Neat links! One of the commenters in that thread suggested the keyword “mediated personality” which exposes academic content like this and this.
My impression is that Eliezer was writing about roughly the same phenomenon in Einstein’s Superpower except he was coming at it from the perspective of attempting to replicate or surpass the accomplishments of celebrities… learning to see that what “those far people” have done is prosaically accessible to “we mere mortals” if we just role up our sleeves and get to business for a few years.
One thing that always tickled me about the essay is the way Eliezer was so bashful about admitting that he already had a measure of this sort of halo and was writing to an audience composed partly of people who thought there was something magically unattainable about what he himself was doing and had done already. He was pleading to be accepted as “capable of those big things” but not visibly noticing that he already had such a halo in some people’s eyes :-)
Neat links! One of the commenters in that thread suggested the keyword “mediated personality” which exposes academic content like this and this.
My impression is that Eliezer was writing about roughly the same phenomenon in Einstein’s Superpower except he was coming at it from the perspective of attempting to replicate or surpass the accomplishments of celebrities… learning to see that what “those far people” have done is prosaically accessible to “we mere mortals” if we just role up our sleeves and get to business for a few years.
One thing that always tickled me about the essay is the way Eliezer was so bashful about admitting that he already had a measure of this sort of halo and was writing to an audience composed partly of people who thought there was something magically unattainable about what he himself was doing and had done already. He was pleading to be accepted as “capable of those big things” but not visibly noticing that he already had such a halo in some people’s eyes :-)