“The occupational hazard of making a spectacle of yourself, over the long haul, is that at some point you buy a ticket too.”

This is ridiculous reasoning. Tyson has bought a ticket to his own show.

Also, sad how the peddlers of science usually end up as preachers of scientism. https://twitter.com/neiltyson/status/1248576852135993344

Look, I'm all for science. I spent years in the basement of a physics building trying to make superconducting circuits work (it was mostly machining, soldering and welding really).

But most of these science 'guys' preach a sort of science as revealed gospel that's facile.

I can see the charm: when many in the public forum abandon all reason (e.g. anti-vaxxers) the reflex is to worship the opposite. But science itself, as actually practiced, is messy, incomplete, and applicable only in a narrow empirical realm. There's so much it can't answer.

Also, anyone who thinks it can't be tainted by personal politics (cf. OP's tweet) has never been part of a grant-writing process.

Science is our best hope against the pandemic, but it can at most answer the 'what?' in life, and not necessarily the 'how?' or the 'why?'

For decades, we've assumed that things like capitalism and science followed in lock-step with things like human rights and liberal democracy. China has been a resounding counter-example, showing you can have plenty of capitalism and science without democracy.

Even the hardest-core scientist embraces some flavor of metaphysics at some point, even if couched in the most secular language ('human rights' instead of 'divine spark'). And whatever ethical principles those might be, they're not to be found inside a test tube.