Andrew Peacock
asked
Neil deGrasse Tyson:
Hey Neil, I’ve noticed that certain individuals respond to the realms of climate change or COVID-19 vaccinations by pointing fingers at cases in which scientific expertise has failed them — such as the abuse of DDT/insecticides, or our anthropocentric understanding of Earth’s location in the universe. How do you respond to people who attribute their distrust in scientific authorities to these precedents?
Neil deGrasse Tyson
Excellent question. Often they are cherrypicking failures and ignoring the successes. 35,000 people die each year in the US in auto accidents. Yet people continue to drive cars every day. So what people cherrypick seems to be a matter of their religion, politics, or culture, and not something based on rational statistical analysis.
More broadly, science on the frontier will be wrong most of the time. That's the whole point of repeated observations and experiments. Only when there's scientific agreement from multiple research paths can we declare that science has established an objective truth. And when that happens, it's not later shown to be false.
In Starry Messenger: Cosmic Perspectives on Civilization, there's a whole chapter that explores the meaning of scientific truths.
FYI: The press likes to report on new scientific results, without the benefit of confirmatory studies. So when a conflicting study comes along, which is perfectly normal an natural on the frontier, the public is left thinking that scientists don't know what they're taking about.
More broadly, science on the frontier will be wrong most of the time. That's the whole point of repeated observations and experiments. Only when there's scientific agreement from multiple research paths can we declare that science has established an objective truth. And when that happens, it's not later shown to be false.
In Starry Messenger: Cosmic Perspectives on Civilization, there's a whole chapter that explores the meaning of scientific truths.
FYI: The press likes to report on new scientific results, without the benefit of confirmatory studies. So when a conflicting study comes along, which is perfectly normal an natural on the frontier, the public is left thinking that scientists don't know what they're taking about.
More Answered Questions
G.G. Melies
asked
Neil deGrasse Tyson:
My book "Quantum Algocracy" is about social polarization. It deals with the DMA syndrome (Dualism, Manichaeism, Armageddon) theorized by the Carter center and imagines a social civilization without humans in power. Do you think that a society governed by quantum algorithms of different processors that audit each other will be able to do better than us? Like a self-driving car.
David Howell
asked
Neil deGrasse Tyson:
Can you explain, if the universe is expanding from the point where the Big Bang occurred, how can the light from the objects (now) X billion light years away just now be reaching us? How did our slow selves physically get "out here" AHEAD of that light, while we wait patiently for it to arrive? In other words, how is the expansion of space faster than light?
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