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Fnord
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24 May 2019, 3:49 pm

The paragraph that follows is an excerpt from "Smarter Than Thou: Neil deGrasse Tyson & America’s Nerd Problem", by Charles C. W. Cooke, editor of National Review Online, July 21, 2014.

Charles Cooke wrote:
An astrophysicist and evangelist for science, [Niel DeGrasse-]Tyson currently plays three roles in our society: He is the director of the Hayden Planetarium at the American Museum of Natural History; the presenter of the hip new show Cosmos; and, most important of all, perhaps, the fetish and totem of the extraordinarily puffed-up "nerd" culture that has of late started to bloom across the United States...
Source: America's Nerd Problem

The article reads like a non-stop hissy-fit of jealousy against people who are smarter than Cooke. It hearkens back to the days when high school jocks hated and bullied us "nerds" for being smarter and more knowledgeable than they were. Cooke is angry and resentful that smart people are now cool, and that computer nerds like Bill Gates and the late Steve Jobs are now more powerful, more influential and more wealthy than most people. However, there is absolutely no evidence or justification in the article why smart people like us shouldn't be cool and powerful and influential.


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Antrax
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03 Jun 2019, 1:03 am

The article is beyond clumsy, and really just horribly written. I don't even know what it's trying to say other than popular nerdism is bad.

I think the thing to remember is that while the "nerds" in the limelight get a lot of attention they're typically in the camp of "those who can't do are on television." Neil DeGrasse Tyson is a real astrophysicist PhD, but he's more of an entertainer than a scientist. The grad student who imaged a black hole probably knows a lot more about current astrophysics than him.


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PurpleReject
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03 Jun 2019, 1:28 am

'Cosmos' is a "hip" "new" show? It's a revival of a science documentary series from almost 40 years ago, not some kind of teenage Netflix drama. Does that make Carl Sagan part of America's "new" nerd problem despite being dead for the last twenty years?



Fnord
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03 Jun 2019, 8:25 am

Nerd-haters gotta hate, I guess.


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