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plutherusSo, this blog entry has been making the rounds on Facebook and elsewhere. A huge hoopla over how Neil deGrasse Tyson has been caught multiple times fabricating quotes. Is this true? Normally, the fact that its on the Federalist would be enough reason to ignore it, but multiple people have linked to it and at least one person I know is very invested in both the truth and the importance of it.
The gist is, a blogger is trying to edit Neil deGrasse Tyson's Wikipedia entry to have references to his blog which he feels document an ongoing proof of dishonesty on the part of Neil deGrasse Tyson, and the fact that people keep reverting his edits, he believes, gives evidence to his belief that science and religion are really the same thing.
OK, enough editorializing on my part. Let's look at some of these oh-so-scandalous quotes:
1. Half the schools are below average.
What's the lie? There are several, according to the author of the blog:
- In the one article he found, the statement was in the text of the article, not the headline. Therefore Tyson is lying about it being in the headline.
- Mean and Median are not the same thing. This is true. For a normal distribution, they would be, but most distributions are not perfect bell curves. Tyson doesn't make the claim that mean and median are the same thing, he just (according to the author of the blog) used the quote to try to make the people he likes look stupid. So, not a lie, not even a misquote, just a claim that, because half the results don't necessarily have to be below average he's not as stupid as Tyson thinks he is. However, you should still not be overly alarmed because your distribution approaches a balanced bell curve. i.e., even though mean and median don't have to be the same, it's not an alarming thing if they are. So claiming it is does indeed show an ignorance of statistics, just as Tyson said.
2. An unnamed member of congress claimed that their views have changed 360 degrees. The blog author could not find that exact quote. However, he did find a quote by Member of Congress Maxine Waters that claimed another members views had changed 360 degrees. Is this a lie? The quote is not exactly right, but it does show that a Member of Congress did indeed not understand what 360 degrees meant, which was exactly the point Tyson was making when he claimed that this common mistake is even made by people in Congress.
3. Jury Duty – was it 1700 or 3000 mg?
Tyson tells an anecdote of when he was dismissed from Jury Duty. The judge told him the defendant was found with 2700mg of cocaine. When he asked the judge why say 1,700 mg instead of 2.7g, he was sent home. Later times when he told the story, he used the numbers 3,000mg and 3g. He also at one point claimed it was about the weight of a penny, and another time he claimed it was the weight of a dime.
If, in a scientific paper, say (to use something I know a tiny bit about) someone measured 2700 instances of a particular pollen, but then later claimed in another paper it was 3000 instances, that might be a cause for alarm. However, if they initially published the 2700 number, then later during a presentation complained that they had to spend several hours “bent over a microscope carefully counting out 3000 individual grains of pollen”, that would not be a lie.
In other words, the important information here is that he was let out of jury duty because he understood that a thousand milligrams is the same as a gram. To get bogged down with the exact number and call him a liar because it varies slightly as he tells the story in different forms is beyond ridiculous. It is the sort of thing that could only be important to someone really digging hard to find a reason not to like Tyson.
4. “Our god is the god who named the stars”. The blog author claims that Tyson claims that Bush used this quote to distinguish the Christian god from the Muslim god. He could not find the source of this quote. Tyson also doesn't give the source of the quote in his talk. I also could not find the source of the quote in the five minutes I spent googling it. There are two issues with this claim:
- The main point he was making is that people are ignorant about how two-thirds of all named stars have Arabic names. There is a reason for this, and science courses should not be glossing over Arabic contributions to astronomy, which they do out of fear of offending certain American Christians.
- Bush actually did have a lot of rhetoric trying to distinguish “us” from “them” in the days after the attacks on 9/11/01. Remember his “Crusade against evil” and how Iraq is “The same part of the world” as Afghanistan and his constant reference to the Terrorizers? No, well, I'll let you look all those up. (Note it won't be on the White House web site because after a few days they went back and re-edited his speeches to remove all references to the word “Crusade” when they found that very few people actually held the Crusades as a good example of holy work.
But I digress. At any rate, there you have it. In four articles chronicling Neil deGrasse Tyson's horrible history of fabricating quotes, the author gave exactly four examples. The first two of which are only slightly wrong, one of which is wrong only in a single completely irrelevant detail. And one, assuming that the fact that the five minutes I spent searching and however long the author spent searching is sufficient evidence that there is no such quote, may be problematic in that it smears a horrible person in the wrong way, but the point, or the Arabs contributions to science, still stands.
And this is assuming that everything the blogger said was accurate. I'm going by only the quotes he provides and the rebuttals he attempts. My conclusion: Yes, there is good reason why Wikipedia isn't letting you add a section to the Neil deGrasse Tyson page about “repeatedly fabricated multiple quotes over several years” and it has nothing to do with a grand conspiracy about people who worship Tyson as a new deity.
The gist is, a blogger is trying to edit Neil deGrasse Tyson's Wikipedia entry to have references to his blog which he feels document an ongoing proof of dishonesty on the part of Neil deGrasse Tyson, and the fact that people keep reverting his edits, he believes, gives evidence to his belief that science and religion are really the same thing.
OK, enough editorializing on my part. Let's look at some of these oh-so-scandalous quotes:
1. Half the schools are below average.
What's the lie? There are several, according to the author of the blog:
- In the one article he found, the statement was in the text of the article, not the headline. Therefore Tyson is lying about it being in the headline.
- Mean and Median are not the same thing. This is true. For a normal distribution, they would be, but most distributions are not perfect bell curves. Tyson doesn't make the claim that mean and median are the same thing, he just (according to the author of the blog) used the quote to try to make the people he likes look stupid. So, not a lie, not even a misquote, just a claim that, because half the results don't necessarily have to be below average he's not as stupid as Tyson thinks he is. However, you should still not be overly alarmed because your distribution approaches a balanced bell curve. i.e., even though mean and median don't have to be the same, it's not an alarming thing if they are. So claiming it is does indeed show an ignorance of statistics, just as Tyson said.
2. An unnamed member of congress claimed that their views have changed 360 degrees. The blog author could not find that exact quote. However, he did find a quote by Member of Congress Maxine Waters that claimed another members views had changed 360 degrees. Is this a lie? The quote is not exactly right, but it does show that a Member of Congress did indeed not understand what 360 degrees meant, which was exactly the point Tyson was making when he claimed that this common mistake is even made by people in Congress.
3. Jury Duty – was it 1700 or 3000 mg?
Tyson tells an anecdote of when he was dismissed from Jury Duty. The judge told him the defendant was found with 2700mg of cocaine. When he asked the judge why say 1,700 mg instead of 2.7g, he was sent home. Later times when he told the story, he used the numbers 3,000mg and 3g. He also at one point claimed it was about the weight of a penny, and another time he claimed it was the weight of a dime.
If, in a scientific paper, say (to use something I know a tiny bit about) someone measured 2700 instances of a particular pollen, but then later claimed in another paper it was 3000 instances, that might be a cause for alarm. However, if they initially published the 2700 number, then later during a presentation complained that they had to spend several hours “bent over a microscope carefully counting out 3000 individual grains of pollen”, that would not be a lie.
In other words, the important information here is that he was let out of jury duty because he understood that a thousand milligrams is the same as a gram. To get bogged down with the exact number and call him a liar because it varies slightly as he tells the story in different forms is beyond ridiculous. It is the sort of thing that could only be important to someone really digging hard to find a reason not to like Tyson.
4. “Our god is the god who named the stars”. The blog author claims that Tyson claims that Bush used this quote to distinguish the Christian god from the Muslim god. He could not find the source of this quote. Tyson also doesn't give the source of the quote in his talk. I also could not find the source of the quote in the five minutes I spent googling it. There are two issues with this claim:
- The main point he was making is that people are ignorant about how two-thirds of all named stars have Arabic names. There is a reason for this, and science courses should not be glossing over Arabic contributions to astronomy, which they do out of fear of offending certain American Christians.
- Bush actually did have a lot of rhetoric trying to distinguish “us” from “them” in the days after the attacks on 9/11/01. Remember his “Crusade against evil” and how Iraq is “The same part of the world” as Afghanistan and his constant reference to the Terrorizers? No, well, I'll let you look all those up. (Note it won't be on the White House web site because after a few days they went back and re-edited his speeches to remove all references to the word “Crusade” when they found that very few people actually held the Crusades as a good example of holy work.
But I digress. At any rate, there you have it. In four articles chronicling Neil deGrasse Tyson's horrible history of fabricating quotes, the author gave exactly four examples. The first two of which are only slightly wrong, one of which is wrong only in a single completely irrelevant detail. And one, assuming that the fact that the five minutes I spent searching and however long the author spent searching is sufficient evidence that there is no such quote, may be problematic in that it smears a horrible person in the wrong way, but the point, or the Arabs contributions to science, still stands.
And this is assuming that everything the blogger said was accurate. I'm going by only the quotes he provides and the rebuttals he attempts. My conclusion: Yes, there is good reason why Wikipedia isn't letting you add a section to the Neil deGrasse Tyson page about “repeatedly fabricated multiple quotes over several years” and it has nothing to do with a grand conspiracy about people who worship Tyson as a new deity.
