"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.

Graphs of rational functions: vertical asymptotes | High School Math | Khan Academy

Cosine, sine and tangent of π/6 and π/3

View All

Americans Are Spending Like There's No Tomorrow..

What’s up you guys, it’s Graham here, and this is getting out of hand. According to the Wall Street Journal, Americans are still spending like there’s no tomorrow, with the average consumer splurging on events, concerts, vacations, and experiences, all wh…

The Billion Ant Mega Colony and the Biggest War on Earth

In nearly every corner of the earth, ants wage war against each other. Their weapons are what nature gave them. Some have strong armor, deathly stingers, or sharp mandibles. And then there’s this tiny and not very impressive ant, but it rules the biggest …

INSANE Watches Inspired By Firefighters

So we actually make the watches, Kevin, from genuine upcycled firefighting materials. So even the case itself has 100 years of real firefighting history, we say, beating through every component. This is a wonderful here, Geneva, Switzerland, with Johnny G…

Rewriting square root of fraction

So we have here the square root, the principal root of one two hundredths. What I want to do is simplify this. When I say simplify, I really mean I want to, if there’s any perfect squares here that I can factor out to take it out from under the radical. I…