take Secular Solstice to a level where it was “at least as commonly celebrated as Kwanzaa”
I’d say that’s maybe a 1 in a million level of impact. Equivalently, I’d say that’s the level of cultural change that America sees maybe 330 times a year (there are about 330 million of us).
Some levels of impact are relatively easy. If you want to teach high school for 40 years, you can (with high probability) impact a thousand people over the course of a career. But the difference between the classes you taught and the classes that would have been taught without you would probably be slim, and rather few of the students would remember you ten years later. A lifetime of work will get you a high probability of marginal impact at a modest scope, or a correspondingly lower probability of higher impacts at larger scopes.
Can’t tell to what degree we have a serious disagreement. (I wouldn’t be that surprised if I was fairly deluded about have a >10% shot at being “about as popular as Kwanzaa”, but I also was basing that on an assumption that Kwanzaa is not actually all that popular)
I don’t think we actually do have much of a disagreement. I’m just trying to point you in the direction of doing Fermi estimates of how changeable society is on any particular point. I think by most reasonable estimates, >10% is going to be a fairly delusional probability for any but the most marginal impacts, but YMMV.
take Secular Solstice to a level where it was “at least as commonly celebrated as Kwanzaa”
I’d say that’s maybe a 1 in a million level of impact. Equivalently, I’d say that’s the level of cultural change that America sees maybe 330 times a year (there are about 330 million of us).
Some levels of impact are relatively easy. If you want to teach high school for 40 years, you can (with high probability) impact a thousand people over the course of a career. But the difference between the classes you taught and the classes that would have been taught without you would probably be slim, and rather few of the students would remember you ten years later. A lifetime of work will get you a high probability of marginal impact at a modest scope, or a correspondingly lower probability of higher impacts at larger scopes.
Can’t tell to what degree we have a serious disagreement. (I wouldn’t be that surprised if I was fairly deluded about have a >10% shot at being “about as popular as Kwanzaa”, but I also was basing that on an assumption that Kwanzaa is not actually all that popular)
I don’t think we actually do have much of a disagreement. I’m just trying to point you in the direction of doing Fermi estimates of how changeable society is on any particular point. I think by most reasonable estimates, >10% is going to be a fairly delusional probability for any but the most marginal impacts, but YMMV.