Not to mention I don't recall him really calling himself a "scientist" in any formal sense, but my exposure to him has always been tangential. He was the "Bill Bye the Science Guy" in his original show, and afterwards I've always seem him explained as a science advocate.

I mean, what's a scientist anyway? If it's someone in constant pursuit of knowledge, does a constant reading of new material to learn more count?

I'd say a scientist is someone who advances science, not just someone who reads results by others (unless they publish a study based on those results, like a meta-analysis or similar).

Does that mean the scientist that tests hypothesis that never works out, and never bothers to publish, isn't a scientist?

What about the person that actually does advance knowledge, for their self, but doesn't share it? Are you not a scientist if you don't let everyone know what you found? You would conceivably still be performing science.

Maybe the easiest way to define it as someone that intends to discover something new (or at least add new data to existing data, for corroboration or refutation)? I don't consider myself to be a scientist, but if I wanted to explore some topic in depth, and and started reading about it, and maybe performing my own small scale experiments to confirm what I had read, I think I would be "doing science" and I would then be at a minimum am amateur scientist.