he wants to be a highly-paid public figure. Live by your likeability, die by your likeability or lack thereof.
Saying there was obliviousness but no malice involved doesn’t really mitigate the crappyness of what Tyson said all that much, given everything – given his status and given the nature of the subject. I don’t forgive Trump because he’s oblivious, even though he certainly is: it’s his job – the job he sought – to not be oblivious. Same with Tyson.
And being oblivious to the fact that murder is in a separate category from generic preventable deaths…that’s being way too oblivious.