The author reduces her efforts to a ‘trade’. How is this different to how Terry Tao thinks about his field? Wouldn’t his ‘personalized heuristics’ about how to solve a problem also look like profound ability to an outsider?
Check out my own thread earlier up the thread. I think that'd be the difference, since she didn't get critical peer reviews on her work which is how we've decided to do science. The thread is interesting to me because I was recounting fun memories, which can very easily end up to a conspiracy theory. But thankfully, I did not start solving them then.