a lot of unconventional people choose intentionally to ignore normie-legible status systems. this can take the form of either expert consensus or some form of feedback from reality that is widely accepted. for example, many researchers especially around these parts just don't publish at all in normal ML conferences at all, opting instead to depart into their own status systems. or they don't care whether their techniques can be used to make very successful products, or make surprisingly accurate predictions etc. instead, they substitute some alternative status system, like approval of a specific subcommunity.

there's a grain of truth to this, which is that the normal status system is often messed up (academia has terrible terrible incentives). it is true that many people overoptimize the normal status system really hard and end up not producing very much value.

but the problem with starting your own status system (or choosing to compete in a less well-agreed-upon one) is that it's unclear to other people how much stock to put in your status points. it's too easy to create new status systems. the existing ones might be deeply flawed, but at least their difficulty is a known quantity.

one common retort is that it's not worth proving yourself to people who are too closed minded and only accept ideas if they are validated by some legible status system. this is true to some extent, and i'm generally against people spending too much effort to optimize normie status too hard (e.g i think people should be way less worried about getting a degree in order to be taken seriously / get a job offer), but it's possible to take too far. 

a rational decision maker should in fact discount claims of extremely illegible quality, because there are simply too many of them and it's too hard to pick out the good ones even if they were there (that's sort of the whole thing about illegibillity!). it seems bad to only bestow the truth upon people who happen to be irrational in ways that cause them to take you seriously by chance. if left unchecked, this kind of thing can also very easily evolve into a cult, where the unmooring from reality checks allows huge epistemic distortions.

a good in between approach might be to do some very legibly impressive things, just to prove that you can in fact do well at the legible status system if you chose to, and are intentionally choosing not to (as opposed to choosing alternative status systems because you're not capable of getting status in the legible system).