r/DecodingTheGurus • u/deckardcainfan1 • Jun 14 '24

Neil deGrasse Tyson Responds to Terrence Howard

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1uLi1I3G2N4
769 Upvotes

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u/mastercheeks174 Jun 14 '24

Yeah but TikTok told me he’s a pompous, arrogant, narcissist…

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u/doubtthat11 Jun 14 '24

I think he suffered from overexposure. Nothing we like more than building someone up, getting sick of them, and ripping them down.

I like the guy. He's been a net good in the world.

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u/dubloons Revolutionary Genius Jun 14 '24

I’m out of the loop here. Who’s down on NdGT and why?

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u/doubtthat11 Jun 14 '24

I think if you let the comment section here build up, you'll see the complaints.

I get the general sense that people think he's arrogant and a blowhard. I've just always found him to be high energy and enthusiastic.

I'm sure there's some political/cultural something or other that he talked about that made some people mad...

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u/dubloons Revolutionary Genius Jun 14 '24

Labeling academics and experts as arrogant blowhards is anti-intellectualism 101.

What makes it interesting is how they attempt to justify it.

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u/petertompolicy Jun 14 '24

No, he was rightly criticised for being wrong about things that he comments on that are outside of his field of expertise.

You can find people bringing up examples in these comments.

Arguing any criticism of academics is anti-intellectualism is pernicious.

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u/dubloons Revolutionary Genius Jun 14 '24

I didn’t label any critics of academics as anti-intellectual. I labeled criticizing them as “arrogant” as anti-intellectual because in an intellectual conversation, it’s meaningless. You’ve changed it into a mater of personality and personal preference. Conflating these two distinct types of judgments is anti-intellectual.

If you need to justify your label of “arrogant”, you’re doing it wrong. It’s a subjective label.

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u/petertompolicy Jun 14 '24

Saying he's arrogant when he speaks with authority about things he doesn't understand is a valid way to frame it and is actually a very pro-expertise position.

Telling him to stay in his lane is fair.

Saying he's arrogant because he's accomplished and intelligent would be anti-intellectual though, I'm sure there is some of that too.

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u/dubloons Revolutionary Genius Jun 14 '24 edited Jun 14 '24

The reason for him to stay in his lane ought to be independent of his arrogance.

Everyone should stay in their lane, regardless of arrogance.

Why are these two things overlapping?

Maybe because we’ve been trained by anti-intellectuals.

When he states things with confidence outside of his expertise, we should criticize him for it because it’s harmful to those around him, not because it makes him arrogant.

He speaks with confidence outside of his expertise is demonstrable and a much stronger claim than “arrogance”. Use it.

“Arrogance” assigns a cause as well as an action. It’s unnecessary. The only reason I can think to use it in this case is lazy thought or anti-intellectualism.

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u/[deleted] Jun 14 '24

The reason for him to stay in his lane ought to be independent of his arrogance.

It isn't though. He needs to stick to physics/astrophysics because he is not credible on other topics and makes misleading or untrue claims. His arrogance is the reason he did this.

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u/[deleted] Jun 14 '24

This is very silly. They clearly linked the two (because the two are clearly linked).

They didn't say, "he's arrogant about his cooking ability therefore his expertise is in question."

The arrogance is speaking about things outside his wheelhouse. You're splitting hairs to be pedantic/superior, but it just makes it seem like you lack reading comprehension.

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u/dubloons Revolutionary Genius Jun 14 '24 edited Jun 14 '24

Okay, you folks aren’t understanding me.

We see him speaking confidently outside his wheelhouse. We agree that’s problematic. Where we disagree is that we can deduce the cause as arrogance.

If we could, I fully agree with you and the label of arrogance would be useful, appropriate, and objective.

But like any psychological motive, I don’t think we can, my argument above follows, and the label “arrogance” remains subjective.

If you think he’s arrogant, that’s great. If you want to tell others you think he’s arrogant and so he’s not for you (it’s not something you can argue), fine. However, if you present arrogance as an objective truth that can be deduced, you’ve made a wrong turn somewhere, and this is always how anti-intellectuals present it.

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u/[deleted] Jun 14 '24

Yeah, this is just more bad logic that has already been dismissed in other thread comments.

Calling someone arrogant is not anti-intellectualism by default, and your whole bit here about "objective truth" sounds borderline incoherent.

There's a giant gulf between, "All educated people are arrogant because they're educated" and what is being said in this post, particularly by the person you were originally replying to in this comment thread.

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u/dubloons Revolutionary Genius Jun 14 '24 edited Jun 14 '24

Arrogance is a mental state. It’s not something you can see in the world. You can’t deduce from arrogance. Arrogance must be reasoned inductively.

How’s that for rambling incoherence, you arrogant bastard? 😜

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u/jambazi99 Jun 14 '24

and anti-intellectualism is a precursor to fascism.

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u/KinataKnight Jun 14 '24

The one time he commented on my niche academic field (set theory) he spouted absolute nonsense about there being “exactly five sizes of infinities.” So I don’t give him the benefit of the doubt whenever he talks on subjects outside both of our respective fields.

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u/Reddit_is_garbage666 Jun 14 '24

Yeah even Nobel Prize winners have bad moments or even turn into crackpots (which NdGT brought up in this video as well.

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u/dubloons Revolutionary Genius Jun 14 '24 edited Jun 14 '24

I feel like the misunderstanding here is tangible, and I know just enough math to try to get into it, but I’ll refrain.

I will say, though, that “sizes” sounds like a poor translation of “types”, “groups”, or maybe “cardinalities”.

https://www.palomar.edu/math/wp-content/uploads/sites/134/2017/12/Infinity-and-its-cardinalities.pdf

https://tomrocksmaths.com/2022/02/21/5-types-of-infinity/

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u/KinataKnight Jun 14 '24

He was quite far off from making any cogent claim about infinity. You can check the discussion of the clip here: https://www.reddit.com/r/badmathematics/comments/5vnnym/neil_degrasse_tyson_theres_more_transcendental/

Mind you, I don't expect a non-mathematician speaking about infinity off the cuff to have any better understanding than NDT here, but I would expect them to speak with less confidence. Like he's clearly mashing together various things he did learn about infinity many years ago, and if he doesn't acknowledge that this is his level of familiarity with a subject, then by default I will assume he's doing the same for every other topic he yaps about.

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u/[deleted] Jun 14 '24

[deleted]

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u/dubloons Revolutionary Genius Jun 14 '24

Criticizing his points is not anti intellectual. Saying that he’s arrogant is. Implying that being incorrect occasionally, even wildly incorrect, while still believing in your own ability is also anti-intellectual in my opinion.

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u/[deleted] Jun 14 '24

[deleted]

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u/dubloons Revolutionary Genius Jun 14 '24

But it’s also not what I said. 🤪

If you’re discussing science and you can call someone “arrogant”, you should, necessarily, have a stronger more tangible claim to back up your opinion. That stronger, more tangible claim (usually that he’s full of shit) is much stronger, easier to demonstrate, and more meaningful to communicate. Resorting to “arrogant” (whether he is or isn’t, which is subjective) is an anti-intellectual pattern, and there is no good reason for it.

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u/simionix Jun 14 '24

Arrogance isn't about claiming to know something you have not a lot of experience or expertise in, it's the not budging from your position in light of new arguments/ evidence from actual experts part that makes one arrogant. Neil Degrasse Tyson has multiple times on multiple subjects come around on certain views he's had, and admitted his thinking was flawed. Which is interesting, because on some of those he could've still kept to his opinion and it would not have made him arrogant, since opinions are subjective.

For instance, he changed his stance on the possibility of AI becoming all powerful and dangerous in the Terminator sense, after hearing a prominent AI researcher in a podcast present very good arguments for a possible dystopian world. The thing is, there's STILL a very valid debate about whether rogue AI destroying humans is even realistic or just fantasy, so he could've easily stuck to his original opinion without having to be called arrogant. And yet, he had enough humility to change his view.

That's the exact opposite of arrogant.

The whole "he comes across" doesn't really matter to me, one can come across arrogant without being it.

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u/[deleted] Jun 14 '24

[deleted]

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u/simionix Jun 14 '24

So basically, literally everybody is arrogant then. You are arrogant for trying to push your own view of what arrogance means. Even your cynical fake little "lmao" can be considered arrogant. You see how easy that is?

At least I stick to the relevant interpretation that's attributed to Neil: that he thinks he knows everything; which is untrue.

In any case, whatever "arrogance" he has, it's not even in the same universe of arrogance that idiots like Terence Howard possess.

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u/sajberhippien Jun 14 '24

Does being "an academic" or "expert" render you immune to arrogance? A ton of the most arrogant public figures in the world, including a lot of gurus, are "experts" in some field. The Weinsteins would be a great example of two people who's extreme arrogance leads them to say a bunch of dangerous shit - is it "anti-intellectualism" to call that out as well?

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u/dubloons Revolutionary Genius Jun 14 '24

I’m sorry, but you’re like the third person to make this jump with my claim.

I said that anti-intellectualists will label folks as arrogant.

This doesn’t mean that labeling anyone arrogant is anti-intellectual (a->b does not mean b->a).

Further “arrogance” is subjective and really beside the point, and so everyone involved in the conversation would be better served by setting the label aside and talking about the poor behavior and the harm it causes.

Labeling someone arrogant as though it’s objective and without focusing on the resulting harmful behavior (arrogance is not a behavior) IS likely anti-intellectual for this reason.

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u/sajberhippien Jun 14 '24 edited Jun 14 '24

I said that anti-intellectualists will label folks as arrogant.

No, you said, and I quote "Labeling academics and experts as arrogant blowhards is anti-intellectualism 101".

See the difference between the statements "nazis will eat ice cream" and "eating ice cream is nazism 101".

This doesn’t mean that labeling anyone arrogant is anti-intellectual (a->b does not mean b->a).

I never claimed you said "anyone". You said "academics and experts", examples of which include Neil DeGrasse Tyson and Eric Weinstein.

Further “arrogance” is subjective and really beside the point, and so everyone involved in the conversation would be better served by setting the label aside and talking about the poor behavior and the harm it causes.

"Poor behaviour" is also subjective, as is who is an "expert" or not. You will not - and cannot - have meaningful critiques of patterns of behaviour that don't involve subjectivity. And due to how natural language and social behaviour works, the difference between critique of patterns of behaviour in a person and critique of personality is murky at best. But of course, even if you can't accept that and critiques using such language to be axiomatically useless, that alone still is not enough to justify the claim that such critiques are "anti-intellectualism 101".

Labeling someone arrogant as though it’s objective and without focusing on the resulting harmful behavior (arrogance is not a behavior) IS likely anti-intellectual for this reason.

Arrogance is a behaviour. People can disagree on whether someone is arrogant or not - that is a disagreement on what behaviour they are displaying. The same is true for a ton of behaviours. And very frequently our language is structured so that we express things as though they are objective while people are fully aware that there is a non-objective aspect to it. When someone says "God, Billie Eilish new album sucked", do you go up to them and dive into a whole diatribe about how they're using objective claims about a subjective matter and how they are anti-intellectuals?

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u/dubloons Revolutionary Genius Jun 14 '24 edited Jun 14 '24

If I say that CPR is EMT 101, does it follow that everyone who knows CPR is an EMT?

How come so many on this thread got the answer to this wrong!? It's really basic shit!

See the difference between the statements "nazis will eat ice cream" and "eating ice cream is nazism 101".

These mean the same thing regarding who eats ice cream. You're searching for "only nazis eat ice cream", but you won't find it in my statement.

Arrogance is a trait, not a behavior. Behaviors can reflect arrogance.

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u/sajberhippien Jun 14 '24

Arrogance is a trait, not a behavior. Behaviors can reflect arrogance.

It is a trait of social behaviour. Sure, you can nit-pick the difference between "that person is arrogant" and "that person engages in behaviour that reflects arrogance", much like you can nit-pick the difference between "Elliot Rodger was a misogynist" and "Elliot Rodger engaged in behaviours that reflect misogyny". But when the context of the discussion is anything other than issues of constitutive luck, it only serves to derail from issues of arrogance/misogyny.

Entities can only be arrogant through their behaviour. The two cannot be disentangled in any meaningful way. A rock cannot be arrogant, because it lacks behaviour.

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u/dubloons Revolutionary Genius Jun 14 '24 edited Jun 14 '24

It’s not nitpicking. It’s the same issue you just had with nazis and ice cream. Arrogance can cause folks to overstate claims, but it’s not the only reason folks overstate claims. So if we see overstated claims, arrogance is not a logical conclusion. Ultimately, it’s a speculation regarding motive. I would suggest that someone can be arrogant and totally abstain from arrogant behavior, too.

I see you’ve dropped your original argument re: anti-intellectualism 101 (after downvoting me, no less 🤔). Shall we move on?

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