“It is not something I think about a lot, for fairly obvious reasons, but I would like to believe that, if I won a Nobel Prize, I would have enough self-control never to mention it to anyone. Not because I am not desperate for approval and prestige! Certainly, absolutely, I would want everyone I ever met to know that I had won a Nobel Prize. I just mean that it would be so much more satisfying (for me) if they found out on their own. Like I would have normal chats with them about the weather every day, and then one day they would say “oh hey someone told me the other day that you had a Nobel Prize, I didn’t know that, that’s amazing, why didn’t you tell me!” And I’d be like “oh that old thing, yeah, it’s not really a big deal, I never think about it.” Look, I do not know if I could pull it off. Would I occasionally drop cryptic references to Stockholm to try to help them along? Sure, of course, I am only human. But I really do think that I’d mostly be able to delay gratification, because when they did figure it out it would be extra sweet.

“On the other hand, in addition to never winning a Nobel Prize, I have never been to Burning Man, and it’s possible that if I spent a week in the desert with weirdly dressed strangers almost all of whom are either tech founders or hedge fund managers, I might just end up wearing my Nobel medal around and taking “Alfred” as my playa name. I assume Burning Man is mostly a weird form of charades where everyone dresses up as a hippie and tries to get you to guess what app they invented. I don’t know. All of this feels far enough removed from my actual experience that I am kind of groping in the dark here.”

https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2019-09-05/goldma...