I'd hesitate to call your estimate of the social value you'll generate a lower bound, as you do, if you're not sure about the value of the invisible/conventional work you might be persuading people away from
For conventional careers, income is a proxy to social value of work, and this serves as a base-line. I think that most people with an innovative flair can do better than this. But there may be opportunities to systematically contribute outsized impact relative to earnings – I'd very much appreciate pointers to places where we can learn more about this subject.
We think that there are people who:
who we can persuade to good effect.
It seems like most of what you're doing and planning should give a boost to any kind of achievement,
That's our hope.
(You don't seem to rely on it, but I especially don't think replaceability is the knockdown argument many people treat it as here.)
Yes, there are major problems with the replaceability argument in full generality.
Even if one is replaceable, if one is replaced, that will divert someone else from something else that's valuable (in expectation) to fill the role, which will divert someone else from something else that's valuable (in expectation) to fill the role, etc.
In How can Cognito Mentoring do the most good? I included a section on our potential social value. I want to flesh out what we hope to achieve.
Consider the following people:
Some of these accomplishments are more impressive than others, but all of them are impressive, and most of the people listed are quite young, and will plausible do more impressive things along similar lines as they get older.
Some common threads that I see in these people are:
Unconventionality isn't necessarily a path to success, and there are plenty of people who adopt unconventional paths and don't get much done at all, but when executed well, it's possible to pursue an unconventional path with relatively little risk and high potential upside.
We think that we can enable more people to engage in activities like the ones above. Many of those who are well-suited to them are already engaged in them. But there are others who have most of the relevant traits for whom there are only one or two limiting factors. Some ways in which we think that we can remove the limiting factors are as follows
According to student feedback we've had some success on the first two fronts. We're continuing such efforts, and are in the process of working on the latter two.
By moving people in the directions suggested above, we hope to tip more people into the high achieving pool that has the above as representative members. We expect that we can enable an average of one additional person per year to get into this achievement range, with the benefits accruing throughout their lives.
Concerning the feasibility of this: The number of people with the requisite traits is not very small. As above, the people on the list have in some cases achieved far out of proportion with their ability, so there are a fair number of people of the same ability level who don't. So far we've had a number of advisees who probably have similar characteristics to people on the list above at the same age. So it's not necessary to influence a huge number of people to succeed (though we're casting as wide a net as possible.)
Assuming the estimate here is correct, we get a lower bound on the social value generated by Cognito Mentoring. We have other sources of social value, which we touched on in our earlier post and might elaborate in later posts.