How popular scientists are indulged in optimism to entertain the public or how they insert their values into the objective reality.

First of all, I’d like to mention as a science educator myself that these two guys are great in educating the public about science and scientific thinking. Below is the criticism that I don’t think they will read but I hope someone else will take time to consider as anyone who claims to possess critical thinking skills must question everything they know because only then they have the potential to change and grow their mind.

If I were in a conversation with Nye and Tyson; I’d crack down their arguments in a minute. Note, I’m not even a scientist but I’m a systems thinker and it seems to me that systems thinking is what these two great guys are missing. We all miss something because we’re humans, beings who are full of cognitive biases and dissonances. Tyson and Nye tend to insert their values into the arguments they present and everyone who has similar values applauds them. Well, probably, they have to do so on purpose so their audience will stick to them. But then there’s a danger of blindness of taking the words of popular figures like Tyson and Nye for granted. 

Bill Nye Interviews Dr Neil Degrasse Tyson — COSMOS Possible Worlds:

So our conversation would go this way.

Tyson: Vegetarians eat plants that just started to reproduce but get killed and eaten by them, those who oppose killing a life.

Me: It seems to me you miss the fact (and so you tend to make this generalization) that is according to the recent surveys, most people who go vegetarian or vegan do so for health reasons or to reduce their impact on the environment, not because they don’t want to kill a life.

Nye: Thank you all for coming. I appreciate all for coming out tonight. Please take precautions.

Me: You’ve gathered an audience in a closed space during the global pandemic, in the country which is hardest hit by the pandemic to talk about scientific literacy and ask the audience to take precautions?

Nye: We’re competing with something that thinks nothing about taking anyone of us out.

Me: What can a virus think? A virus doesn’t think, nor it distinguishes species on which it feeds to survive by gradually killing the host and eventually itself. We’re very arrogant to think that it should consider us; it’s purely a projection of human beliefs into what we believe should happen. The objective reality doesn’t care about your expectations, values, or beliefs. 

Moreover, we’re not competing with it, nor ‘it’s our enemy that won’t negotiate with us’ as Tyson says further. Viruses have been on this planet much longer than our species. It’s like saying: ‘we’re competing with nature’, which is an absolutely retarded notion even for own survival. That belief is exactly what got us into the current mess known as the 6th mass extinction: “Humans are the master of other species for the progress and prosperity of their own species”. The objective reality is that as we kill species and invade the habitats of other species, we won’t survive without those as they constitute the basis of life on this planet, ‘the only home we’ve ever known’ (Carl Sagan). So ask yourself who is the bigger virus by behavioral dynamics? 

Nye: We’ll get through this because we will all wash our hands.

Me: You seem to lack knowledge of how respiratory viruses are passed on. Respiratory viruses are not only passed through surfaces; they are more quickly passed through air droplets, and people knew that since the Spanish flu and even earlier. It’s part of basic scientific knowledge that an average person at least here, in Taiwan, has but scientists and educators don’t have it? No wonder, why the US folks refuse wearing masks. Why should they if even their scientists and educators don’t do so?

Nye: For most people in the world things are less messed up than ever. There are fewer people in extreme poverty. If you are even born in the poorest part of Africa, there’s a chance that your kids will do better than you do which is everybody’s dream.

Me: First, all that progress for humans has come at the tremendous cost of nature exploitation and its destruction that you prefer not to mention as you, as a human being focuses on your own species’ progress and prosperity. It’s a perpetuation of the same way of thinking and values I mentioned earlier: “Humans are the master of other species for the progress and prosperity of their own species” which is the most dangerous belief of our times. Secondly, if things are less messed up for people now it doesn’t mean there is such a trend; and that is where you’re wrong regarding kids having a better future in the poorest part of Africa. By all indicators that sustain our life on this planet, we are more and more messed up than ever: overdevelopment, overpopulation, ecological overshoot, species extinction, resource depletion, water and soil contamination, climate disruption, etc. Politically, the world is shifting towards dictatorships. 

I’m quite stunned that those basics are not even mentioned. Though, I’m actually not that stunned when I take into consideration how much of the human value system is engaged in this talk. You wouldn’t have such a big audience if your talk was named ‘Civilization collapse’. I can assure you, as I’ve done it myself. People don’t pay money for despair if even it is acquired along with the crucial knowledge that the majority lacks. They pay for entertainment or optimism or hope that you and Tyson are so obviously indulged into. So the monetary motive redirects your audience’s attention and interest.

Nye: Humankind now is running the show; we probably didn’t intend to but now we’re in charge and thinking about other words and going there is just human nature to imagine that.

Me: No, humankind isn’t running the show anymore. That is what you want to believe is happening until you learn about the exponential function, systems dynamics, collapse of civilizations, the Jevons paradox, limits to growth, climate disruption, ecosystem collapse, and coextinctions.

Tyson: We’re imagining the future where we have active CO2 atmospheric scrubbers.

Tyson: We shouldn’t demonize the consumption of energy; you demonize the consequences of consuming some kinds of energy relative to others.

Me: You didn’t seem to do your homework on technological fixes of our broken culture. Once you unlearn the dangerous notion of techno-fixes/solutions to our human predicament by studying more on the topics mentioned above, you may or may not divorce the dangerous belief you’re advocating for. 

As an example, let me extrapolate a bit on the Jevons paradox. You have to realize that Moore’s law doesn’t apply to energy. When we deal with energy, we deal with physics. Unless you can find a way around physics, any consumption of energy is going to be powered in some way. The more we become energy efficient, the more energy we consume, that’s is the Jevons paradox I though physicists were aware of. So far, no amount of technology and no amount of human ingenuity can possibly overturn the laws of physics, the laws which govern this planet.

Nye: Talk about climate change and vote.

Me: So you got me to start on politics. You ask people to vote to elect a billionaire to appoint other billionaires to fix the system that made them billionaires? In a nutshell, the US is run by one party which is the business party with two fractions which in essence carry out variations on the same policies which are opposed by most of the population. Take the New Green Deal, for example, it’s just as flawed as previous fossil fuel deals or whatever they were called in the past. The Green New Deal is a perpetuation of the industrial civilization to continue with nature exploitation and destruction for the progress of humankind and capitalism (or any other kind of profit-oriented monetary system). It doesn’t talk about degrowth and/or depopulation; neither talks about the system’s change. All it talks about is patchwork as known as a switch to another type of energy extraction. Well, another type of energy extraction known as renewables requires enormous quantities of minerals by digging the sea bed, forest depletion, vast land and it still plugged into a fossil fuel grid to satisfy the current level of energy demand. The Jevons paradox, mentioned above, is an additional beast showing how little sense the Green New Deal makes. Politicians are completely uneducated on how to manage societies and you call people to vote for them? I’d love to be wrong about that; name a politician advocating degrowth policies, shutting down most of the industries and re-educating everyone to restore the environment they have loused up. This is based on the objective reality that needs to be done globally if we want to save the rest of the species our life depends on.

Those are just some of the arguments I’d deal with along with asking a thousand questions that might or might not make them question their own values that they seem to insert into the objective reality of our world. There’s no perfection, only the improvement. 

Written by Irina Le