Purely a guess, but a lot of people whose pride stems from understanding complex subjects are the same people who will gatekeep that subject. Sagan, making astronomy more accessible to lay people, would be a grave offense to someone like that.
He doesn’t seem likely to be wildly better as a scientist than his peers, but being wildly better as a communicator has incredible differentiating value (and likely has a tailwind for the other scientists in terms of public support for science when it’s something they feel is almost within their grasp).
> Autorotation is the ability of a helicopter to in some situations have its rotors powered by the flow of air rather than the engine. In short, as the helicopter descends, the upward directed flow of air pushes through the rotors, makes them rotate faster, which in turn provides lift.
see the "dead man's curve" which relates to having an engine failure with insufficient height or lateral speed (helicopters shouldn't hover in place unless a good ways up) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Helicopter_height%E2%80%93velo...
But show them the original Sagan version. The CGI may be dated, but the material is far more thought provoking.
Find it hard to imagine anyone taking him seriously after seeing his Twitter account.
At the same time... If twitter existed back then, how would the famed scientists and communicators come out? Einstein, Feynman, Asimov, Clarke have all had pretty damming (defined at minimum as "unacceptable by modern cultural standards") behaviour come to light. Respected scientists and philosophers of 70s who are still alive have similarly gotten themselves into serious hot water on social media more recently.
Never meet your heroes and all that...
Neil deGrasse Tyson, on the other hand, is an edgelord with a PhD. He takes contrarian positions for the sake of generating controversy, often without understanding the underlying issues or forming a cohesive, reasoned argument. He appeals to emotion rather than logic, and is politically partisan and divisive rather than unifying.
The ability to have your research funded is a practical and existential problem for scientists. And I find it quite natural having issues with someone being able to achieve better outcomes through marketing and fame rather than through the quality of their work.
It's something I find aggravating with Google, OpenAI, and cie in the field of machine learning for example. The amount of marketing they benefit from, before their papers are even published, is unfair and anti-meritocratic. I don't want to have to do SEO to be able to stand on even ground with these people.
(And that's not to say Sagan wasn't a good scientist, or that his work communicating science wasn't useful.)
The industry was interesting (bizarre) at the time in that the engineers were more or less left to run their domain. Upper management might give the overall direction of what to work on but beyond that there was not a lot of middle or lower management that could tell engineers how to do that.
This left a lot of the responsibility (and authority if you will) in the hands of engineering to accomplish what the company wanted. And so engineers chose code names. To be sure too they were not meant for (sanitized by) the PR department — they were strictly at the whim of engineering.
Engineers don't want to have to put on a "marketing hat", or get marketing to sign off on a codename (for chrissakes).
That one of those code names leaked somehow and caused bad publicity for the company — that was management's/marketing's problem, not the engineer's.
We're in a more modern era now where the balance has shifted to a much more top-down model — diminishing the broader role engineers used to have.
To think otherwise is a much stronger arrogance
GP asserts that what the engineers did is wrong. They didn't say that the public should get to decide what codenames to use or anything like that. They simply pointed out the arrogance of the engineers, and they are right.
It's like a straw man, but specific to issues of morality.
"X is wrong".
"Oh, so you want to jail every offender of X? You want to completely regulate Y in case it leads to X?"
You just don't know what a fallacy is.
> Oh, so you want to jail every offender of X?
This is not what I'm saying. I'm disagreeing, and putting forward a stronger, opposite claim.
I am the same way, I tend to self censer because who wants to hear about the subtle intricacies of the bgp system. until they start to show interest, then you can't shut me up.