Point missed
“Why do you even care??!” he shouts.
We don’t. We don’t care in the slightest. Who wears makeup and who wears a muscle shirt is not what we care about. It doesn’t take all that much effort to find out what we do care about. I guess Neil Tyson is too important to bother though.
Trans ideology won’t take away any of his rights. If a trans man is in the bathroom with him, he is not in potential danger. Also, men are not being erased.
This isn’t the first time Tyson has wandered into a conversation where he doesn’t bother to find out what he should know. When he made a wrong statement about the evolution of sex, and was challenged by evolutionary biologists, he doubled down and told them they didn’t know what they were talking about.
And in this case at least it’s not just what he should know, it’s not even bothering to think – or, worse, just being dishonest. It doesn’t strain the brain all that much to think about why women don’t want to be forced to share everything with men.
Pop skeptics have been utterly disappointing.
Is it not enough that it’s an incredible claim? No curiosity on where a gender identity arises? Itaytets because it has negative and dangerous effects on many people. But why can’t I just care about because it makes no sense to me?
It would be nice if Tyson didn’t give an odious place like Mythinformed something to go on about.
I know.
“Why do you care?” There are people who do care. But people disagreeing with gender ideology are not a monolith of religious conservatives who want women to wear makeup and dresses and men to wear pants. That Tyson can’t be bothered to learn something about the various views on the issue before spouting forth about it is inexcusable. Surely he is perfectly well aware that most things are not accurately represented in the popular press.
Hoo boy, you sure can say that again, Mike.
A fine example of ideological capture, and a weak defense of gender ideology as well. Repeating the prevailing doctrine is just as inane coming from him as it is coming from *anyone* who says “I am who I say I am.” Tyson should stick to his area of expertise (astrophysics) and leave social commentary to people who are better equipped to understand and explain social phenomena. It’s as if he’s never heard of gender stereotypes, or sexism, or biology for that matter. Does he understand how reproduction happens in human beings, and how evolution has eliminated any possibility of a “spectrum” over the millenia? (Hint: Mutations unseccessful at reproduction die off, duh.) Does he understand that reinforcing gender stereotypes, and concluding that the variations of superficial features, or gender “presentation” means that there is a sex “spectrum?” Well it doesn’t. We are not all phony “performers” of gender (Thanks for that viral bit of horseshit, Judith). Does he understand that gender dysphoria happens, but is quite uncommon (or used to be), and the vast majority of people don’t question their sex or gender at all? Does he really think he feels 20% of either gender? How would that be measured exactly? How would he ever know what a woman feels like in the first place, much less some percentage of it, or some mixture of both? It’s beyond idiotic. This guy calls himself a scientist. OK fine, but not a very good one if this garbage is any indicator.
P.S., sorry for the typos in the above, but in my own defense, I am currently 50% contrarian, 25% indignant, 15% sleepy, and 5% disillusioned.
P.P.S., Yes I know that’s only 95%, but I’m not feeling 100% just now. ;)
Being for the benefit of James:
Pop skeptics have been utterly disappointing.
Yes, he seems to have not bothered to take the time to learn what this is all about. He thinks it’s about how other people present, and has no clue that it’s about how they demand acceptance, space, intrusion, and are really just men asserting over women.
But, hey, like the phsysicist who asserted that human evolution had stopped, there’s no need to look it up before you answer the question if you’re a physicist. You’re by default the smartest scientists out there.
(There may be some with a degree of humility. None that I know of who have been willing to express their humility publicly since Einstein.)
Going with Mike in #11: https://xkcd.com/793/
Mousing over the cartoon:
A number of years ago, I heard Neil there in an interview basically say there was nothing more to learn about biology on earth. Long enough ago now that I can’t remember the exact quote and can’t be bothered to try look it up, but as a biologist that was enough to tell me I could safely ignore (or at the very least, need expert verification for) anything he claimed outside of astrophysics directly. He didn’t seem to have an above-grade-school-level of understanding of biology then, and doesn’t seem to have learned anything more about it since.
ibbica, I agree with that. Physicists snub Biology as “stamp-collecting”, but somehow our stamp collecting has managed to make a number of diseases extinct or nearly extinct, and has given people better lives. With that being said, there is a lot – like, a shitload – that we still don’t know.
As an ecologist, I could tell Tyson how Biology is not a “nothing more to learn” science. We’ve barely scratched the surface on Ecology, though for such a young science, i think we’ve done pretty damned good. But there is likely much more we don’t know than what we do know…including how many species there are on earth, and what they are.
But there are a lot of people out there who think they know Biology better than Biologists. My former associate dean was one of them; fortunately, they promoted him to the level of his incompetence, and we were no longer supervised by him. But people “explain” to me all the time things I understand way better than they do. I presume you experience the same.
Can’t remember the details now, but this is the same guy who opined that religious countries like Spain wasted the physical and intellectual energy of their citizens building cathedrals instead of, you know, conquering the world like less religious countries. And that it would be brilliant if there were an academic discipline that did some kind of comparative study of different cultures. So add history, anthropology and sociology to the list of things Tyson apparently knows less than nothing about (I write ‘less than nothing’ because someone who knows nothing can be willing, or even eager, to learn more).
“Can’t remember the details now, but this is the same guy who opined that religious countries like Spain wasted the physical and intellectual energy of their citizens building cathedrals instead of, you know, conquering the world like less religious countries.”
The totally non-conquering country of … Spain? Huge portions of the world today speak Spanish because they just love the sound of it?
My guess is, he was saying that the British Empire eventually took over from the Spanish Empire because Britain was “less religious”. Which I’m sure would have been news to the Brits of the time (roughly 17th to 19th century).
Then again, Tyson also seems to believe that Medieval Europeans thought that the earth was flat, which they absolutely didn’t (https://historyforatheists.com/2016/06/the-great-myths-1-the-medieval-flat-earth/). History might not be his strong point, which would be fine if he didn’t make pronouncements on the subject with such unwarranted certainty.
He didn’t even mention those Muslims who were so crap at conquering. The whole chain of ‘logic’ was problematic – do we really want ‘rate’ countries by how good they are at imperialism?
If religion actually distracted people by getting them to build gorgeous buildings instead of violently expanding their empires, that would be a point in its favour!
But I don’t think it works like that. If I was to take a wild guess, I’d say that religion adds fuel to the imperial fire by persuading people they’re not just doing it for land and gold, but also to spread the Word of God. You can even justify slavery by persuading yourself that it’s better to be chattel under the True Faith instead of free under Heathen Superstition.
Good to know that I’m at least partially, if not 100%, male because I’m not wearing makeup.
@18 Congratulations, you’ve thought more about these issues than N Tyson.
iknklast
Indeed… I teach postsecondary-level human biology now, and the number of incoming students who are convinced they know all there is to know about the human body from high school biology is amazing. I get a kick out of the in-jokes about biology being a soft, squishy science and therefore the most friendly and easiest of the sciences, but too many people don’t seem to understand that they’re *jokes* :-/
Because no one’s mentioned it as far as I can see, there is a technical term for arguing against something that your interlocutors don’t support and then claiming victory. It’s an overused and often misused term, but it’s nevertheless important and accurate. That term is “straw man”.
Deploying a straw man means either ignorance or mendacity. Either you don’t know what your interlocutors actually argue, or you do. If you don’t, then the straw man is due to ignorance. If you do, then it’s due to dishonesty. There are no other options.
‘Which I’m sure would have been news to the Brits of the time (roughly 17th to 19th century).’
This book argues that the ‘scientific method’ as we know it actually originated in Britain during this period as a result of strong sectarian rifts in the elites at that time. Since any conversation between friends, colleagues or relatives could contain land mines about religious or spiritual topics, the best way to create connections among elite males through conversation was to focus on topics for which there was actual direct inarguable physical evidence to support opinions. The concept of the ‘experiment’ as we know it arose as a way for people to agree about objective observations to facilitate communication and connection.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leviathan_and_the_Air-Pump
NiV, I experienced that in a talk back after one of the play festivals I was featured in. I had been in a disagreement with this totally obnoxious, sexist, asshole about some study that was badly done and I didn’t bother with; he accepted it hook, line, and sinker. So after that discussion, at the talk-back, he commented that he and I had been talking about that recently…and looked over at me and grinned. I’d already been outed as a scientist; now all the people there left thinking he had science on his side, because it would not be appropriate, nor would it go over well, to have such an argument in that setting. And he knew it. And he knew I would not be in a position to talk back. Did I say, he was an obnoxious, sexist asshole? Who’s play compared women to kittens? Not even adult animals?