Everyone screws up sometimes
The best antidote to arguments from authority is when authoritative figures screw up.
So, this happened today:
There’s been a great and justified hue and cry about gun violence in the US, especially after the El Paso mass shooting.
Given the current political landscape, it’s not surprising that there is much angst on display both by the anti-gun and pro-gun sides.
For instance, Keith Edwards’s tweet (left) points to the stark reality of gun violence in the US, compared to other “developed” nations.
And then Neil deGrasse Tyson, one of the most respected science communicators of our day — and a person known for his level-headed approach to things, comes up with that outrageous tweet.
And “outrageous” is the correct word here. The outrage in the comments to his tweet is palpable. And it’s perfectly understandable. It’s almost as if he were begging us to indulge in the emotional response he appeared to discourage.
But there’s no need to feel outrage. Indeed, the directionless spew of outrage is rarely conducive to anything but even more wild-eyed hysteria.
Tyson has erred here. Not that his data is flawed. I don’t honestly know. However, given his track record, I suspect he has drawn from appropriate sources.
No, the errors here are in his logic.
Error #1: Conflation of suicide and homicide. Though he presents separate data for suicides and homicides, he fails to realize that more than 60% of all gun deaths are suicide (based on 2017 data). Separating suicide from homicide is not the correct approach here because the use of guns in both (and only those two) categories masks an important correlation of guns and death.
Error #2: Only handguns? The Gun Violence Archive indicates 253 mass shooting in 2019 so far. Surely this data bears some mention in Tyson’s summary.
Error #3: A category error. Tyson’s categories of “medical errors”, “flu” and “car accidents” constitute unintentional deaths. Gun homicides and suicides — especially when one includes all the mass shootings — are (arguably) intentional. This difference is tremendously important, yet overlooked by Tyson. This is very much an “apples and oranges” mistake.
I am very much anti-gun. But I don’t need to discuss that here. I’m not concerned here whether or to what degree guns should be banned. I am concerned that such a respected representative of progressivism and rationality would make such glaring errors.
I will not ascribe any ulterior motives to Tyson’s action. I lack any reasonable information on which to base that.
Instead, I will point this out: Everyone screws up. Everyone. Even people like Neil deGrasse Tyson. And because of this, we must ourselves take care to evaluate everything we see, read, and hear. We must not allow arguments from authority to sway us. We must be willing to check, recheck, and think through our own rationale for accepting or denying what we read.
Yes, it’s disconcerting when someone we trust so much — someone like Tyson — makes such mistakes. But that cognitive dissonance is ours, not his. He is not responsible for our cognitive errors; we are.
So let’s please not lose our minds here. Someone made a mistake. Let’s point it out, and move on. And let’s remember to watch out for our own mistakes too.
