[wolverine876]

Twitter - that's become the perfect venue for this kind of thing, but not in the way Berger imagines.

> he considers a public-interest lecture and a publicity tour equivalent to a preprint on something like SSRN

There's all the difference in the world: A preprint has empirical data (not to mention an hypothesis, methods, analysis, conclusion).

> it seems to have been effective in getting people to talk about it

That has nothing to do with science. No scientific advance is connected to the public talking about it.