[theoh]

> Blogging seems to be an unhealthy activity for physicists.

This kind of observation is valuable, I think, even if it's only statistically true. Certain disciplines encourage practitioners to work within conventions and with capabilities that closely match the activity of blogging (or being on Twitter). For other disciplines, tweeting/blogging is very far from the core competencies, so practitioners who do pursue it are more likely to be outliers.

The other, not-so-neutral aspect of this is the narcissism problem. People who do a lot of personal PR are more likely to be narcissists—and this is a more negative indication in disciplines where self-promotion is an anomaly.

[x3tm]

I agree. I've come to the same realization recently when I started following the work of some CS researchers. I was (and still am) amazed to see how active they are on the internet (here, twitter, medium, youtube, github, blogs, etc.)

In the far more conservative physics community, there are (essentially) only two ways of communicating that are acceptable: writing academic papers, or delivering academic talks. Online presence is seen with suspicion.

I am not sure if this is a good or a bad thing.

>People who do a lot of personal PR are more likely to be narcissists—and this is a more negative indication in disciplines where self-promotion is an anomaly.

Spot on.

[foobiekr]

In my experience many of the CS people who are most active are basically doing it for career visibility reasons and much of what they post is either highly misleading or exaggerated to the level of clickbait. But it depends who we are talking about.

[x3tm]

I was thinking specifically of the AI/ML folks. Many top researchers from universities, google, open ai, fair, etc. are super active online. I don't think they do it for career visibility.

[solveit]

There's a cargo cult blogging thing going on in ML, where you also have a large number of tutorials written by variably-competent people written not to inform, but to look good. As I'm sure you know, the results are fairly mixed.

[yesenadam]

>much of what they post is either highly misleading or exaggerated to the level of clickbait

Could you give some specific examples of each, name some names?