Recently, though, he's started to go off-book.
First it was this widely-panned assertion, which Tyson still hasn't deleted, despite a slew of articles correcting him:
Hey Neil, how many people would have to roll their eyes at the same time to generate a sound detectable by the human ear? (Don't literally answer that.)
Dawkins, by the way, has already declared himself a Citizen of Rationalia:
Not to say Tyson's anywhere near that bad, just that he's more effective at pointing out the physics errors in movies and advocating for vaccines and GMOs than he is at political philosophy. He'd never let an expert in that field mouth off about astrophysics, yet he's got the magic solution to the world's governmental woes. Right.
Anyway, Rationalia is bad and naïve and basically ignores the entire history of governments and political philosophy. So it's got that going for it.
UKIP wasn't blind to the evidence that leaving the European Union would damage Britain's economy. The party just hates foreigners more than it loves financial stability for working people.
Republican lawmakers (mostly) aren't blind to the evidence regarding global warming, it's just more profitable and politically expedient for them to reject it.
Reasonable people can agree: These are horrible motivations and horrible outcomes. But they're not irrational, per se.
It could be based on ideas of morality and the common good; it could be based on hoarding the most money or natural resources; it could be based on personal feelings of happiness and well-being. Or any number of other things that often find themselves in competition.
But who's the ultimate arbiter of "self-interest?" We're looking for some objective position from which to view what's good for us, but no such position can be found: We're all in this universe—or multiverse or whatever, Neil—together, and all subject to the same physical laws. Even God (if Tyson, Dawkins et al believed in one) would run into the same problem: If God decides what's good, who decides whether God's decisions are good? It's just turtles all the way down.
Or, in the case of Rationalia, dudes all the way down.
What a crazy world, where people can view the same evidence and come to completely different conclusions about which goals to pursue and what action is required! There should probably be some system wherein we determine what the majority of people in a nation think about these things.
In other words, it's still just political bickering.
It's certainly admirable to attempt to boil down government to one uncontroversial principle that fits in a tweet, but it's also arrogant to ignore that political scientists have struggled with that project for centuries. And the result, the "evidence," if you will, is that it just doesn't work.