Gesellschaft reputation works very differently from Gemeinschaft reputation, but in both cases, there is an extreme power law type effect. 90% of your reputation rests on 10% of either your credentials or your work.
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Your Gesellschaft reputation is for impersonal institutions and for people who don't know your work (and might never know it). In my case, 90% of my reputation rests on a) brand-name PhD b) association c) one "real" book (until they find out it was self-published 😂)
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Gemeinschaft reputation has a similar distribution, it's for people who have enough of a familiarity with your work that you pop from a generic scene as "that _____ guy" where FITB in my case = "ribbonfarm", "gervais principle", or "premium mediocre" 90% of the time
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Everybody with a finished-Act-1 level reputation is like an iceberg. 90% underwater, reputation resting on 10%, and that indirectly (via signal value). When you think about Act 2 games for yourself after age 35 or so, this iceberg is what you have to work with.
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A rather dumb mistake I see Very Online social media people make is mistaking reputational capital for actual identity capital. Just because only 10% of who you are is part of the "signature" of your presence, doesn't mean the other 90% can be ignored. That's a fatal error.
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Your ability to actually do anything interesting is a much more boring bell-curve or even uniform type distribution on top of everything that could go into your identity. The 10% that generates 90% of your reputation might only generate 10% of the power of your thinking.
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At least this is the case for most kinds of activities. Perhaps there are patterns of production where signal capital is much more closely correlated to production-capability capital.
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