Spectacle

Oh honestly. Not this again. “I am Skeptic, I can settle all this for you with some Facts.”

Neil deGrasse Tyson:

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 Handgun

Often our emotions respond more to spectacle than to data.

?????

Dude, we know lots more than 34 people die in the US every day. We know. But when one person with a big gun kills a lot of people in seconds, yes, we pay attention. We pay attention and we have emotions about it. We ought to have emotions about it.

I wrote a Free Inquiry column some time back quarreling with his claim that “Earth needs a virtual country: #Rationalia, with a one-line Constitution: All policy shall be based on the weight of evidence.” Same problem: he left out emotion. You can’t leave emotion out of policy, because policy is all about what we care about. If we don’t care, evidence is just a pile of meaningless facts.

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