Bad Time For Fake Nerds

Looks like one of their icons is a serial fabulist:

Religious fanatics have an odd habit of overreacting when people have the audacity to question their fanaticism. In Iraq, radical Islamic jihadists are systemically murdering and beheading Christians, Jews, and even Muslims who do not pledge fealty to ISIS’s religious tenets. Hundreds of years ago, church authorities and Aristotelian acolytes imprisoned Galileo for having the audacity to reject geocentrism in favor of heliocentrism. The bible recounts how Christians were persecuted and stoned, and Jesus himself was crucified for contradicting the religious dogma of the day.

You will bow to the religious zealots, or you will pay the price.

Which brings us to l’affaire de Tyson. Neil Tyson, a prominent popularizer of science (he even has his own television show) was recently found to have repeatedly fabricated multiple quotes over several years. The fabrications were not a one-off thing. They were deliberate and calculated, crafted with one goal in mind: to elevate Tyson, and by extension his audience, at the expense of know-nothing, knuckle-dragging nutjobs who hate science. Tyson targeted journalists, members of Congress, even former President George W. Bush. And what was their crime? They were guilty of rejecting science, according to Tyson.

There’s only one problem. None of the straw man quotes that Tyson uses to tear them down are real. The quote about the numerically illiterate newspaper headline? Fabricated. The quote about a member of Congress who said he had changed his views 360 degrees? It doesn’t exist. That time a U.S. president said “Our God is the God who named the stars” as a way of dividing Judeo-Christian beliefs from Islamic beliefs? It never happened.

This is a common problem on the Left. No one challenges them so they start making stuff up. Celebrity scientists are a lot like celebrity chefs. They are better at being celebrities than being scientists. They start getting sloppy and before long they are making claims that are ridiculous. It’s why a lot of writers never read the comments of their own stories. They fear they will start writing to please their admirers.

Tyson does not seem like an evil person. He is a bright guy by conventional standards, but one always has to wonder about the elephant in the room. His scientific work is meager and ended more than 20 years ago. He made his name and career as a presenter, PR man and popularizer of science. Nothing wrong with any of it, but he probably should not be passing himself off as a scientist these days.

He is the John Stuart of science. Stuart does comedy, but he is not a comic. He is a preacher, telling the faithful the good news every night. He uses comedy as a tool and a shield. Tyson has the same act, except he uses science instead of comedy. Instead of mocking the benighted with comedy, Tyson tells the chosen that science proves their deepest beliefs. In another age, science would be replaced by the gods and Tyson would be dressed as a shaman.

2 thoughts on “Bad Time For Fake Nerds

  1. Tyson is a popularizer of science, as you say, but not the active science researcher some people seem to think he is. Over the years he has published very few research articles in any of the major professional science journals. Mostly he does book reviews and talks about science to lay people. There is a place for such people, as the enormous popularity of Carl Sagan showed. However, these days there’s no reason for anyone to make things up, even for its humor value. There’s an endless supply of humorous and interesting material out there in the real world for any science popularizer to use in his stand-up routines before an audience.

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