Neil deGrasse Tyson had former President Bill Clinton on his Startalk show for a conversation about science and politics. They discussed a variety of subjects from Clinton’s successes with getting funding for the Genome Project, to his regrets of losing the predecessor to the Large Hadron Collider. In the clip below, Neil deGrasse Tyson asks Bill Clinton about how one negotiates the politics of science between what is reality and what some people want reality to be. Clinton, using his almost peerless ability to articulate in layman’s terms, explains his newest way of testing people on science.
I think with regard to science we have to at least get those people who have no interest in it to adopt what is now my mode of thinking—the grandparent test. That is, you name me one other risk-related decision, where if 95 percent of the experts were here and one to five percent of the experts were there, any grandparent would stake his or her grandchild’s future on the five percent. So how about this—suppose one guy wrote one article in one journal and said, You know, I’ve been thinking about these child-restraint seats and I think you know there’s a one-in-a-million chance a kid could snap his neck so I recommend just throwing the kid in the backseat and letting him roll around. And ninety-nine percent of you would say, Oh my God, you can’t do that. These are working—look at how much the fatalities have gone down.
Name me one grandparent that would choose the one percent? Not one.
So, this Thanksgiving, if you have a grandparent on the fence about climate change—maybe run this test by them. But wait until after pie is served.