Yeah, I agree there is a great utility to it, and it can be of great benefit. I also still think that it feels a useful criticism to keep mentioning as well because there's that always balance to strike in the huge wide spectrum between "mainstream and fluffy and almost void of content" and "deep and interesting but hard to follow and more clearly for a niche audience.
It's a bit of a hysteresis, right, of constantly trying to fight for that "perfect" (nonexistent?) fit of strong content to largest audience. Like with most science itself, you experiment with some content, use the reviews and criticism you get back to compensate for the next content. When I accuse Brian Cox or NdGT "over-compensating" a little to the broad it's not that I don't think they are doing the right thing, it's that I hope their next hysteresis swing might go a bit denser again and maybe criticism like mine will be useful if either of them read HN.
Similarly, I respect Bill Nye's attempts so much because it seems (from the outside, from mixed reviews I've read, from other people talking about the shows) to be, if not "failing" then certainly not as successful as they could be. As science reminds us, failed experiments are useful too, and I don't necessarily want people to believe in the boring null hypothesis that "People don't want harder science discussions" and I don't want for people like Bill Nye to give up on trying to broach the hard topics (like Climate Change and more science that should be mainstream but is fighting disinformation and/or disinterest). (Not that I think Bill himself would give up, but that it might discourage people trying to follow in Bill's footsteps.) I would love to see more of these "edutainers" trying to do the hard stuff more of the time, get a wilder balance/mix. I want to see more stuff in general in the spectrum as a whole. I don't think "celebrity" is necessarily zero sum and that these "edutainers" are competing among each other for the same audiences, but there does seem to be some scarcity factors for "celebrity scientist" at play to account for.
It's a bit of a hysteresis, right, of constantly trying to fight for that "perfect" (nonexistent?) fit of strong content to largest audience. Like with most science itself, you experiment with some content, use the reviews and criticism you get back to compensate for the next content. When I accuse Brian Cox or NdGT "over-compensating" a little to the broad it's not that I don't think they are doing the right thing, it's that I hope their next hysteresis swing might go a bit denser again and maybe criticism like mine will be useful if either of them read HN.
Similarly, I respect Bill Nye's attempts so much because it seems (from the outside, from mixed reviews I've read, from other people talking about the shows) to be, if not "failing" then certainly not as successful as they could be. As science reminds us, failed experiments are useful too, and I don't necessarily want people to believe in the boring null hypothesis that "People don't want harder science discussions" and I don't want for people like Bill Nye to give up on trying to broach the hard topics (like Climate Change and more science that should be mainstream but is fighting disinformation and/or disinterest). (Not that I think Bill himself would give up, but that it might discourage people trying to follow in Bill's footsteps.) I would love to see more of these "edutainers" trying to do the hard stuff more of the time, get a wilder balance/mix. I want to see more stuff in general in the spectrum as a whole. I don't think "celebrity" is necessarily zero sum and that these "edutainers" are competing among each other for the same audiences, but there does seem to be some scarcity factors for "celebrity scientist" at play to account for.