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 :-)
Elizabeth Bear writes about the extent to which people invent versions of celebrities to react to:
I'm just in these last couple of years coming to realize that, to a lot of people (like, more people than I know in real life), I'm no longer a real person they don't know, or maybe know by reputation. Instead, I've become an auctorial construct, and it's very bizarre.
Essentially, I'm a fictional person to them.
And they feel like they have ownership of that construct/fictional person, and sometimes they get very angry when I persist in being me and not the person they imagined. Which, I mean--okay, yeah. It happens to actors and musicians and sports figures a thousand-fold more, and politicians build their careers on capitalizing on this effect, but boy it takes some getting used to.
Sometimes, it's a little like dealing with 5,000 high school crushes. Sometimes it's like dealing with 5,000 high school enemies. Sometimes, I learn things about myself I did not know from my Wikipedia page.
Part of the price of being a public person is not having a lot of control over what people say about you--or, more precisely, what they say about the auctorial construct they have created, that they think is you. It's the cost of celebrity. Even teeny tiny celebrity. Celebrity this big: ---><---
Everybody experiences through their own perceptual filters, you see, and everybody projects their deepest, most heartfelt hopes and dreads into what they read and watch and live. To narrow it down a little, it's how this flawed technological telepathy we call prose communication works. It's why a book can get under your skin and change you; because a book is a mirror. A funhouse mirror. (My former Viable Paradise roomie Cory Doctorow, who isn't very much like a lot of people seem to think he is, and who I like a lot, has a hypothesis that a lot of how we experience fiction comes from the workings of our mirror neurons. Which is to say, the same things that both give us empathy (if you believe that particular research), allow us to model the behaviors of others in advanceof experience ("Mom's gonna kill me!"), and also tend to lead us to project our own motivations onto others ("I know you're thinking about breaking up with me!").
I'm posting this because it's an example of rationality in the face of emotional pressure, and might be useful to anyone who's acquired some fame or is dealing with famous people. Here's a little more about how gender cranks up the intensity.