"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.

In the Studio Pt. 2 ft Zedd | One Strange Rock

How I learned to make more friends

View All

Life Lessons College Didn't Teach You

My life completely changed in my final year of college. After spending the first 3 years as an introvert who only really went to school to get the best grades, I started communicating more with my professors and other students in my program. I started mak…

Khan Academy Districts Overview

Foreign [Music] The benefit that Khan Academy brings to our school district is being able to provide a platform that provides individualized practice study skill. The ability for students to increase their knowledge proficiency. The support that Khan Aca…

The Power of Persistence

Hi, my name is Maria Eldeeb. I was born in Egypt and worked on a farm until third grade. Then we came—I came with my family to the USA, and I worked. I continued working and also going to school since we had to, but working full time didn’t allow for scho…

Worked example: Rewriting definite integral as limit of Riemann sum | AP Calculus AB | Khan Academy

Let’s get some practice rewriting definite integrals as the limit of a Riemann sum. So let’s say I wanted to take the definite integral from π to 2π of cosine of x dx. What I want to do is write it as the limit as n approaches infinity of a Riemann sum. …