As an educator, I try to get people to be fundamentally curious and to question ideas that they might have or that are shared by others. In that state of mind, they have earned a kind of inoculation against the fuzzy thinking of these weird ideas floating around out there.
Interpretation
Encouraging curiosity helps combat flawed thinking and misinformation.
In this quote, Neil Degrasse Tyson emphasizes the importance of fostering a sense of curiosity and critical questioning in education. He believes that by encouraging individuals to scrutinize their own ideas and those of others, they become more resilient against misleading and incorrect concepts that may circulate in society, ultimately leading to clearer thinking and better understanding.
In practice
This quote can be used in a classroom to inspire students to ask more questions.
The problem is that many people operate on the assumption that NASA should go to Congress every year with hat in hand and justify it every year. Well, I see it as the greatest economic driver that there ever was. Economic drivers don't need justification.
The press still thinks [global warming] is controversial. So they find the 1% of the scientists and put them up as if they're 50% of the research results. You in the public would have no idea that this is basically a done deal and that we're on to other problems, because the journalists are trying to give it a 50/50 story. It's not a 50/50 story. It's not. Period.
As a scientist, I want to go to Mars and back to asteroids and the Moon because I'm a scientist. But I can tell you, I'm not so naive a scientist to think that the nation might not have geopolitical reasons for going into space.
In just one year, the expenditure of of the U.S.'s military budget is equivalent to the entire 50-year running budget of NASA combined.
One of my great laments is that education today seems to have... be less about passion and more about process, more about tactic or technique.
Lots of people think, well, we're humans; we're the most intelligent and accomplished species; we're in charge. Bacteria may have a different outlook: more bacteria live and work in one linear centimeter of your lower colon than all the humans who have ever lived. That's what's going on in your digestive tract right now. Are we in charge, or are we simply hosts for bacteria? It all depends on your outlook.
Without libraries what have we? We have no past and no future.
In my own view, some advice about what should be known, about what technical education should be acquired, about the intense motivation needed to succeed, and about the carelessness and inclination toward bias that must be avoided is far more useful than all the rules and warnings of theoretical logic.
Too many years away from academia renders you pretty incompetent at research and teaching. So I had to go back.
Every book you pick up has its own lesson or lessons, and quite often the bad books have more to teach than the good ones.
If a kid is reading a book about someone who looks like them but doesn't talk like them, we stunt their growth by dissing them.
The teacher is commodified, the school is a shop, the subjects are consumer goods. To read, to think, to reflect, isn't a question of want, it's a question of need.
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