298. Neil deGrasse Tyson — Starry Messenger (3)
2 (24m 1s):
Okay. What is, what is your reason? Okay. Is there and no. What is your goal for that? And what is the evidence that this is a goal that would be achieved. Okay. And now you wanna make, so what is the EV well, I just don't want it. Well, that's not enough to make a law, right? Just cause you don't feel that way. Right? If you wanna make a law, there should be a cause it affects everybody. So there better be sort of a line of reasoning that has some foundation in some kind of research. Oh. And by the way, there's nothing more racist than a racist anthropologist. Okay. They, they lead, they wrote the book literally and figuratively on racist science.
2 (24m 48s):
So if you're gonna have research to inform a law that touches on race or gender, anything else such as that, you you'll want to verify the potential of bias in the researchers doing the work. And the, the risk of bias is highest. It's higher in some fields than in others. In other fields it's like really low. Okay. It's hard to imagine sort of a racist mathematician. No, the mathematician can be racist, but in terms of the work that comes out of them, it's hard to imagine racist math.
2 (25m 31s):
It's just hard. I'm just saying maybe I hadn't thought of it yet, but there's this one I mentioned in the book, there's this one theorem called the hairy ball theorem where there's a theorem that says you cannot comb the hair on a ball. And like, what does that even mean? Right. What does that sentence mean? So it turns out if you comb the hair on a ball, if you have a fully hairy ball and you comb the hair, there is no way to comb it. Without there being some spot on the surface of that ball where the strands of hair do not know which way to fall. This is the famous ick that you might have in the, on the back of your head.
2 (26m 14s):
Okay. It's called the hairy ball. The, for that reason, when I first learned it, I said, I, my head is like a ball and I comb my hair all the time successfully and I don't have a cow lick. Okay. Comb. My hair is you got a different issue going on on the top of your head. Let the listening audience know that Michael Shermer is gracefully losing his hair on the top of his head with proper, the progress of male pattern boldness. And so, so for me, combining the hair didn't mean laying straight hair down, parallel to your scalp. To me, combining my hair meant, pulling it straight out.
2 (26m 56s):
And my bowling ball head. If I had an Afro in every square inch, I'd be able to comb it. So it doesn't change the value of the theorem, but it does change how you might teach it. Right. It was being taught in a way that excluded my participation in even understanding what the theorum meant. And so, so in math, you can have, it can, it can kiss the boundaries of, of non-inclusive teaching, but the results that come out of it are, are different. Okay. Will not, will not hinge on it. So now you keep going back to laws or some morality that one might establish and try to then impose that morality on others.
2 (27m 39s):
This book is not about morality. It's about your thinking that may go into the morality that you hold. Okay. But I'm not telling you what kind of moral person to be. Let's go to the gender chapter. Okay. A gender and identity. The you, there's an urge that we have and it goes way back. Are you boy? Or are you a girl? And this is announced within seconds of birth. Okay. It's a boy. It's a girl. Okay. And so we have this urge to compartmentalize. Okay.
2 (28m 19s):
And let's hold the boy, girl aside just for a moment and look at, for me an interesting example of this hurricanes. Once they cross some threshold of, of wind speed and, and barometric pressure, we begin to categorize them category one, category 2, 3, 4, 5, all right. You realize that category, wind speeds are continuous. Continuous. Yet wheat can go from a low category, three to a high category three. And it, that fact will not make the news.
2 (28m 59s):
But if it goes one mile an hour above and lands in category four, that's breaking news, hurricane Irma. Now category four. It's like by that one mile an hour, really you're gonna break in and talk about this. And so the question comes down to why do we always have to compartmentalize things, right? I, if we, if we have to let's, let's recognize that. Be self aware of it and try to do it better. Why is it that if someone commits a crime and the police, was he black or white, Asian, or, or brown, you know, or Hispanic four categories to decide who the police are gonna search for to find out who the perpetrator is.
2 (29m 49s):
How many times have I been stopped by the police? Because a description was just black man, black man. Okay. With no better vocab. If the person was lighter skinned than I was or darker skin, can't, there's no nuance for that. Apparently not. Meanwhile, you can go to a pharmacy and go to the hair color aisle, and there's 200 hair colors that you can choose from. And each one has a name. Okay? Autumn, wheat, sit cinnamon Berry. We got vocabulary is available. You can buy paint colors in all a hundred different shades of white, 50 shades of black.
2 (30m 33s):
Nevermind. Any other color? We've done this before, but now if someone is gonna get put in jail and arrested and put in jail based on your account and all you have are four words to describe them. This is long, okay. DM value judging this. This is we can do better than that. Yeah. All right. So now what happens? Let's get back to gender. So you got your chromosomes, right? X, Y XX, and the very rare case of, of a doubling up on one of those two chromosomes, just hold aside the very rare case for a minute. So now you have these chromosomes and so biology will say, this person is male.
2 (31m 13s):
This person is female. All right. When you look at a person other than certain other traits, like men are generally have a hairier face, and men will have a pattern boldness that women won't have in the chromosomal way. Okay, fine. Let's say you're not losing your hair yet. And there you are. How am I judging if you're a male or female, do, do I see the X chromosome in the Y? Do I looking at no. You know what I'm looking at? Are you wearing earrings? Is your hair long? Are you, is there, is there, is there Rouge or whatever it's called on your day? Are you wearing mascara?
2 (31m 54s):
Are you wearing more jewelry than average? Are you? This is if you're, if you fully clothed, right? So I don't necessarily see breasts or, or I'm not looking at your crotch, right? Oh, your clothing is different because we have an entire industry that helps you look like male being a male or female. Okay. So that's what we're queuing on. Well, if that's what we're queuing on. And, and that's how we decide whether someone is male or female and someone chooses to alter these tertiary secondary accoutrements.
2 (32m 36s):
And, and we live in a free country. Who am I to decide if you're a male or female, maybe there's a spectrum of this expression. Take the tomboy in, in west side story. Her name was anybodies, very odd name, but it's what it was anybody. She had a dirty face. She had short hair. She wore pants. This is 1962, the original movie. She wore pants. Okay. She she's, she wants to fight. They won't let her in the gang because she's a girl. All the other features that mattered that for a gang membership were there, but she's a girl they're not taking her.
2 (33m 23s):
Okay. That's binary thinking. And so the fact that we have to bin wind speeds into five categories and human beings into two categories might just simply be a shortcoming of our brain wiring. We don't know how to think about things on a continuum expression. The reality of that world is people enjoy expressing themselves, want to express themselves, feel right about themselves, expressing themselves somewhere on that spectrum. That's different from the binary of what some other people decide you should be. And so in a free society where the pursuit of happiness somewhere, I read that somewhere.
2 (34m 7s):
I read nice in the United States of America, pursuit of happiness is something we're gonna value. If I'm happiest dressing exactly in the middle of this spectrum, where at a glance, you can't tell if I'm male or female, because I'm not buying into your binary. Then we should perhaps blame the, in the inability of our, our brain to think on a continuum and not use that shortcoming as a rule to prevent other people from expressing their happiness.
1 (34m 41s):
Okay. There's a lot to unpack there. So we're talking about concept of concepts in which we have family resemblances of characteristics that represent a thing. So a chair, what is a chair, you know, has four legs and a, and a seat and a back well, but you know, a beanbag chair or a stool without a back and a three-legged chair and so on. So we have, you know, this is Vic Stein's problem of a game. What's a game. Does it have to have a ball? Do you have to have a competitor and so on? No, but we sort of know when, when we see when by a loose Confederation of, of characteristics. So if we're talking about stars, then in your book, you talk about all the different kinds of stars, a through O and the subdivisions and so on, but we would separate that from planets, right?
1 (35m 23s):
So planets are these objects that can't produce fusion by converting, he hydrogen into helium. And so we have these definitions. If we don't have the definitions in which we agree upon the terms, then how do we even speak? Right. So, and just to pick a completely random example, let's say you have a solar system with nine planets. And then one of 'em turns out to be a little bit smaller than how we define a planet, just to pick a random example and say, okay, blue is no longer a planet, completely
2 (35m 51s):
Random example.
1 (35m 52s):
Well, but you see what I'm going with this, right? So with race, I see it different than gender, because race is such a continuum. I don't see gender quite. I see, well, at least sex sex anyway, right? Those X Y
2 (36m 5s):
Well, lemme finish the part because you brought up planets. So, so we had stars and we had planets and we had sort of asteroids fine. The more we learn about the solar system and star systems and the galaxy, we realize that there is in fact, a continuum of objects that connect planets to stars. It was a new class of object discovered called brown dwarfs. These are, these are objects with that. Have a lot of planet characteristics, all right. They have atmospheres that kind of smell like planets, but they kind of almost were stars. And so what do you do with this?
