Long hair
Start at 50 minutes on this to see and hear Neil deGrasse Tyson being sillier than you or I would have thought possible.
He tells his hosts he can tell women and men apart by looking at them, and that women are more expressive with their jewelry, and that women don’t have short hair, and a whole list of things of that kind. (Every single one of them, by the way, failed to be true of me, and I’m very far from the most strikingly butch woman on the planet, so…) He tells them that with much passion and emphasis, as if he’s saying something novel or surprising or clever. The point seems to be (I got too irritated and bored to watch to the end of his “argument”) that we know which sex is which because of a lot of visible cues, which are not inherent to femaleness or maleness but chosen and a matter of custom and fungible (i.e. they can be swapped)). Well no shit Sherlock, we know that. Now explain why that means we have to let men take everything we’ve won for ourselves over the past half-century.
I stopped thinking he couldn’t say anything so ridiculous after he told evolutionary biologists they didn’t understand evolution after he made an argument that was just plain wrong about evolution.
I do have long hair, but often don’t wear jewelry. I am not usually expressive with it when I do. How 1950s can you get?
I’ve found it increasingly hard to take NDT seriously in recent years. For an undeniably intelligent man (I can tell he’s a man because he’s wearing a tie /s), he has been saying some really dumb things. This one deserved a “You’re not fucking serious about that are you, you fucking plonker!”
This plays into the terrible tropes we’ve been raised on for decades about female appearance. Think of the countless times in movies and TV’s that we’ve seen beautiful girls and women derided as ugly or plain because they wear dowdy clothes, little makeup and glasses. here’s always the big moment where they turn up somewhere in nice dress, heavy makeup, and no glasses (never explained how that happens) and everyone gushes at how beautiful they are. I used to think it was the makers of the programmes that I thought were shallow and stupid, but no. There really are a lot of people who are so shallow and stupid that they don’t look at a person, but at their presentation only.
This was reinforced to me a few years ago watching a UK makeover programme that asked people in the street to critique the subjects appearance both before and after. I really high percentage of the great unwashed public can’t see past clothes and hair. All of. which are fungible as Ophelia notes (love that word).
He begins by saying he was going to talk about sex, but then almost everything he referenced had nothing to do with sex. Earrings, makeup, clothing, hair etc. etc. – he doesn’t know what he is talking about.
Well, to be unnecessarily fair, those things are about sex indirectly. They’re things that are culturally associated more with one sex than the other.
I’ll listen to Tyson on Cosmology, Dawkins and ikinklast on Biology.
Do you want to know how to do anything in PC/MS/DR-DOS – asked me, but I gave up on OS’s after Windoze took away all the fun.
Know what you know, and know what you don’t know.
What about in my first DOS, ProDOS?
Apple IIe was my introduction to computing, but I never got into the OS.
Oh gawd I watched.
What is Tyson’s response to whether it’s fair to have males in female spaces like bathrooms?
“GET CREATIVE and make all bathrooms unisex!”
What is Tyson’s response to whether it’s fair to have males in female sports?
“GET CREATIVE and divide sports according to physical criteria other than sex!”
What is Tyson’s response to whether it’s fair for men to be on shortlists reserved for women in order to address discrimination?
“GET CREATIVE and solve sex discrimination so we don’t need short lists!”
He dodges the central issue he’s been posturing and gesturing about regarding how Men and Women are different (clothes & makeup!) in order to answer the question “how can we accomodate men into women’s spaces?”
The only satisfying thing was watching the hosts call him out on his ridiculous claim that the transgender issue is about people wanting to force men and women to dress in traditional clothing.
Waait a minute. NDT says he can tell sex at a glance by looking at hair, clothing, jewellery, but also claims it is feminists and gender critical people who are trying to enforce dress codes?! You lot can’t see the way I’m wincing, but I just got hit in the face by pieces of my exploding irony meter.
He genuinely literally doesn’t seem to know anything except astrophysics. I’ve mentioned here before that I read a Twitter exchange with him years ago where he seemed to be inventing entire (already existing) fields of sociology and history in his own head because he’d never actually encountered them before; he seemed to imagine he was the first human to ever think these ideas.
GET CREATIVE!
It’s very odd that he came up with the idea of a system of government that is based on rationality, but disses philosophy as unnecessary parsing over the minor meanings of words. How does he think rationality works? I think there is some sort of physicist narcissism that steers them into the field, honestly, because so many famous physicists claim to be the only real scientists, and smarter than all the other scientists combined. Michio Kaku is another example. He was asked once whether human evolution had stopped, and rather then defer the question to someone who would know, or even asking someone who would know, he gave a boneheaded answer that yes, it has stopped. (Why ask him in the first place? That’s when I unsubscribed from The Big Think’s email newsletter.)
I don’t think I can watch this video, thanks to those who “took one for the team.”
It is indeed TORTURE to watch.
Sorry about the abundant typos in the post. I must have been so agitated I couldn’t remember how to tipe werds.
So “…secondary and tertiary accoutrements…” is how you tell? Meaning your not really a snorkeler until you have your flippers on? I don’t agree with the idea that when people wake up it’s tabula rasa and we invent our personas every day, I’m more in the ‘no matter where you go, there you are’ camp. Not to say that some people don’t go to great efforts to appear a certain way (not to leave out the ever increasing vainglorious among us).
It’s clear that most of us here are not part of NDT’s target audience, which is probably why he’s so irritating. I suppose his shtick is that if something is said with enough drama and conviction, it has to be true.
Jumping from chromosomes to ‘performativity’ isn’t all that clever.
twiliter, I’m not in the tabula rasa nor the “all in our genes” camp, because it’s obvious they work together, nature and nurture, to create who we are. I suspect Tyson is more in the “all in our genes” (though I can’t watch the video, either…I’ve been hit in the head with a hammer too many times during this move already). To a lot of physicists, all in our genes is neater, tidier, and more sciency. Too bad humans (and other species) refuse to be so neat and tidy for all these physicists who think it’s all just math. (Maybe they’d include chemistry, but I suspect they don’t even consider chemists real scientists).
I’ve discovered it’s rare for anyone not a biologist who is writing a work that touches on biology to consider asking a biologist about it. I was once asking someone I knew who was writing about moon colonization if he planned to consult any scientists. Yes, he says. I plan to talk to some astronauts and some psychologists. Really? You need to talk to chemists, physicists, and ESPECIALLY biologists if you’re going to write about colonizing the moon.
ikn, I watched some of the video (which was way too much), and it sure looks to me as if Tyson places too much emphasis on superficialities, and *not enough* on genetics. Where our experiences lie are in the middle ground, where biology tells the story. Microbiology informs biology, but using chromosomes as an explanation of trans seems to me just as useless as using lipstick as an explanation. I’d say Tyson is more of a lipstick guy. He also avoids psychological explanations, which is odd, but for him to say he can judge a book by it’s cover “100%” tells me that he only has a scientific outlook about certain things. Also Mike Haubrich’s comment about him disrespecting “philosophy as unnecessary parsing over the minor meanings of words.” (which I haven’t seen btw), tells me he doesn’t have a very good grasp of what philosophy is either. Bertrand Russell wrote that a good understanding of science is crucial to understanding philosophy, an opinion I agree with (empiricism), but there are those who (incorrectly, imo) think linguistics and metaphysics are what philosophy is about. Maybe he’s one of those.
Why should anybody treat Tyson’s performance as a serious attempt at doing anything other than making sure the gender kiddies don’t turn on him? Tyson KNOWS he is dancing around trying to run out the clock with babble and bravado. Tyson KNOWS he is LYING to save his own butt from the kind of zealots who make death threats to gender critical people. Tyson knows that WE KNOW he is a lying coward. That is the source of his rage – he hates himself for having no courage and he spews contempt and name-calling on those who won’t get with the program that he has agreed to grovel to. Same thing with guys like PZ Myers.
What startled me was how his level of vehemence and body language ramped up as he was fervently describing all the things us women supposedly do to make ourselves female (his words, not mine) — make up, jewelry, push-up bras, breast implants, etc. Then I remembered that he has had some issues about his behavior with women in the workplace in the not too long ago past. He managed to keep his job but IMHO, where there is smoke there is often fire.
twiliter, I got that from the article, and assumed he was doing that. But I also suspect he feels that the superficialities are in fact part of our genetic make up. That’s the sense I get from many physicists; the universe is hard wired, so women will be hardwired for long hair and make up and men will be hard wired for short hair and logic.
I doubt he thinks much deeper about it than that, but his shallowness on the subject does not keep him from opining on it…and calling biologists names when they call him out on his misunderstandings.
iknklast @16
Some physicists don’t include chemistry. Some grudgingly include physical chemistry.
There’s the old joke about physicists with the line: “Assume a spherical cow …”
Mike Haubrich @12
I have a memory of him saying that on an episode of a science show on the Science Channel, an episode of “How the Universe Works” I think it was.
I wonder what the date was, when it stopped.
Species becoming extinct is also a function of evolution. It has nothing to do with progress except as it pertains to the passage of time.
October 23, 4004 B.C. At least, according to Bishop Ussher.
It seems I’m late catching in up with this (heck of a lot of posts per day on this blog!) and likely no one is still reading, but regarding NdGT:
One should realise that Tyson is not in the position he is owing to his standing as a physicist or to his research career. Rather, Tyson is a TV personality. He was indeed a successful PhD student in astrophysics, back in the early 1990s, but then pretty quickly he got a job in a planetarium and diverted from research into promoting science to the public (which is a good thing to do).
Now, what is the main skill of a TV personality who presents science? It is not primarily a track record as a scientist or knowledge of science, it’s the ability to talk well and confidently to a camera. (In the same way that the skills of a good TV news anchor are distinct from those, say, of a good political reporter or analyst.) Further, if your career is based on taking confidently when a camera is pointed at you, then it’s likely you’ll continue doing that regardless of topic, regardless of whether it’s a subject you know about. That’s just what a person in that position does.
The above is worth bearing in mind regarding NdGT.
By the way, I don’t regard many of the above generalisations about physicists as all that fair. Take, just for example, the “spherical cow approximation”. It’s an entirely sensible and valid approach as a first stab at an issue. If, for example, you were interested in how much heat a cow emits per hour, the spherical-cow approximation would quickly give you a correct order-of-magnitude answer. What you then do is interatively improve the answer by gradually adding features to the model that improve the match to the real world, depending on how much accuracy you need. This approach works; it’s why physicists are among the most successful people at understanding the world.
Ah yes. Very good points.
(Sorry about the many posts every day. I’m a chatterbox [though not in person].)
And us chemists are evil. We make chemicals. Chemicals bad.
;-)