"They are not average and they are not normal" — Brian Klaas on power seekers. #shorts

less than 1m read

·Nov 3, 2024

Processing might take a few minutes. Refresh later.

The people who end up in power are not representative of the rest of us. They are not average, and they are not normal people. Those who are power hungry tend to self-select into positions of power more than the rest of us.

As a result, we have this skew, this bias in positions of power where certain types of people, often the wrong kinds of people, are more likely to put themselves forward to rule over the rest of us. That is one of the key challenges of modern life: we have to find ways to block them.

There's this absolute intersection between culture, behavior, individuals, and systems. When we have this simplistic view of power, we're missing the story.

What you really need is a system that attracts the right kind of people, so that the diplomats who are clean, nice, and rule-following end up in power. Then, you need a system that gives them all the right incentives to follow the rules once they get there.

If you do have people who break the rules, there needs to be consequences.

The Body Deck

Big takeaways from the Civil War

View All

Justification using first derivative | AP Calculus AB | Khan Academy

The differentiable function f and its derivative f prime are graphed. So let’s see. We see the graph of y is equal to f of x here in blue, and then f prime we see in this brownish orangish color right over here. What is an appropriate calculus based justi…

Parametric surfaces | Multivariable calculus | Khan Academy

So I have here a very complicated function. It’s got a two-dimensional input—two different coordinates to its input—and then a three-dimensional output. Uh, specifically, it’s a three-dimensional vector, and each one of these is some expression. It’s a bu…

4 Revolutionary Riddles

At the Palace of Discovery in Paris, they have this huge turntable where you can sit and perform experiments. Like, in the middle of the turntable you can put some water and then add liquid nitrogen, and this creates a kind of fog. These tiny water drople…

Making a house out of mud bricks. (Real life minecraft) - Smarter Every Day 18

Here are Smarter Every Day, we’ve decided to change the format and make learning very very serious. And by serious I mean… [Thump, splash] - Seriously awesome! [Crowd yells] [Crowd laughs] (Destin) Alright, today we’re gonna learn about mud in Africa. Th…