>> ^mxxcon:
>> ^chilaxe:
1. There's pro-science media available.

correction. pro-science media bias


What do you mean by that? You're using a computer to voice your opinion, so it seems like you're a supporter of science.

>> ^chilaxe:
1. There's pro-science media available.

correction. pro-science media bias

Neil seems like a great guy.

I think there were 3 parts to his answer.

1. There's pro-science media available.
2. Kids aren't the problem, adults are the problem.
3. Science funding is such a good deal, we'll have no choice but fund it.

#1: This doesn't seem to address the statistics that show US students on average lagging behind students from other countries. (If you look at only the top half of students in each country, however, it would probably be more even, and the top half are where tomorrow's science and technology professionals are drawn from, but that's not the kind of thing Neil would talk about.)

#2: Today's kids will be tomorrow's horoscope-reading adults, so I'm not sure what he meant by this. Maybe he meant they'll only turn out to be superstitious if we raise them to be, so we should promote a culture of science.

#3: This sounds like a normative statement (we ought to have no choice but fund it), but it's presented as a positivistic statement (we will have no choice but fund it). Science funding (e.g. the budget of the National Institutes of Health) is currently at a historic low as a percentage of GDP, so his point doesn't seem consistent with the data.


I think it's nice for a public intellectual to be so oriented toward fun, but imho the reality is that there are costs to that attitude. I admire him for the great job he's doing as a science advocate, but I think it's good to encourage attention for the other science advocates who are less fun and more about data precision without caring about which way the data goes.

>> ^MaxWilder:
^ Peer review is not "sitting around a table and coming to a consensus". It is looking at scientific papers and scrutinizing the methods and conclusions of the author. If the paper meets the standards set by the scientific community, it is deemed worthy of publication

Realistically, how is that much different than the process in which a group of clergy put out new dogma in the middle ages? Science is different because the predictions it makes can be replicated. I strongly advocate science--real science--science which actually goes through *all* eight steps of the scientific method, not just the first seven.

21st century "scientists" undermine science to a similar extent as creationists. What I want is a return to real science. Models, predictions, reliable information, practical information, and most importantly, reproducible results.

Peer review is susceptible to the ills of man--bias, politics, etc. It may serve some purpose, but it was never meant to be the "end" of the scientific process, as it currently is. When people talk of science, how often do you hear these statements:

"99% of scientists believe..."
"published in a number of peer reviewed journals"
"cited in over 100 papers"

and how often do you hear this:

"results replicated by several independent experimenters"

The top three are not scientific, the latter is.

>> ^mattsy:
I like it when he gets riled up.
I'd be interested to know how much of that budget went to scientific projects for the military...(what Eisenhower called the scientific-technological elite)


I'll bet you it was most of it, easily.

Greater than two-thirds.

>> ^Crake:
So they could expand that with some scientific skills, and assert what research is promising, and what isn't.

That's a simplification, Banks want assured investments that pay off. 90% of research ends with no feasible marketable commodity or technology.

Banks have thus more incentive to make investments towards projects that have some end product. Look how the investment trends have changed in the pharmaceutical industry towards products that are more marketable focusing on prolonged treatments.

Publicly funded research is required, I mean it's only created the computers and the internet so far.

>> ^imstellar28:
Science today emphasizes "peer review" which consists of publishing articles in several journals and counting how many citations they receive

The emphasis is supposed to be on the repeatability of results by independent experimenters, not peer consensus in "scientific" journals.

Don't downplay peer review. While it may not be part of the scientific method, it is an important part of how scientists communicate their results.

I don't understand how publishing results and having them peer reviewed beforehand is a bad thing. I certainly don't think it's replacing independent verification of each other's work. It can only help facilitate it, right?

Tags for this video have been changed from 'neil degrasse tyson, pro science, science, budget, repiblican, democrat' to 'neil degrasse tyson, pro science, science, budget, republican, democrat' - edited by mauz15

Thank you, very interesting.

In reply to this comment by NetRunner:
^ Oh, you want facts, not mild snark. This article has a pretty good chart of Science spending over the last 50-ish years.

In short, what Tyson said is true, to an extent. Medical/Biological research funding went way up, but Bush always reminded people that it was to protect us from biological weapons, and I wouldn't be surprised if the money did come with strings attached that it be used for projects that would help on that front.

NASA funding went up slightly, but it came with the requirement that about a third of the total budget go to working on a manned mission to Mars, and/or nuclear rocketry.

Earth and environmental science, whose budget was already tiny, got cut by about a third, presumably because he didn't want it wasted on global warming research.

I assume it's a similar story with energy research which he all but eliminated for most of his tenure as President.

General funding for science also went up. I've heard no bad stories about that, so I'll just say good for Bush on that count.

The chart also puts paid to DeGrasse's claim that Republican Presidents generally fund science more than Democratic ones do. Kennedy/LBJ spiked it up, Nixon cut it back slightly, Carter boosted it up, Reagan cut it back. The Bushes and Clinton were backwards from the historic trend, but Clinton was trying to balance the budget, and Bush thought he was on a mission from God. Both were odd examples of their party.

Obama will likely bump these numbers to new highs, though I imagine the mix will be wildly different than under Bush.

I enjoyed the movie, until the moronic ending where scientific knowledge was equated with religious belief. And they utterly stacked the deck to make that seem rational. The best review was Penn's - http://pennandteller.com/sincity/penn-n-teller/excite/contact.html

The best bit:

The movie was rocking along. Even though it was fiction, it was just like Carl -- pro-science to the bone.

Then it all started falling apart. Why didn't Jodie permanently lose the newage -- rhymes with "sewage" -- hippie after he tried to keep her from fulfilling her dreams for his own short-sighted horniness? That started to bum me, but it was the ending that finally broke my heart. The end of "Contact" asserted that belief in something tangible by a single person is equivalent to belief in god, and that the reality imagined by saints is the same as scientists understanding something they can't explain to lay people.

That is evil, utterly evil.

The Carl Sagan angle got killed off in the movie executives offices when concerns were raised about selling a pro-science movie to a Midwest Christian audience.