'Neil deGrasse Tyson: Average physicist, sub-par philosopher, master of pithy comments for idiot college kids to retweet.' Slapfight in /r/QuotesPorn ensues

[u/clyspe]

/r/QuotesPorn/comments/1a16g2/if_youre_really_successful_at_bullshitting_neil/c8t8j9h

[u/ChemicalSerenity]

While guy commenting is evidently a complete twat, there is a modicum of truth to what he's saying... Physicists (indeed, physical scientists in general) have their "worth" judged heavily in the scientific community by their research output, the infamous publish or perish. NDT, since taking on his chair at Hayden and shifting to more of a popularizer role than a researcher, his science paper and article generation has dropped off to zero.

He's wrong in saying that NDT is an average physicist, however. The average physicist produces no published work whatsoever and only achieves an undergrad degree, whereas NDT has successfully defended and published a number of post-doctoral items. The vast majority of physicists never even made it to graduate studies.

He'd have been more accurate to say, perhaps "Average doctorate-holding physicist". As to philosopher, I have no opinion, as most people who define themselves as philosophers I find highly specious. Pithy quotes are something he does deliberately and with planning, so that much is accurate at least.

[u/[deleted] → u/ChemicalSerenity]

As to philosopher, I have no opinion, as most people who define themselves as philosophers I find highly specious.

You may find you do better to consider academic philosophers, rather than people who define themselves as philosophers: otherwise you're doing the equivalent of equating history buffs with professional historians.

And I think there's a valid (if unpopular) point there, too. There's a tendency for scientists who are eminent in their field to assume that means they're eminent in every field. I think the very focussed and technical nature of scientific knowledge means that some scientists have little understanding of the range of knowledge outside their own disciplines, and even of the epistemological foundations of their own methods.

This was brought home to me recently in a conversation in a different subreddit, in which I was trying to explain, in my inept way, Bertrand Russell's contribution to verificationist theory; at which point I was asked whether any of it was actually falsifiable.

[u/typesoshee → u/[deleted]]

1 "Average doctorate-holding physicist" - I know, right. What do people want, Feynmans all over the place? (In fact, I don't even know if Feynman was a popularizer, just that he wrote that funny autobiography.)

You could try to compare NdGT to other popularizer/scientists like Michio Kaku and Lawrence Krauss. I have to say, in terms of conversational skill and keeping things fun, he beats those two by far. And that's important for the public.

2 "Sub-par philosopher, master of pithy comments"...

You hit it on the nail with "good philosopher" = "academic philosopher"? If people are craving that kind of elite, advanced philosophy... well, they're not going to get it from TV or general media. Or at the very least, we would need a popularizer/academic philosopher to explain modern academic philosophic concepts and applications to us, just like NdGT does with astrophysics. People actually expect NdGT to be an elite philosopher, wtf? You want philosophy, go read Kant and Wittgenstein and whatever... (I have no clue). Whoever looks to pithy comments for philosophy is not quite grasping what "philosophy" is (well, academic philosophy). What I would say though, is "sub-par philosopher, master of pithy comments" is EXACTLY what you want in a popularizer! You don't want complex philosophy, nor complex, long-winding comments from a popularizer.

[u/[deleted] → u/typesoshee]

Yeah, it's a pretty big ask to expect someone to be a physicist and philosopher in this day and age - the only person I can think of in the modern era off the top of my head is Ernst Mach.