Commenter Ted Lawry pointed me at this Discovery Institute article, in which they accuse scientists of smugness. Their authoritative source is Andrew Klavan.
Klavan noticed something interesting about the speakers: the scientific atheist “spokesmen” share, almost to a man, what Meyer calls an “element of smugness in the way they communicate.” Klavan mentions Neil deGrasse Tyson, Richard Dawkins, Carl Sagan. Oh, there’s Lawrence Krauss, and many others. Dr. Meyer recounts a memorable debate he had with Krauss that illustrates the point.
It occurred me as I was watching this conversation… I bet you could turn the sound off on a video of any of the well-known scientific atheists and they would likely be identifiable by the smugness that radiates from them, by the manner of speaking not by the words. Again, this is without any sound. You could try the experiment yourself sometime. Meanwhile, watch and enjoy Klavan and Meyer:
First, in case you’ve never heard of Klavan, he’s an obscure conservative babbler on the dying Daily Wire The only time I’ve heard of him was on a video where a bunch of these Daily Wire writers were huddled up smoking cigars and bragging about how they never do the dishes or laundry because their wives do them for them. Inspiring.
Secondly, his accusation is more appropriately directed at the creationists. The scientists he is complaining about are confident, because they come equipped with a battery of evidence. The creationists are the cocky, arrogant ones: they’re the people making extravagant claims without an iota of evidence. So sure, watch one of the videos from our side, and you’ll notice that we’re all forthright and bold where it is warranted; the creationists are even more arrogant, and their sole source is their interpretation of the Bible.
I do wonder why anyone should give a damn about Klavan’s opinion of science, since he has no qualifications other than being a pompous loudmouth.
I wish I could talk and communicate with the ‘smug’ of Carl Sagan!
Klavan is the dumbest of the dumb and the smuggest of the smug. I wrote about him here:
https://recursed.blogspot.com/2011/01/net-neutrality-fairness-doctrine.html
I see nothing wrong with being smug.
(The basis for it, however, is a different thing)
But Limbaugh and Coulter are bywords for intolerance!
PZ, we work to avoid being obsequious. So, objectively watching your videos, we’ve never noticed arrogance or ‘smugness’, not in your words, tone of voice or expression. You are an educator, open to intelligent discussion, not one of these pompous arrogant creationist xtian terorists who envision jebus standing behind them with a shotgun aimed at their enemies. You touched on words that are important to differentiate: smugness vs. confident. We fully agree with your contention that ‘the scientists he is complaining about are confident, because they come equipped with a battery of evidence.’ While all the creationists and xtian terrorists exude a sense of hubris and arrogance and to use the phrase ‘holier-than-thou’ piety with nothing factual or rational to back that up.
Let me also remark that your article about ‘regretting youthful insensitivity to the plight of others’ and your title question of this article indicate a sense of honest introspection that I truly respect. It is the opposite of the blow-hards that shovel bs with no sensitivity to anything other than preserving their own puffed-up ego and self-image.
In the case of Lawrence Krauss, it’s not just ‘confident, because they come equipped with a battery of evidence’, but having done the hard work, and know how to solve 4-dimensional nonlinear partial differential equations from General Relativity to yield results from the early Universe that match the measurements.
The creationists? My estimate is that high-school algebra is beyond them. They’ve learned some rhetorical tricks, but that’s all.
“Am I smug?” – Well, Minnesota smug. : )
Is Krauss smug because he is a scientist or because he is a sorry excuse for a human being ?
To be fair, the actual quotation is:
but the claim is Commenter Ted Lawry pointed me at this Discovery Institute article, in which they accuse scientists of smugness.. So that’s slanted and therefore misleading.
(#¬allscientists)
I’ve had personal experience with this particular accusation being leveled at me. It was an odd, surreal experience because at the time I was much more reserved and cautious around people I’d just met. If you picture a stereotypical shrinking violet you wouldn’t be far off.
As I got to know this particular group of new friends I felt more less constrained about speaking and sharing what I thought. This transition from being a good listener to actually contributing to the conversation seems to have shocked some of them and that’s when they accused me of being smug. I tried to consider their viewpoint but frankly it was wildly inaccurate.
I learned a few things from the experience. Be careful of people who say things that are overly convenient for their point of view. Don’t let other people tell you what your attitude is, you can check that yourself. And when someone has no real answer for what you’ve said, this sort of tone policing or personal attack is what they’ll fall back on.
All of that seems to apply here.
Blah. Typo: should read I felt less constrained about talking. I had started to describe it as more confident but I don’t think the end state could be called “confident” at that point.
I think that this type of criticism requires just those qualifications of being a pompous loudmouth.
It is far better to be smug and right than to squawk and be wrong. So there!
Was Bronowski smug? Was Feynman smug? Is Attenborough smug? Is Brian Cox (the scientist) smug? Is Dawkins smug? (Okay, maybe I’ll give you that one) Is John Lennox smug? Absolutely, but then he’s a mathematician and that goes with the territory.
Nah, it needs translation. In this case:
“smug” = “having a rather solid handle on stuff one does not understand but cares about, which makes some people very resentful”.
I hates it my preciousss, I hates it so much, nasssty nasssty science peoples!.
Nah.
Y’know what it is? Their usual, boring, typical hypocritical projection. They are smug as fuck and so they accuse scientists of their own unmerted smugness.
[meta]
Nope. That is not what it is, StevoR.
Not ‘scientists’ (in general) and not ‘unmerited’ in the original.
cf. #10 — not all scientists. Not even ‘scientists’!
Actual claim: the speakers: the scientific atheist “spokesmen”.
So twice there you’ve made unwarranted claims, and you ignored my #10.
Tsk.
I don’t know – are you sitting on a pile of gold?
I suspect one’s perception of smugness is biassed by whether one agrees with the speaker. If they’re on my side, then they’re just forthrightly stating the facts. If they’re on the other side, then they’re smarmy lying bastards.
(This comment partially motivated by a recent imprudent foray into Facebook Reels, which for some reason feeds me a lot of Kent Hovind videos. Now there’s a smarmy lying bastard if ever there was one, by any objective standard).
As PZ notes, we aren’t smug, we are right and have the data to show that. We scientists also created the modern world and were responsible for the former world leadership of the USA.
A lot of good that does us these days.
The Trump regime/GOP War on Science has managed to all but wreck US science.
I was at a meeting of our local resistance organization last week.
The guest speaker was a Sociologist who was terminated from her federal government agency job.
The Feds didn’t just fire her, they fired everyone in her office and closed it down.
Two of the people in the audience were also scientists who had lost their jobs or funding.
One academic climate scientist whose entire budget was canceled. She has taken early retirement despite being relatively young, middle aged.
The other one was a scientist at the EPA.
His entire department had been dismantled any way they could, scientists transferred, projects defunded, equipment budgets zeroed out.
There is more. A lot of graduate students and postdocs are seeing what is happening and looking at other careers. They aren’t even taking very many graduate students next year.
US science could in theory recover from this.
It probably won’t though. It would take many years to do so and the support to do so isn’t there.
@21: But I think “smug” refers to attitude, not whether one is right or wrong (and FWIW, Wiktionary agrees). E.g. if everyone says you’re wrong about something and in the end you turn out to be right, you’re entitled to be a bit smug about it. Or such seems to be the common usage.
@21
The Sputnik scare made USA invest more in science and education.
But the current political climate will probably not allow more than taping over the worst holes, even under a Democratic presidency. Clinton and Obama offered band-aids not deep structural reconstruction. Same with Biden
.
I would argue USA can not adress any of the systemic flaws until the Supreme Court has been expanded to 13 judges and the election system has replaced the electoral college with majority elections.
Then you can finally go on to get nice things.
re #21, USA’s woes are other countries’ weal. The brain drain is operational.
cf. https://www.nytimes.com/2026/04/04/business/dealbook/trump-brain-drain-academia.html
Every accusation is a confession.
nomdeplume@25– beat me to it!
@ ^ nomdeplume : Exactly! My point in #17.
.*
@18. John Morales : “”So twice there you’ve made unwarranted claims, and you ignored my #10.”
Hadn’t seen your #10 when I posted that.
I guess I could’ve been more sepcific and yeah, generalisation but yeesh you sure are bad at understanding and following what is being meant and understood by most folks. Deliberately so it often seems.
Is PZ Myers being smug? Nah He doesn’t come across that way to me.
I think its projection on the part of this creationist here – .Andrew Klavan and more broadly and that scientists in general aren’t smug with some exceptions because that’s how the word broadly works.
..*
@ hillaryrettig1 : “I don’t know – are you sitting on a pile of gold?”
LOL. Nicely done. Smug – > Smaug.
https://tolkiengateway.net/wiki/Smaug
One of your problems is that you speak about ‘being’ yet you stick with ‘seeming’.
But I get it, apparently not. Fine, so it seems to you, and that makes it true.
More relevant, you literally quoted me and yet did not dispute me, you merely repeated yourself.
Venn diagram time: scientific atheist “spokesmen” vs. ‘atheists’:
Let A = all atheists and S = the public‑facing “scientific atheist spokesmen” (Dawkins, Harris, Coyne, etc.)
Then S ⊂ A and |S| is tiny relative to |A| therefore S is not representative of A in demographics, temperament, motives, or discourse style.
Yet you conflate them.
Lawry name-dropped Carl Sagan and Neil deGrasse Tyson. Both Sagan and Tyson publicly rejected the atheist label and, accordingly, have never been spokespeople for a movement they don’t identify with. And while Tyson can be smug at times, Sagan was famously not so, with many reports of him patiently explaining evidence to people, even creationist blowhards.
Lawry is using a cheap rhetorical trick to dismiss anyone who has presented scientific arguments against creationism and ID by calling them smug atheist spokesmen if they aren’t smug, atheist, or spokespeople. He does not deserve a pedantic logical-rhetorical defense while he ignores all the rules of logic and honest rhetoric in the first place.
[meta]
Well, I am not very impressed with Neil and his pop science posture.
Respect for his other achievements, but he’s gone into that domain.
Sagan I do respect, generally.
Both claim to be agnostic, which means they both deny being theists.
Now, if you consider atheism to be a lack of theism, they are atheists. Functional def.
If you consider agnostic to be non-atheistic, fine. But it sure af fuck they are not theists, are they?
(The cowardly stance, that is. Ooooo…. who can say? Maybe Jawa the God is real!)
Me, I reckon agnosticism and deism are both the coward’s way out.
To appease the mob and their torches and pitchforks.
—
Point being, they both concede maybe the deity is real. Stupid, but there it is.
To give Neil credit, he literally claimed “I don’t associate with movements. The moment you attach a label to yourself, you’ve got to live up to the baggage that comes with it.” — and that is my own stance.
(But he also wrecked that by claiming to be agnostic, so there’s that)
Oops. It wasn’t Lawry who dropped those names, it was Klavan. My apologies.
I don’t think Klavan actually knows the word he’s using. At worst, each of the individuals named comes across not as “smug,” but as “condescending”… and the latter can both be a communication barrier and a misperception (usually by those who have little relevant knowledge base) that the speaker’s confidence in knowledge the speaker has but the audience doesn’t is condescension. And that knowledge can be both factual and methodological; it’s one thing to assert that substance x causes condition y that can be treated by z, and another entirely to understand both why and how that relates to substance x‘ or treatment z‘.
Neither smugness nor condescension gets past the tenure process with much regularity. Well, at least not in the sciences; over the years, I’ve seen some of both in law faculties, and a lot of both in business-school faculty and administrators (whether or not otherwise tenured)…
As long as PZ does not concentrate all his Chi to a finger sending a beam to blow the head off the other guy, I will consider him acting within the frames of polite society.
.
The Vulcan nerve pinch is OK if someone starts on a rant about homersechsuals and joos.
There is a lot of talk about “magnetogenetics” recently, but the most recent paper I can find is from 2024.
Is this “a thing”?