What Neil de Grasse Tyson Does Not Understand About Science
On Del Bigtree's show, The Highwire, Neil deGrasse Tyson committed two classic logical fallacies, and it's important that you know what those fallacies are so you can recognize them as well.
On Del Bigtree's show, The Highwire, Neil deGrasse Tyson committed two classic logical fallacies, and you must know what those fallacies are so you can recognize them as well.
The first one is called the fallacy of consensus gentium, usually made with the Argumentum ad Populum.
This is an argument by which a person claims a conclusion must be true because most, all, or even an elite group of elites irrelevantly think, believe, or feel that it is true.
There’s even a Wikipedia article about it.
We all saw, in real-time, from 2020 even until today, scientists like myself, doctors like Peter McCullough, Paul Marik, and Jay Bhattacharya get it right over and over in intricate detail against the handed-down decreed and enforced consensus on each and every topic.
Lab leak
PCR testing
Early treatment
Over-reporting
COVID-19 vaccine efficacy and effectiveness
COVID-19 vaccine safety
Gain-of-function
Masks
Lockdowns
The list goes on and on.
Del showed de Grasse Tyson an image of physicians and scientists they had on The Highwire, to which deGrasse Tyson responded:
“The individual scientist doesn’t matter”.
And he challenged Del to take the issue up with a “consensus expert” whatever that is.
The logical flaw is clearly obvious.
If, as deGrasse Tyson claimed, “The individual scientist doesn’t matter”, then Einstein’s singular work should not have been influential.
And if science is determined by consensus (which it’s not), then it’s “game over” once everyone agrees on something? We can lock up all the labs, and go home? We’re done? The best any human civilization will ever achieve is now?
At this point, that’s not just fallacious, it’s hubris.
In addition, de Grasse Tyson made an appeal to authority in response to The Highwire’s demolition of the appeal to authority; Bigtree showed that there was no consensus. Appeal to authority is another classic logical fallacy. (See Grammarly’s article on the Appeal to Authority Fallacy).
I think de Grasse Tyson did a stand-up thing to appear on the show and face Del. I know if he looks at vaccine safety “science” in detail, he’ll be surprised.
Del did a great job letting de Grasse Tyson know there is a difference between an organic, hard-won consensus, and a consensus by fiat - one that is proclaimed as such and enforced with threats of job loss, and loss of medical license.
And it was crystal clear that the consensus he wanted Del to know about did not exist. The consensus was conjured by Fauci et al., we have the emails, and we can see they did not put all the ideas on the table and sought to falsify them. Their game was to quell dissent and quash understanding. (See At a time when the U.S. needed Covid-19 dialogue between scientists, Francis Collins moved to shut it down by Vinay Prasad).
I could be wrong, but I don’t think de Grasse Tyson got these points. Science in astrophysics requires far more reliance on untested induction for longer periods of time than research in medicine and in biology. As a result, the consensus, per Thomas Kuhn, is far more important than evidence to him.
Public health has of course done all it can do to prolong and delay the point between dissenting views and actual empirical data collection to try to refute and challenge the hypothesis under scrutiny. Collins and Fauci both argued for combined Phase 2/3 trials, ostensibly to reduce the time to EUA approval of COVID-19 vaccines. In detail, a Phase 1, Phase 2, and Phase 3 trial would allow a more thorough scientific process of finding and challenging adverse events via an attempt at replication: those found in Phase 2 could also be found in Phase 3.
That did not happen, and de Grasse Tyson likely does not know this, nor can he deeply appreciate the significance of that top-down move on the distortion of the results of the COVID-19 vaccine clinical trials: It delayed consideration until the “science” being done was observational, which leads to a causality stalemate (“correlation does not equal causation”). Collins and Fauci didn’t foster the necessary science: they destroyed it.
At the core of the difference of the viewpoints is that those who wish everyone would rely on consensus, and those who want Science to consider all viewpoints trust. de Grasse Tyson trusts that the consensus in public health has been generated by the same process consensus is generated in areas of bona fide rational inquiry: construct a hypothesis, try it out, if it stands up to a critical test, fine, keep challenging it, ok, if it does not hold up, it’s been falsified (in the Popperian sense) and should be rejected.
That’s not how public health “science” works.
Even a cursory serious inquiry into what public health became under Fauci - top-down determination of the truth by decree, evidence or no evidence should be enough to shake his trust. A deeper look - 40 years of dogmatic, dictatorial, spiteful power plays, including destroyed careers due to dissent (Dr. Judy Mikovits), phone calls to Universities and research hospitals with threats to loss of funding if a dissenting voice is not silenced, medical boards suspending licenses of doctors working with scientists doing highly ethical research (Dr. Paul Thomas). de Grasse Tyson should seriously consider the fraud done after Simpsonwood, the email from Verstraeten pleading with CDC to accept the link in the VSD data between vaccines and thimerosal, William Thompson’s saga on the still-not-retracted Destefano study (Vaxxed)… There are MANY examples of this authoritarian abuse of power in public health, too many to mention here. Much of this is reviewed here (Put Children First). Denialist alternative explanations have been floated, including a misleading an no credible re-interpretation of the email by Vertstraeten; it took him four years to find a way to warp the analysis and finally make the association go away. That’s not Science. Not even close.
And with COVID-19 all of these tactics and more were used, in real time, during a deadly pandemic, to force the public to accept a consensus that conflicted with reality. the loss of trust in public health is not only well-earned - it is essential.
I’m sure that the research de Grasse Tyson is familiar with has its politics, but I highly doubt he can imagine how far away from science the activities at HHS agencies have become.
I would recommend for de Grasse Tyson (and everyone else) a read or re-read of Popper’s The Open Society and its Enemies. Then, compare everything HHS agencies have done to warp and control public perception on the question of vaccines (many, many articles on this from 2015-2020 on jameslyonsweiler.com).
Regarding the interview, dear readers, you will want to see this for yourself. And send the Highwire some love - by that I mean donations! They’ve been there all this time, hammering away at the truth. Tell them I sent you.
See: DEL DEBATES NEIL DEGRASSE TYSON - The HighWire
Related:
Support the NIH Reform Act! - Children’s Health Defense (childrenshealthdefense.org)
Del was right to bring him on, but his arguments were very unimpressive especially repeating “consensus”. He just came off as a sell out to me. He could understand the issue but chose not to because it wouldn’t help his career.
It was difficult to watch. He continued to deflect responsibility; yet he went public parroting the narrative....based on his false belief that other "consensus scientists" had done the research. And that the data was clear and unbiased. That is religious or ideological belief if I ever heard one.