Menu
Spiritual North
  • Blog
  • Research
  • Music
  • Film
  • Comedy
  • Timeline
  • Glossary
  • Blog
  • Research
  • Music
  • Film
  • Comedy
  • Timeline
  • Glossary

Non-Flat Earther Calls Neil DeGrasse Tyson and Bill Nye Scientism Cult Leaders

6/17/2017

 

A thoughtful article on the Scientific Regression published in May of 2016, deliberately calls out Neil DeGrasse Tyson and Bill Nye as "the worst enemies of Science's actual practice."

Picture
William A. Wilson published this article on FirstThings.com, in which he lays out the inherent flaws to confirmation bias, the desire to publish science which correlates with results, and the inherent fraudulent characteristics this engenders.

"Older scientists contribute to the propagation of scientific fields in ways that go beyond educating and mentoring a new generation. In many fields, it’s common for an established and respected researcher to serve as “senior author” on a bright young star’s first few publications, lending his prestige and credibility to the result, and signaling to reviewers that he stands behind it. In the natural sciences and medicine, senior scientists are frequently the controllers of laboratory resources—which these days include not just scientific instruments, but dedicated staffs of grant proposal writers and regulatory compliance experts—without which a young scientist has no hope of accomplishing significant research. Older scientists control access to scientific prestige by serving on the editorial boards of major journals and on university tenure-review committees. Finally, the government bodies that award the vast majority of scientific funding are either staffed or advised by distinguished practitioners in the field."

"The hagiographies of science are full of paeans to the self-correcting, self-healing nature of the enterprise. But if raw results are so often false, the filtering mechanisms so ineffective, and the self-correcting mechanisms so compromised and slow, then science’s approach to truth may not even be monotonic. That is, past theories, now “refuted” by evidence and replaced with new approaches, may be closer to the truth than what we think now."

Wilson points out that the two most prominent findings in recent years with respect to hard scientific studies, ,have both been recanted.

"Two of the most vaunted physics results of the past few years—the announced discovery of both cosmic inflation and gravitational waves at the BICEP2 experiment in Antarctica, and the supposed discovery of superluminal neutrinos at the Swiss-Italian border--have now been retracted, with far less fanfare than when they were first published."

Finally, Williams aims his critique at the Cult of Science, likens it to a religion, and pinpoints both Neil DeGrasse Tyson and Bill Nye as popularizers whom have conducted little to no research on their own. 

"If science was unprepared for the influx of careerists, it was even less prepared for the blossoming of the Cult of Science. The Cult is related to the phenomenon described as “scientism”; both have a tendency to treat the body of scientific knowledge as a holy book or an a-religious revelation that offers simple and decisive resolutions to deep questions. But it adds to this a pinch of glib frivolity and a dash of unembarrassed ignorance. Its rhetorical tics include a forced enthusiasm (a search on Twitter for the hashtag “#sciencedancing” speaks volumes) and a penchant for profanity. Here in Silicon Valley, one can scarcely go a day without seeing a t-shirt reading “Science: It works, b—es!” The hero of the recent popular movie 
The Martian boasts that he will “science the sh— out of” a situation. One of the largest groups on Facebook is titled “I f—ing love Science!” (a name which, combined with the group’s penchant for posting scarcely any actual scientific material but a lot of pictures of natural phenomena, has prompted more than one actual scientist of my acquaintance to mutter under her breath, “What you truly love is pictures”). Some of the Cult’s leaders like to play dress-up as scientists—Bill Nye and Neil deGrasse Tyson are two particularly prominent examples— but hardly any of them have contributed any research results of note. Rather, Cult leadership trends heavily in the direction of educators, popularizers, and journalists."

"When cultural trends attempt to render science a sort of religion-less clericalism, scientists are apt to forget that they are made of the same crooked timber as the rest of humanity and will necessarily imperil the work that they do. The greatest friends of the Cult of Science are the worst enemies of science’s actual practice."


William A. Wilson is a software engineer in the San Francisco Bay Area.

Comments are closed.


    WEST OF THE EDGE (NOVELLA)

    Picture
    $10 PAPERBACK ON AMAZON.COM.COM

    MAGNETIC NORTH (ALBUM)

    Picture
    $10 DOWNLOAD ON FRANKAMERICA.BANDCAMP.COM

    FLATLANDIA (ESSAYS) 

    Picture
    $10 E-BOOK DOWNLOAD ON AMAZON.COM

    SN Categories

    All
    Academics
    Advertising
    Antarctica
    Books
    Celebrity
    Comedy
    Cryptocurrency
    D.C.
    Earth
    Flat Earth
    Globramming
    History
    Hoax
    Hollywood
    Language
    Memes
    Moon
    Movies
    Music
    NASA
    News
    Nuclear
    Polaris
    Research
    Satellites
    Science
    Scientism
    Space
    SpaceX
    Sports
    Sun
    Troubleshooting
    Truthers
    Vatican
    Vegan



    Archives

    February 2020
    November 2019
    August 2019
    June 2019
    May 2019
    April 2019
    November 2018
    October 2018
    September 2018
    August 2018
    February 2018
    October 2017
    September 2017
    August 2017
    July 2017
    June 2017
    May 2017
    April 2017

    RSS Feed

Blog

Videos

Music

Timeline

Glossary

Contact

Copyright © 2018 (All Rights Reserved)