Everyone who has the deep technical knowledge also needs to be able to communicate with others who don't have it. There's a difference between being an Internet personality who can code and being a programmer who can write English.

Even if locking yourself in a room for months is a requirement to coming up with new science (which I highly doubt), solving problems for the intellectual gratification is useless on its own unless the new knowledge is shared. Writing is simply the highest-bandwidth medium for distributing technical knowledge to a wide group of people, so even the most in-the-trenches technical people need to be good at it.

It's really not as you say in practice. Semantically yes it never becomes released, but eventually excellent work spreads naturally.

In the current internet setup it is hard to grow organically, but that's a result of this same mentality. It reinforces politics and showmanship, which is why those skills dictate the market and coincidentally the internet.

But how does excellent work spread naturally? If I publish some truly wonderful language or package on GitHub, would anyone notice without me promoting it? Or if I find some surprising result from an experiment, write it up, put it on my blog that I don't promote, will anyone see it? And if so, how?

> Let the two be separate, because the world has enough 'leaders'/'advertisers'. What it needs now is technical knowledge.

I think that without those with the technical knowledge leading in their own right, then other self-proclaimed leaders will do their best bet at understanding, and will often get critical parts wrong.

It's more likely that the technical crowd won't follow the leaders who get technical implementations wrong. Instead you will see natural leadership like in the early days of the internet.

> Unfortunately, the more you focus on advertising the less you focus on technical knowledge.

If the law of diminishing returns applies, it's better to spend time on improving multiple skills or knowledge instead of focusing on just one. I don't think you need to be an expert in advertising for it to be useful to you.