For those three readers I have who don't read Instapundit, my Fox column is up. It's a more genteel response to Mr. O'Reilly than my previous one, and it's all-new, now with 38% less snark!

I also apologize to John Pike for accusing him of being a physicist.

Very well done. Any response from Mr. O himself?

That is perhaps the most beautifully worded apology I have ever seen. Rand, you are a master of the language. :)

Rand, In your earlier thread, you said you were interested in figuring out whether Pike's a physicist, not whether he has a degree. Now it's morphed into 'no obvious qualifications at all to express opinions about launch costs,' etc.

I think it would be better just to disagree with him. The credentials issue would be important if he were pretending to be something he isn't (which I don't see as the case here).

Anyway, as Robert Zubrin pointed out in The Case for Mars, space colonists aren't going to worry about this kind of thing:

'If you're paying five times the terrestrial wage rate, you're not going to waste any of your worker's time with stoop labor or filling out forms, and you will not seek to exclude someone who can perform some desperately needed profession from doing so just because he or she has not taken the trouble to run some institutional obstacle course.' (p.236)

Granted, what Pike does isn't 'desperately needed,' but the anti-credentialist point is a good one, I think.

Beats me why my link to the earlier thread doesn't work.

I'm probably not qualified to write HTML.

Ken, Mr. Pike has been playing space expert on television, radio and print for many years, and sagely offering his opinions (often misinformed and mistaken, in my own opinion) as indisputable facts, and the media has been eating it up. There is, in fact, nothing in his educational or professional background to justify the respect that his opinions receive.

I said nothing about credentials--I said qualifications, which are an entirely different thing.

I got this email today after the column appeared.

Thanks for the smackdown on John Pike. I've been waiting 20 years to see somebody with access to the mainline press point out the fact that the dude is a charlatan.

Just thinking about the legitimate engineers and scientists who've lost their jobs because of something that no-experience weasel said on the air makes the old blood boil...

What's frustrating is not just that he's in all of the rolodexes, because he says comforting lefty things that resonate well with liberal reporters, but that many more knowledgable experts aren't.

Several good points there. But I think Pike does have qualifications; he's been analyzing these issues for a long time, at his current outfit and before that at Federation of American Scientists (a confusingly named but still legitimate organization).

If he were, say, making shirts the last 10 years and then suddenly weighed in on space policy, that would be another story.

By the way, I think what Pike said about launch costs and 'laws of physics' was stupid. But experts saying stupid things is nothing new.

I guess I don't think that "analyzing issues" per se renders one an expert, even if it's been happening for years. The quality of the analysis is important, too.

Jeremy Rifkin has been "analyzing issues" for years as well, but I find most of his viewpoints scientifically illiterate, regardless.

True enough, an expert who spouts nothing but nonsense would be no expert. Rifkin strikes me as coming fairly close to that negative ideal.

I found Pike to be a well-informed source for several articles I wrote at Insight magazine and Space.com, on spy satellites and other topics. I also don't think he's as reflexively leftist as you're suggesting.

Does he say things that are worthy of criticism? Yes. Is he overexposed? I guess so. But I'm not too worried that other people don't get a word in edgewise about space policy. Many do and will.

He may not be reflexively leftist, but it clearly taints his commentary, and the kinds of things that he "investigates" and "analyzes."

And he doesn't understand the issues of launch costs, but he often gets quoted (as in that Wired piece) as though he does.

I do agree that he's not as bad as Rifkin--I was just using an egregious example to make a point.

"I found Pike to be a well-informed source"
Knowledge equals expertise NOT. Computer is worth nothing if it _only_ has a storage device.

All:

Here's my own "pithy soundbite" on John Pike...I should put this on my website:

"John Pike is proof positive that any self-declared pundit can support himself these days on little more than the strength of a subscription to "Jane's All The World's (insert topic here)."

On a more serious note, I not only take issue with his total lack of credentials, as outlined above, but with the idea that he really *does* ever have anything particularly smart or noteworthy to say in the first place!

For example, when asked about the use of UAVs in Iraq and the possibility of developing UAVs with more autonomy, Pike said something like "Well, I'd be concerned about them going after targets we don't want them to once the man is out of the loop!"

OH REALLY JOHN?!?!! IS THAT THE CONCERN?!?!? THANKS FOR POINTING THAT OUT FOR US MISTER ENGINEERING EXPERT! WE WOULD NEVER HAVE THOUGHT OF THAT AS BEING THE ISSUE....DUH.

In fact, he sometimes actually misleads the public, as when he critiqued the failed results of a close-in, theater-missle defense test and implied directly they spelled doom for ICBM defense programs -- which rely on mostly different scales of physics and types of technology. I'm not saying ICBM defense can necessarily work, but it's wrong to mix apples and oranges to make one's politically-motivated point. I once questioned John Pike on this, and his reply can be paraphrased quite accurately as saying "what do you want? I had only 15 seconds to get a soundbite in!"

Somebody in this thread compared him to Edwin Land! I beg your pardon?!?! Edwin Land was the holder of more than 500 patents, founded the Rowland Institute of Science in 1960, etc. What has John Pike done except copy the web archive from the FAS web site when he left them and given a bunch of obvious quotes on cable news shows?

Face it guys, he's nothing but a libertarian who his own site professes is simply trying to fill some "independent, watchdog" function on the government...the Bush administration is getting enough attention in that area right now anyway.

What galls me is how once one of these self-professed experts gets into the media stream, they all borrow them from each other, figuring they've "gotta be" experts once SOMEBODY'S used them! It's a snowball effect...they should have a reality TV series wherein people jostle for pundit status in the interview offices of the major news outlets....

- Bill

P.S. Sorry to cross-post