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There's a thing that happens when a former smart kid who gets a platform, meaning strangers hear what you have to say, where you flash back to the YA fantasy of being Smart Enough and Right Enough that Your Ideas Change The World. (Note ENDER"S GAME was a (horrific) YA novel.)
It's happened to me a couple times, as a (somewhat) Buzzy Young Novelist, and as a columnist read by 10Ks-to-millions; and I've watched it happen plenty to others. It's intoxicating, being part of The Discourse. You're still one of thousands, but that's a lot fewer than millions.
The notion what you declaim from your platform might actually _matter_ was plausible, once, long ago, as I understand it. The Discourse, from (the incredibly exclusionary!) Great & Good, would inspire/influence think tanks and policy people to draft meaningful laws & regulations.
But it's been a long time since that's been the case. Nowadays, The Discourse only matters, if at all, when it's a clamor, meaning, definitionally, individual voices are irrelevant. Nowadays its ideas are used, at best, as fig leaves & rationalizations for pre-cooked decisions.
I recently came across the term "decision-based evidence making," all too apt for the modern era. The joke in engineering school was "first draw the line, then plot the points"; well, here "the line" is the policy decision, and "the points" are The Discourse about the subject.
The pandemic has made this very clear, in the way real experts have been cherry-picked, slow-rolled, deliberately misinterpreted, & straight-up ignored in favor of pre-existing biases; but it's true for everything else too. Every policy decision is now a battle, not a compromise.
I'm not saying The Discourse is completely irrelevant-yet. Again, when it erupts into a near-unanimous clamor, it has some influence. But the notion there exists a mechanism by which well-expressed widely published good ideas might turn into policy is frankly delusional nowadays.
There are rare exceptions. There are always rare exceptions. But by and large the days of making the world better by being publicly Smart Enough and Right Enough are long gone, if they ever existed. It seems that new engines of change are required.
