1) People usually don’t recognize faked genius as faked when they see it; they don’t realize what’s missing from “genius” characters in their fiction.
2) However, if you then show them real genius, they can recognize it as new, different, better, and important (though they may not realize what the added ingredient was).
This applies to stereotypical fiction ‘genius’ when compared to an actually clever fictional character. Yet I’m not so sure it applies to gaining real world reputation. In many fields it can be demonstrated that being recognized as a brilliant expert is not actually strongly correlated with domain performance but instead determined by social factors.
If you want to get a reputation for being brilliant gain a solid baseline proficiency in an area and then actually become brilliant at politics. Or, of course, choose one of the few fields where objective performance is hard to hide from.
HPMOR demonstrates:
1) People usually don’t recognize faked genius as faked when they see it; they don’t realize what’s missing from “genius” characters in their fiction.
2) However, if you then show them real genius, they can recognize it as new, different, better, and important (though they may not realize what the added ingredient was).
This applies to stereotypical fiction ‘genius’ when compared to an actually clever fictional character. Yet I’m not so sure it applies to gaining real world reputation. In many fields it can be demonstrated that being recognized as a brilliant expert is not actually strongly correlated with domain performance but instead determined by social factors.
If you want to get a reputation for being brilliant gain a solid baseline proficiency in an area and then actually become brilliant at politics. Or, of course, choose one of the few fields where objective performance is hard to hide from.