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Comment by adastra22 | Hacker News Reader

This is true (source: worked at NASA and heard other astronomers opinion of Sagan). The other chief aspects were (1) some had professional disagreements with Sagan and resented that he still won academic battles for mindshare just by being Sagan, and (2) resentment of his success by academics who were just as good but didn’t get fame and the grant wins or lucrative work that came from it.

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This sort of stuff makes me happy I worked on open source research rather than try to get a PHD. Same thing is playing out with LeCun. The excessive, perhaps egotistical need for attribution in academia is in strict opposition to what I consider “good science”.

I don't think this comparison is fair to LeCun. He has literally been at the forefront of ML for over 40 years, starting with his PhD thesis and continuing to the present, and his public fame is entirely a byproduct of the awareness of the impact of his work. (Disclaimer: I've known Yann for decades and worked down the hall from him during his NEC years.)

To be clear, I’m not accusing LeCun of trying to “hoard credit”, rather I’m accusing others of having petty squabbles (often surrounding his published works) around who was “first” and thus “actually” deserves credit. To them, I say “Get over yourself” - progress doesn’t tend to be made when we’re busy trying to win imaginary races for “mindshare”. And LeCun has done more than enough to prove himself in the field (with all the hard work that entails) to have to deal with that sort of thing.

Well said. (cough, cough, Schmidhuber, cough.)

Neither of the things described in the parent comment have to do with ego, they have everything to do with career opportunities and outcomes.

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.)

Ref #2, I wonder if scientists feel similarly to Neil deGrasse Tyson today.

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).

I find Neil deGrasse Tyson to be a terrible science communicator, especially since a few years back. Just look at the man's twitter. Putting him and Carl Sagan in the same sentence is almost insulting x)

Not to mention that I am fairly certain I've caught him being horribly wrong more than once. But for the life of me, I cannot seem to remember which times it was. I'm sure I'll come across those videos again sometime though, and when I do; I'll be sure to edit this comment. Knowing my luck, it will be in the next few days time.

Tyson once said on twitter “An airplane whose engine fails is a glider. A helicopter whose engine fails is a brick.” Now it's not at all obvious why that's not true. But that's why it's important to be humble about what you do and don't know.

In case anyone else is interested in the not-at-all-obvious-answer [1], I’ll save you the google: autorotation

> 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.

[1] https://www.highskyflying.com/can-helicopters-glide/

Still, isn’t it more likely for the occupants to survive when a plane lands without power, assuming a decent landing spot?

a helicopter can "glide down" just like an airplane. if your engine fails, with the aid of the rotor as you descend you can turn the potential energy of being up in the air into forward motion, and that forward motion will generate lift over your rotor blades. You practice these techniques as part of getting a license.

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...

Agreed, however forward motion works for a plane landing with wheels. A helicopter with "skis" sounds less effective.

I don't want to speak for all scientists, but I find Neil deGrasse Tyson utterly insufferable and cringe almost every time he makes a public statement. Like him or loath him, Carl Sagan was a scientist that wasn't afraid to apply scientific thinking to social and political issues. His positions were particularly reasoned and defensible with data and logical arguments.

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.

>I wonder if scientists feel similarly to Neil deGrasse Tyson today.

Find it hard to imagine anyone taking him seriously after seeing his Twitter account.

I suppose I'll need to check it out, I am not on Twitter so don't frequent it.

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...

NGT posts some pretty cringe science takes too, though. The kind of stuff you would expect someone in his position to put even the slightest bit of research before speaking.

Keep in mind that some of the youngest generation of scientists have been influenced by his Cosmos revival. Source: have one such in my household.

I will never criticize something which sparks an interest in science in someone else.

But show them the original Sagan version. The CGI may be dated, but the material is far more thought provoking.

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