Just curious, what are your thresholds for what qualifies as ‘changing the world’ and ‘making a difference’. Where do these come from, and how specific do you think they are?
I know that lots of people seem to believe that the thresholds exist, but I’ve always found them perplexing.
I don’t think there’s a precise threshold, but when I use the phrase “change the world”, I’m pretty confident that my interlocutor is thinking of people like Steve Jobs and companies like Apple and not thinking of people like me who don’t have our own wikipedia articles and companies like the ones I work for that don’t have names many would recognize and aren’t credited with inventing/popularizing important product categories that millions of people now use every day.
People who “change the world” make big political, technological, or scientific changes and bring them into the lives of many people.
I am not sure if there is a defensible Schelling point in this particular Sorites. Possibly whether your actions cause a self-sustaining reaction, or something.
Volunteering in poor areas can make a difference between life and death for a few people. If you end up achieving Mother Theresa-like prominence, with lots of followers saving lives out of proportion to your personal efforts, then maybe it’s close to changing the world.
Or maybe you just have enough leverage to achieve a significant effect, like Bill Gates planning to eradicate malaria completely in a decade or two. But most of us are not in that situation, so we have to rely on others to create a “world-changing” amount of leverage.
Just curious, what are your thresholds for what qualifies as ‘changing the world’ and ‘making a difference’. Where do these come from, and how specific do you think they are?
I know that lots of people seem to believe that the thresholds exist, but I’ve always found them perplexing.
I don’t think there’s a precise threshold, but when I use the phrase “change the world”, I’m pretty confident that my interlocutor is thinking of people like Steve Jobs and companies like Apple and not thinking of people like me who don’t have our own wikipedia articles and companies like the ones I work for that don’t have names many would recognize and aren’t credited with inventing/popularizing important product categories that millions of people now use every day.
People who “change the world” make big political, technological, or scientific changes and bring them into the lives of many people.
I am not sure if there is a defensible Schelling point in this particular Sorites. Possibly whether your actions cause a self-sustaining reaction, or something.
Volunteering in poor areas can make a difference between life and death for a few people. If you end up achieving Mother Theresa-like prominence, with lots of followers saving lives out of proportion to your personal efforts, then maybe it’s close to changing the world.
Or maybe you just have enough leverage to achieve a significant effect, like Bill Gates planning to eradicate malaria completely in a decade or two. But most of us are not in that situation, so we have to rely on others to create a “world-changing” amount of leverage.