Letters from an Astrophysicist

by Neil deGrasse Tyson

The people who fail in life are those whose ambitions were insufficient to overcome all the forces that work against them.

IQ correlates nicely with GPA in high school and college, but after your first job, nobody ever asks what your college GPA was. What matters are your people skills, leadership skills, real-world problem solving skills, integrity, business acumen, reliability, ambition, work ethic, kindness, compassion, etc. So for me, conversations about race and IQ are of no practical consequence, any more than are conversations about race and hair color, or race and food preferences.

One objective reality is that our government doesn’t work, not because we have dysfunctional politicians, but because we have dysfunctional voters.

The Carl Sagan dictum “extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence” remains a potent guide when investigating the natural world for its underlying order. But it comes with a recurring risk: knowing enough about a subject to think you are right, but not enough about the subject to know you are wrong.

Note that eyewitness testimony is, by far, the weakest form of evidence that a person can present in support of a claim. In spite of its high value in the court of law, in the “court” of science, eyewitness testimony is essentially useless. Psychologists have known for quite some time how ineffective the human senses are as data taking devices.

So either the power goes away under controlled circumstances or the people are remembering the hits and not the misses—one of the most common perception failures of the human mind.