"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.

Introduction to entropy | Applications of thermodynamics | AP Chemistry | Khan Academy

Price discrimination for a monopoly | Microeconomics | Khan Academy

View All

How we maintain discretion at The Jet Business.

I’ve met with a lot of famous people and celebrities both personally in my social circles and professionally. But, of course, most people who are buying or selling their airplane are pretty confidential about the situation, so we usually don’t try to shar…

There is NO HARD language -A polyglot's perspective

As a polyglot, I always get this question: Is Chinese like Japanese, as Turkish is… blah blah? Language hard to learn? The answer is, there is no hard language. Hard language doesn’t exist. Hi, guys! It’s me, Dory. For those who are new here, I’m a polygl…

Second derivatives (parametric functions) | Advanced derivatives | AP Calculus BC | Khan Academy

So here we have a set of parametric equations where x and y are both defined in terms of t. If you input all the possible ts that you can into these functions and then plot the corresponding x and y’s for each chord for each t, this will plot a curve in t…

Digital Aristotle: Thoughts on the Future of Education

Hello Internet, Recently YouTube invited me to California for a conference with a bunch of really interesting people. There were many talks and giant balloons and much discussion of what the future of education might look like — which is no small issue b…