Exposure and the Long Game

Harold Urey, a Nobel laureate, wrote a letter to Harvard's tenure committee recommending against Carl Sagan's tenure. His objection was that Sagan was too exposed, too public, too speculative, too broadly read. Sagan was denied at Harvard and MIT. He thrived at Cornell and became one of the most consequential science communicators of the twentieth century. Urey later admitted he was wrong.

The short-term cost of exposure is that institutions which control early career milestones, tenure, grants, promotions, are run by people who mistake breadth for shallowness. The long-term benefit is that exposure compounds. An audience is an asset that does not belong to any committee.

What's different now is the surface area. Sagan had television and books. The infrastructure for reaching people today is orders of magnitude more accessible, and the range of things you can produce and distribute has expanded correspondingly. The penalty for being exposed has not changed much. The upside has.

The opportunity set is larger than it appears from inside any single institution. That asymmetry is worth understanding early.