Shocking new discovery: some information can be true but unhelpful
Neil deGrasse Tyson bestowed a Facebook post on us yesterday, explaining that he’s sorry we’re too stupid to have understood his profound tweet on Sunday.
Yesterday, a Tweet I posted in reaction to the horrific mass shootings in America over the previous 48 hours, killing 34 people, spawned mixed and highly critical responses.
If you missed it, I offered a short list of largely preventable causes of death, along with their average two-day death toll in the United States. They significantly exceeded the death toll from the two days of mass shootings, including the number of people (40) who on average die from handgun homicides every two days.
Here it is again for us literal-minded peasants:
In the past 48hrs, the USA horrifically lost 34 people to mass shootings.
On average, across any 48hrs, we also lose…
500 to Medical errors
300 to the Flu
250 to Suicide
200 to Car Accidents
40 to Homicide via HandgunOften our emotions respond more to spectacle than to data.
Back to Tyson’s explanation of how too stupid we are:
I then noted that we tend to react emotionally to spectacular incidences of death, with the implication that more common causes of death trigger milder responses within us.
Oh but that wasn’t the only possible implication. That’s part of the problem. It wasn’t particularly clear to me what the implication was, for instance. Was it that we’re just big stupid crybabies who don’t know how to count? Was it that we’re so clueless we don’t realize that more than 34 people die every day? Was it that everybody dies so what’s the big deal? Was it something to do with road safety? Was it an accusation that we pay attention to mass shootings only because we’re drawn to “spectacle”?
Those are a few of the possible implications, and there are more. The implication was far from clear. That’s not our fault.
My intent was to offer objectively true information that might help shape conversations and reactions to preventable ways we die.
But mass murder is not just another preventable way we die. My god. What a stunningly dense thing to say. If a woman close to him – a friend, a relative, a colleague – is raped, would he tell her there are many preventable ways we are injured?
Let me spell it out even more clearly. Murder is more than just a preventable way to die. That’s why it’s called “murder” and not just “death.”
So, cool about the “objectively true information,” but not so cool about the way it was framed or the timing of offering it or the general air of inhuman indifference accompanying it.
Where I miscalculated was that I genuinely believed the Tweet would be helpful to anyone trying to save lives in America. What I learned from the range of reactions is that for many people, some information –-my Tweet in particular — can be true but unhelpful, especially at a time when many people are either still in shock, or trying to heal – or both.
Ya think?
Yes, Virginia, some information can be true but unhelpful. I would say that’s the case not for “some” people but for all of us. I think possibly even Neil Tyson would see it that way if he had just accidentally chopped a finger off and a companion decided to take that moment to tell him how to get from Kensington to Peckham by tube.
So if you are one of those people, I apologize for not knowing in advance what effect my Tweet could have on you.
And that is just outright insulting. It’s “I’m sorry you’re too stupid to get my jokes.” It’s also…well it’s frankly kind of Trumpian in its failure to consider his own possible incomprehension. It’s a jeer at the idea that one could ever possibly suss out how a given remark might affect people – which is a jeer at the whole idea of checking what we say for the potential to hurt or shame or anger or frighten others. Neil Tyson is way too adult and accomplished to be that mind-blind.
I am therefore thankful for the candor and depth of critical reactions shared in my Twitter feed. As an educator, I personally value knowing with precision and accuracy what reaction anything that I say (or write) will instill in my audience, and I got this one wrong.
That sounds more as if he did see the point, but given what went before…I doubt it.
What a narcissistic, deliberately-insulting-while-thinly-disguised insult. In character.
I think it’s the bothering to try to flimsily disguise it—that he was motivated to do so—that burns me the most.
Isn’t it though.
There are some fine comments, including from names. Ima have to post some of them.
Did you give me proper em-dashes? Thank you!
Nope, I didn’t tweak anything! Thanks WordPress (but could you fix whatever it is that’s preventing me from embedding tweets?).
Yeah, this apology is ok (we’ve seen worse) but still has a strong undertone of Vulcan “I forgot how your human emotional responses interfere with your rationality, I shall have to compensate for this flaw in your nature in our future dealings.”
What’s funny is that Tyson is constantly trying to portray himself as the opposite of the Vulcan stereotypical scientist. I just unsubscribed to his podcast (I was tiring of it anyway, this was just the last straw), which proclaims itself as being where science and culture come together. He likes to conclude every episode with some “deep” philosophical musings about how science contributes to “the cosmic perspective.” And he’s been banging the drum about how the only reason the U.S. got into the space program seriously was the threat of the Soviet Union, so he certainly knows that public policy is influenced by emotion as much as objective calculations. So it’s kind of off-brand for him to admit that he had no idea that spouting some statistics, in a condescending response to people discussing in the wake of tragedy how to maybe prevent further senseless deaths, would not come across well.
Does he think the only takeaway from these shootings is a miscalculation of risk? It’s true that they cause barely a blip in assessing what is likely to kill an average person on an average day, but that is unrelated to the reasons that people are shocked, horrified, and angry. Hey, did you know that on 9/11, only a minuscule fraction of the world’s buildings collapsed? Why did people get so emotional?
Looking back at his original tweet, the qualifier “largely” is doing a LOT of work in the phrase “largely preventable deaths.”
Are deaths from the flu really “preventable”? Even if everybody who could take it got the flu vaccine every year, there are multiple strains of flu, so my understanding is that herd immunity is not really achievable.
“Medical errors” and “car accidents” are “preventable” in the sense that, if we could eliminate human error, they would not exist. But those pesky humans are fallible. People are going to run red lights or stop signs they didn’t notice, forget to check a blind spot, etc. Doctors are going to make errors. Maybe we’ll turn all the driving over to AI in the near future, and possibly even medicine eventually, but we’re not there yet, and it’s unlikely that AI will ever be error-free.
Suicides are preventable in the obvious sense that they could have chosen not to kill themselves. But if you view suicide as the result of mental illness, we’re a long way from having the ability to identify and treat every mental illness. It’s actually rather nasty to suggest to people that tried like hell to help a friend or family member who eventually committed suicide that these deaths were preventable.
Since Screechy brought up mental illness, I would like to join the conversation to say that this is like when I was depressed to the point of suicide attempts, and was on suicide watch in the hospital. One of the favorite things for the nurses to say (because apparently psychiatric ward nurses are not specialists enough to realize that depression is not a choice) was “I once felt sad because I had no shoes until I met a man who had no feet.”
Seriously? That NEVER helps. In fact, for a lot of us, it makes things worse, because then we feel guilty for feeling depressed, sad, or, in the case of the shootings, grief and rage. Of course, I would never allow such a stupid Tweet to allow me to feel grief and rage, but then, I’ve been in therapy for about 200+years, and have learned a tiny bit about guilt (not enough; I still embrace it too eagerly). This Tweet is nothing that should make any of us feel guilty about feeling guilt and rage, but his “apology” almost suggests (does suggest between the lines) that we should feel guilty about being so irrational we feel grief and rage about this, but not about every traffic death (or maybe every 34 traffic deaths?) that occur.
Neil, please, don’t ever enter a psychiatric ward and attempt to talk to the patients. You will have the entire ward jumping out the unbreakable, unopenable windows…they will find a way.
Are all suicides due to mental illness?
“I’m sorry I’m too cerebral for you normies to comprehend.”
“On average, across any 48hrs, we also lose…
500 to Medical errors
300 to the Flu
250 to Suicide
200 to Car Accidents
40 to Homicide via Handgun
Often our emotions respond more to spectacle than to data.”
Murder, including mass shooting murder, isn’t a f*ing “spectacle.” Medical errors? People trying their best to do something good. Flu? Natural phenomenon not the result of bad people. Suicide? People doing violence against themselves, not others. Car accidents? People doing their best to not hurt each other. What could possibly make murder and mass shootings stir our emotions? I think the presence of a malevolent, intentional f*ing MURDERER might have something to do with it. It’s not “spectacle;” it’s the intentional malevolence.
No. Some people commit suicide due to a terminal illness that is going to deprive them of most of what they cherish, and deplete their funds to extend their lives for a period of time. They do that for themselves, for their family, so their family will be able to have enough money to survive when they are gone.
But the main cause of suicide is mental illness.