I question this best people tweet also. Some great people become public school teachers.

Some fields are simply harder to measure than others. I have previously known a physicist who DEFINED any question that he couldn't address using the scientific method as "uninteresting." Included in his list of uninteresting questions were things like what is human consciousness. It may be more valuable to search for excellence in fields where the metrics don't work in a trivially transparent way since the fields where it does work will be adequately investigated by following the crowd.