"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.

How I got on Million Dollar Listing Los Angeles...Twice

Two Bites for the Pin Wheel | Wicked Tuna: Outer Banks

View All

A moral consequentialist property norm?

So the context of this is the social contract and one statist’s attempt to defend it. David John Wellman says, “It would be more accurate to characterize my beliefs as if there is such a thing as legitimate property, then the US legitimately owns governin…

How can I keep all my smart devices secure?

So Mark, so far we’ve talked a lot about device security, and when we talk about devices, at least in my mind, I imagine my phone, I imagine my laptop, a tablet, maybe a smart watch. But there’s actually a much broader universe of devices—smart devices, y…

Dilating points example

We’re asked to plot the image of point A under a dilation about point P with a scale factor of three. So, what they’re saying when they say under a dilation is they’re saying stretching it or scaling it up or down around the point P. That’s what we’re go…

Zhou, Qin and Han Dynasties | World History | Khan Academy

[Narrator] What I’m gonna do in this video is give us an overview of the first significant dynasties in Ancient and Imperial China. Now, in a previous video, we talk about the Xia dynasty, which we’re not sure whether it exists because we don’t have a l…