As someone who has read the book, it does go through the history and inspiration of modern sci-fi typeset. Great coffee table book. Mainly expands on the articles on the website with more details and graphics.
I believe you are missing the forest for the trees. It is bringing up the question of what defines self will. It is unrelated to veganism in all but text.
An easy example is dogs. We have bred dogs for centuries to love doing work for us. If they hated doing the work, it would be easy to call it cruel. If they loved it by nature, it would be easy to call it kind. But since we created them into a thing that loves the work we need them for, where do the ethics fall?
Should we prevent them from doing what brings them joy? Should we make use of this win-win situation? If it is the latter, we are quickly approaching the ability to morph every species into something that gets joy from doing our work.
Dogs we changed by accident. The next one will not be an accident. Is it still a beings free will if the game was rigged from the start?
This is why I also like cats. The only reason they don't eat me is that I am 10 times bigger than they are. Other than that, they still seem to be running Lion software on miniature hardware.
(I know your point wasn't about dogs either, it just reminded me of something).
I love Neil de Grasse Tyson's line in Cosmos: A Spacetime Odyssey:
"This wolf has discovered what a branch of its ancestors figured out some 15.000 years ago... an excellent survival strategy: the domestication of humans."
There's also another animal/dog documentary that I've watched recently that puts a finer point on this realization. The secret to survival and evolution is cooperation. For instance, not all dogs evolved the same way in this documentary. Some were more nuturing, some were more problem solving. For the focus of the documentary the challenge was to match the dog with a human that had a need they could address.
I think somewhat egotistically humans underappreciate how we have also been goaded by our "pets" into our own evolutionary journey. Most of the subjects of that documentary would not be alive if it were not for those dogs.
It's much like how many plants have accidentally found that a great means of propagation is to produce a compound that is both a great chemical warfare agent against other plants and microbes and also tastes interesting to humans or makes them feel funny.
That just makes it even more interesting. Have we been selectively modified to think dogs are cute? If I showed a toy poodle to a caveman, would he also want to put it in a little bag with only its head poking out?
Two things. He's obviously an expert in astrophysics but his explanations are condescending and "well actually", like he is trying to convince you how smart he is. That's given him a reputation as a blowhard online.
One of his tweets that HN will love: "Obama authorized North Korea sanctions over cyber hacking. Solution there, it seems to me, is to create unhackable systems."
> "genius in one thing believes he's a genius in everything"
No disagreement here, and sadly I think this is an unfortunate part of human nature.
Other than that, I'd say the person who wrote that list has a beef with Tyson, there's a mix between honest mistakes and debatable things, a lot of nitpicking (with a dose of cherry-picking), and ultimately this doesn't prove that "most of [Tyson's] takes" are mistaken. I agree that some things he says are dumb (like the cybersecurity tweet you mentioned) but I wouldn't dwell too much on them. "Cosmos", in all of its incarnations, is amazing. Of course, I'm not arguing the script is his, but his delivery and screen presence are solid.
I see Tyson commented on that blog, and some of what he says makes sense (e.g. picking on his colloquial use of "exponential" seems a bit mean spirited, though he could have been more precise; some people misunderstand the spirit of his comments on scifi movies; etc). In general, his replies in that blog to what at some points amounted to personal attacks left me the impression that Tyson knows how to gracefully and politely handle flamebait.
I did not notice he commented on the blog so thanks for pointing it out.
His response was impressive I agree, he has matured. You can see that from his initial response to the Bush quote (claiming his memory is infallible, and then condescendingly talking about "absence of evidence is not evidence of absence" when the burden of proof is on HIM) vs. his comment where he said he'd made "inexcusable errors"
Full disclosure I'm not American so my main exposure to this guy is his tweets and occasional Reddit threads about how much they hate him.
I'm also not American (well, I am South American), and I wouldn't count Reddit threats about how much people hate someone else as evidence of anything (other than Reddit being Reddit) :)
Some of the comments in that blog, pushing back against the blog post, say more or less what I think about this.
> my main exposure to this guy is his tweets
In that case, I wholeheartedly recommend the sequels to Sagan's "Cosmos", "Cosmos: A Spacetime Odyssey" and "Cosmos: Possible Worlds". I think they have the potential to make you like Tyson!
Depends on the dog tbh. Keshonds are bred to yell at anyone getting on your barge. A lot of humans would probably like that job if it paid enough. Just chilling out and yelling at anyone you dont recognise.
Adding to this: If you do not want to reference the current gender, you can also use "Assigned Female at Birth" (AFAB), or "Assigned Male at Birth" (AMAB).
This is useful when clarifying terms, when you do not know the persons identity, or when discussing groups based on the factory default settings.
I would expect there to be significant overlap between the demographics of those who more commonly get in accidents and those who use THC. Based on nsc.org, it seems like the majority of car accidents are with drivers 25-34 years old, and occur more frequently late at night on weekends. That generally matches the profile of the stereotypical THC user. It is hard to find good numbers of THC use.
Remember that not all the population drives, nor are accidents randomly distributed in the population.
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