I mean he's kind of right. A preprint is just a badly formatted blog post published in a pdf. Until its finished and published. At least if one see peer-review journal literature as the gold standard of scientific discourse. Maybe this Berger thing has more to it, but scientists can (and maybe even should) talk about their ongoing research before there is a paper behind it.

It's not the public awareness stuff that I'm concerned about. That's just a necessary fact of life that I've also been involved with on my own digs.

I'm personally simply skeptical that the research conditions necessary to make a Netflix special (premiering in May-June apparently) are also conducive to high quality academic work.

Publishing a preprint goes partway to addressing that by showing everyone where their results will fit into the existing literature and strengthen the published paper by hearing / addressing public criticisms before they actually publish.

> he's kind of right. A preprint is just a badly formatted blog post published in a pdf. Until its finished and published

No, it has empirical data, most importantly, and also methods, analysis, conclusions, citations. It's nothing like a blog post, or another way of looking it it - it is an extraordinary blog post.

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.