That goes for self interested individuals with high rationality, purely material goals, and very low self deception. The self deceived case, on the other hand, is the people whose self interest includes ‘feeling important’ and ‘believing oneself to be awesome’ and perhaps even ‘taking a shot at becoming the saviour of mankind’. In that case you should expect them to see awesomeness in anything that might possibly be awesome (various philosophy, various confused texts that might be becoming mainstream for all we know, you get the idea), combined with absence of anything that is definitely awesome and can’t be trivial (a new algorithmic solution to long standing well known problem that others worked on, practically important enough, etc).
That goes for self interested individuals with high rationality, purely material goals, and very low self deception. The self deceived case, on the other hand, is the people whose self interest includes ‘feeling important’ and ‘believing oneself to be awesome’ and perhaps even ‘taking a shot at becoming the saviour of mankind’. In that case you should expect them to see awesomeness in anything that might possibly be awesome (various philosophy, various confused texts that might be becoming mainstream for all we know, you get the idea), combined with absence of anything that is definitely awesome and can’t be trivial (a new algorithmic solution to long standing well known problem that others worked on, practically important enough, etc).