How do people end up having plans (which they realistically expect to achieve) that affect at least thousands, and preferably millions of people?
The first thing is to realize that society makes this very difficult for very good reasons. If it was easy to affect thousands or millions of lives, then thousands or millions of people would constantly be affecting your life. This would be undesirable; without stability there can be no successful planning.
So I’d say Step 1 is: Realize that you are going to have to spend an incredible amount of effort to make even very modest changes to society, and that you are very likely to fail, and that that’s as it should be.
So interesting—I have the exact opposite intuition: it is technically relatively easy to have a large impact, if you are the kind of person naturally inclined to do so (i.e., very roughly speaking, high in the achievement/industriousness aspect of conscientiousness, probably?), but almost nobody is naturally inclined to do so (I blame the ancestral environment).
If it was easy to affect thousands or millions of lives, then thousands or millions of people would constantly be affecting your life.
…How, in Lord’s name, is this not precisely the case? Every major entrepreneur, artist, musician, public intellectual, celebrity, politician, athlete, scientist, engineer, activist, etc., etc., there’s millions of people who affect millions or more lives constantly.
It depends on what degree of effect you’re striving for. If you’re content to change the world by playing Batman in a way that is somewhat different than Batman has been played before, or to write a pop song that millions of people will be vaguely aware of, then those are … actually very difficult dreams to achieve, that only one in tens of thousands ever will. But thousands of people manage that level of impact. If you want to stop global warming, then the difficulty increases by several orders of magnitude.
The bar I set in the OP was “have a plan that could plausibly impact thousands and preferably millions of people”.
The motivating example was my own experience of becoming ambitious, wherein I (for a couple years), had plans to take Secular Solstice to a level where it was “at least as commonly celebrated as Kwanzaa”. I eventually abandoned those plans, because, indeed:
It was going to be a lot of work, and would take at least 5-10 years of solid, socially difficult work.
It didn’t seem like that actually was the most valuable thing for me to be spending 5-10 years on, with AI timelines seeming to be what they were and it seeming plausible that I could actually be relevant to them.
I updated that Fandom is actually the correct Secular Religion for the Masses, and that New Humanism was fairly doomed (possible exception of Politically Motivated Humanism, which didn’t seem doomed but which I was wary of), and meanwhile it seemed better for Solstice to just focus on the rationalist community where it could maintain it’s soul.
(it matched the claim that ambition requires both conscientiousness and extroversion)
Nonetheless, I did have a fairly clear idea of how to go about it, and I took serious actions in that direction for a couple years, and the process of doing that meaningfully changed how I look at the world. Which has output the question “what is necessary to scalably give people that experience?”
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.
Realize that you are going to have to spend an incredible amount of effort to make even very modest changes to society, and that you are very likely to fail
I think this is roughly correct, though. Or, to put it better: To the degree that you are low in conscientiousness, this is true for you. To the degree that you are high in conscientiousness, you’re not reading this comment, because you have better things to do with your life.
I agree that low conscientiousness is probably a showstopper, but conscientiousness alone isn’t nearly enough. You also need 1) a workable plan 2) that enough people can be convinced to endorse, plus 3) the skills to effectively convince people of the virtues of that plan, 4) the leverage to overcome the opposition it generates (which it will), 5) the timing to be there with a solution when society feels the need for a solution and 6) the luck not to have unexpected events make you irrelevant. Most people lack any of those things, and you will need all of them. Otherwise you wind up like Hillary, a talented woman who worked her whole life for a one-sentence mention in the history books.
How do people end up having plans (which they realistically expect to achieve) that affect at least thousands, and preferably millions of people?
The first thing is to realize that society makes this very difficult for very good reasons. If it was easy to affect thousands or millions of lives, then thousands or millions of people would constantly be affecting your life. This would be undesirable; without stability there can be no successful planning.
So I’d say Step 1 is: Realize that you are going to have to spend an incredible amount of effort to make even very modest changes to society, and that you are very likely to fail, and that that’s as it should be.
So interesting—I have the exact opposite intuition: it is technically relatively easy to have a large impact, if you are the kind of person naturally inclined to do so (i.e., very roughly speaking, high in the achievement/industriousness aspect of conscientiousness, probably?), but almost nobody is naturally inclined to do so (I blame the ancestral environment).
…How, in Lord’s name, is this not precisely the case? Every major entrepreneur, artist, musician, public intellectual, celebrity, politician, athlete, scientist, engineer, activist, etc., etc., there’s millions of people who affect millions or more lives constantly.
It depends on what degree of effect you’re striving for. If you’re content to change the world by playing Batman in a way that is somewhat different than Batman has been played before, or to write a pop song that millions of people will be vaguely aware of, then those are … actually very difficult dreams to achieve, that only one in tens of thousands ever will. But thousands of people manage that level of impact. If you want to stop global warming, then the difficulty increases by several orders of magnitude.
The bar I set in the OP was “have a plan that could plausibly impact thousands and preferably millions of people”.
The motivating example was my own experience of becoming ambitious, wherein I (for a couple years), had plans to take Secular Solstice to a level where it was “at least as commonly celebrated as Kwanzaa”. I eventually abandoned those plans, because, indeed:
It was going to be a lot of work, and would take at least 5-10 years of solid, socially difficult work.
It didn’t seem like that actually was the most valuable thing for me to be spending 5-10 years on, with AI timelines seeming to be what they were and it seeming plausible that I could actually be relevant to them.
I updated that Fandom is actually the correct Secular Religion for the Masses, and that New Humanism was fairly doomed (possible exception of Politically Motivated Humanism, which didn’t seem doomed but which I was wary of), and meanwhile it seemed better for Solstice to just focus on the rationalist community where it could maintain it’s soul.
(it matched the claim that ambition requires both conscientiousness and extroversion)
Nonetheless, I did have a fairly clear idea of how to go about it, and I took serious actions in that direction for a couple years, and the process of doing that meaningfully changed how I look at the world. Which has output the question “what is necessary to scalably give people that experience?”
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.
I think this is roughly correct, though. Or, to put it better: To the degree that you are low in conscientiousness, this is true for you. To the degree that you are high in conscientiousness, you’re not reading this comment, because you have better things to do with your life.
I agree that low conscientiousness is probably a showstopper, but conscientiousness alone isn’t nearly enough. You also need 1) a workable plan 2) that enough people can be convinced to endorse, plus 3) the skills to effectively convince people of the virtues of that plan, 4) the leverage to overcome the opposition it generates (which it will), 5) the timing to be there with a solution when society feels the need for a solution and 6) the luck not to have unexpected events make you irrelevant. Most people lack any of those things, and you will need all of them. Otherwise you wind up like Hillary, a talented woman who worked her whole life for a one-sentence mention in the history books.