"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 FEDERAL RESERVE JUST FLIPPED | Major Changes Explained

Rewriting fractions as decimals | Math | 4th grade | Khan Academy

View All

What If You Detonated a Nuclear Bomb In The Marianas Trench? (Science not Fantasy)

What would happen if we detonated humanity’s most powerful nuclear weapon at the deepest point of the ocean? For sure, tsunamis hundreds of meters high would destroy coastal cities, earthquakes would level countries, new volcanoes would bring us nuclear w…

Sound + Fire = Rubens' Tube

So Dr. Phil, uh, what’s going on here? Okay, what we’ve got here is a metal pipe with a whole lot of holes in it. We’re pumping gas through it, and we’ve lit it up, as you can see. So we have like a whole lot of, uh, buns and burners all in a row—a whole…

Analyzing problems involving definite integrals | AP Calculus AB | Khan Academy

The population of a town grows at a rate of ( r(t) = 300 e^{0.3t} ) people per year, where ( t ) is time in years. At time ( t = 2 ), the town’s population is 1200 people. What is the town’s population at ( t = 7 )? Which expression can we use to solve t…

Writing equations for relationships between quantities | 6th grade | Khan Academy

We’re told Ahmad is going to walk 20 kilometers for a charity fundraiser. In the first part of this question, they say to write an equation that represents how many hours ( t ) the walk will take if Ahmad walks at a constant rate of ( r ) kilometers per h…