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That Albert Einstein, always talking to the media, what an idiot. Don’t get me started on that Stephen Hawking either, what a conman. And that Leonard Susskind - complete moron. Richard Feynman - complete booby. Roger Penrose - fool. Bottom of the barrel, all of them. Real scientists work on real science 16 hours of the day and nothing else and spend the remaining 8 hours dreaming about real science. Any one else is a complete poser. If they even so much as speak to anyone who isn’t a physicist or write anything that isn’t a paper that’s a sure sign you’ve found a faker. The only exception is hacker news comments. Stay vigilant people.

Youre making my point for me, ironically. All those people you mention became media personalities later in life _after_ they'd made their contributions. Einstein is an especially egregious example, as later in life he became a crackpot, ranting about how quantum mechanics wasn't science. Sounds kinda like Sabine, except unlike Einstein she never actually contributed anything to science. Hawking _had_ to publish popular science books to pay his bills, but again he did very little in terms of science in this later period.

> All those people you mention became media personalities later in life _after_ they'd made their contributions

Right, sorry, I forgot that the only thing of importance that people have to contribute are Nobel prize winning papers. You know, lecturing, writing textbooks, writing standard scientific papers, peer reviews, all of these things aren't contributions. Obviously no-one should engage with the media unless they have won a Nobel and have decided they have no major papers left in them. In fact at that point, if they were real scientists, they'd just realise their time was up and walk off to perish on the tundra like the elderly inuits used to so they don't take up any more precious resources from the real scientists.

There is a commonality in your argument, at least from where I'm standing, with the logic of the 'proper binmen' people or the ascetics -- only those who suffer in silence away from society are truly the 'holy physicists'.

https://www.theguardian.com/news/2022/nov/15/who-remembers-p...

It's ironic that you express the following sentiment:

> If your goal is to learn about the fundamental building blocks of the universe, writing blog posts the societal aspects of science doesn't help you with that. Real scientists spend their time doing science. There's very few exceptions to this. In fact right now I can think of a single person who's a world class researcher _and_ a prolific blogger;

when, just yesterday, the highest ranked post on the site was this:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33750825

about this essay:

http://paulgraham.com/read.html

Ah yes. The highest ranked place in HN, the reference frame for scientific thinking.

Want to provide any scientific evidence for all the wild assertions you've been making?

I agree with you, and you’ve provided some excellent counter examples. I’d like to, as gently as possible, point out that in the curious spirit of this site it might be possible to make your same point without the snark.

In my opinion, making fun of extreme views is the best way to counteract them.

> In fact right now I can think of a single person who's a world class researcher _and_ a prolific blogger; Terrence Tao, but he's a mathematician.

> My point is, you can't judge who's the expert based on the quality of the science produced because you don't have the expertise for that.

But you do have the expertise / knowledge / chuzpah to say that Mr Tao is a world class researcher? Sorta contradicktory, no?

Surely you should add Scott Aaronson to your list of world class reserchers and prolific bloggers. He's also quite often quoted in the main stream media.