Social parasites in leadership positions

A small percentage of people are social parasites. They take more than they give and feel fine about it.

Leadership positions attract exactly these people. Studies of top managers find psychopaths at three to four times the normal rate. The ladder doesn’t accidentally let them climb – the ladder is built for their kind of climbing.

It gets worse. Power doesn’t just attract the wrong people – it changes the good ones. Give a kind person power and their empathy reduces. There are two roads into the same corner office – parasites climbing in, and normal people changing on arrival.

That’s why “let’s just pick better leaders” doesn’t work. You can’t sort people that well. And who applies for the job of sorter? The same kind.

The only thing that has ever (temporarily) worked: build systems that survive bad leaders. Limits on power, transparency, and above all – an exit for everyone below.

Power reveals

People say power corrupts. It doesn’t – it reveals what was already there.

Give a person power and it reveals the traumas (s)he had normalized so they wouldn’t mess with his/her life. What kept those traumas quiet is that the world pushes back. If you are not nice friends will leave, bosses will fire you, etc. Failure grounds people.

Power removes the pushback. Nobody tells the king no. With nothing pushing back, the managed wounds spill out – onto other people.

Experiments confirm it – give power to a selfish person and they become more selfish. Give it to a generous person and they become more generous. Power is a magnifier of whatever was already there. That’s why every powerful person goes bad in their own particular way – the damage has the shape of their own story.

Two ways back

How does a powerful person become good again?

One way: let them eat themselves full of power. If their wound is the fillable kind (the need to finally feel safe, seen, enough) then once it’s filled, they relax and return to who they really are. Example – the ruthless tycoon who ends up building libraries.

But some wounds are bottomless. Power doesn’t fill them. It feeds them, and the hole grows with the feeding. Doctors have a name for leaders who get worse the longer they rule: hubris syndrome. Filling up never cures these people. Only the second way does.

The second way: the rollercoaster. Power, failure, power, failure. A crash is the one piece of feedback a powerful person can’t fire, can’t bribe, can’t ignore. Every crash forces them back to reality. Enough rounds of this shape even the hard cases into someone that’s ok.

Look at democracy through this lens. Elections were never a machine for picking good leaders – we’re clearly bad at that. Democracy is a machine that guarantees the crash: a scheduled, bloodless fall every few years, even for those who would never voluntarily leave.

Now add AI

Here’s what worries me about the most powerful AI ending up exclusively in the hands of a few.

Notice what each kind of person wants from it. Scientists and engineers rush to use AI to invent new cures and new technologies. The parasites want a different list: war tech, surveillance, mass control. Tools that increase their lead and keep everyone else in check. Step out of line and your money switches off. The phone in your pocket tells them where you are, who you talk to, what you read. The next thing on their wish list is reading minds. After that it will be tech we can’t yet imagine.

A ruler whose AI beats everyone else’s stops losing. No lost wars. No lost elections. No market punishment. The rollercoaster stops – at the top.

Controlling superintelligence doesn’t just make the powerful stronger. It makes them uncrashable. And the crash was the only cure we ever had that worked on the worst cases.

There is not much time left to keep superintelligence from falling into the hands of a “chosen” few. Once they get a big enough lead, there is no catching up.

Every bad ruler in history eventually crashed – lost a war, lost an election, ran out of money. The crash was how humanity recovered. A ruler who cannot crash puts humanity in a situation we’ve never been in before.

What if we can’t get out of it?

What it takes to come up with a good idea vs. what it takes to execute it well

To turn an idea into a successful business:

1. Solve a problem that your future customers find so important/annoying they will gladly pay for your solution. If you’re improving upon an existing solution, it has to be significantly better than what people are used to.

2. Understand who your customers are and figure out if they will actually pay for your solution. Try selling it to them before you spend a part of your life developing it.

3. Unless you can dedicate the next few years of your life to the idea, don’t do it. Just because it’s a good idea, and you came up with it, doesn’t mean you have to be the one that brings it to life.

4. Unless you have a burning passion for working on your solution, you will need superhuman perseverance. Ideally, have both.

5. If you aren’t good at selling, you better have people who are. If your spending exceeds your income, you are going downhill, no matter which way you look at it.

6. Don’t go against human nature. Build the idea so that human nature plays into it. A customer should experience no discomfort/annoyance using your solution (other than paying for it). Your work is not done until this is true.

Creativity: using your imagination to envision something.

Problem-solving: using your imagination to envision solutions to problems.

Inventing: using your imagination to envision solutions that are new and non-obvious.

Innovating: using your imagination to make existing solutions useful in new ways.

Science: using your imagination to envision ways of answering open questions.

Serendipitous discovery: using your imagination to make sense of something that happened by chance.

Art: using your imagination to envision something that would evoke emotions.

From the creator’s perspective art can solve any of the following problems:

From the audience’s perspective, art is used to evoke emotions. Feeling something is less boring than feeling nothing:)

An invention is a solution that is new and non-obvious.

Innovation is an existing solution made useful in a new way.

The purpose of any idea is to solve a problem.

The idea can be anywhere on the problem-solving spectrum. Even just identifying the problem is an early-stage idea. One of the first steps on the spectrum.

A challenge is an aspirational pursuit of an unknown solution. An idea is the exact same thing, but with a solution in sight.

A worthy problem is felt like a personal challenge when it encounters the right person. People will even devote their lives to solving it when fueled by enough passion.

All ideas come from creativity – our ultimate problem-solving tool. All human knowledge is created as a result of problem-solving.

Ideas are built upon other ideas. Existing knowledge is the fuel and building material for new ideas.

As we interact with the world around us, something eventually bothers us to the extent that we want to take action. When we face difficult problems, we turn to creativity.

A bad idea and a good idea are both works in progress. One needs a shift in direction, the other more iterations.

This is pretty much how ideas are born.

There is a stage in life that some people manage to reach. Maslow describes it as “self-transcendence”.^[1] It comes after all our deficiencies and growth needs have been met. Having built a strong safety net protects us from falling back into survival mode. In turn, this frees up our brainpower and allows us to focus on bigger goals.

Our next challenge then becomes how to extend this safety over our families, communities, species, all of biological life, our planet, and whatever else we identify with.

How a few known individuals went about this, each in their own way:

• Mother Teresa dedicated her life to caring for the dying in Kolkata. 
• Bill Gates focuses on eradicating infectious diseases. 
• Aubrey de Grey dedicates his time to cure aging. 
• Elon Musk is all in on making life multiplanetary.

What would you work on if all your needs were taken care of? What is a worthy goal that we rarely hear about?

I’d also like to know what having all their needs met does for sociopaths. My hypothesis is that it reduces the level of sociopathic behavior.

I was told that my grandma was never a believer during her youth but I remember in her old age she was as religious as most older people in the area. In the younger generations, there was hardly a believer to be found. I remember wondering how the church would survive when our generations become adults.

As a child, I had a feeling that religion brings comfort to people who fear death. Over the years I refined this into the following hypothesis:

As children, our parents/caregivers are the alpha and omega for us. They know everything, are almighty, can solve all our problems – all we need to do is ask/cry. As we grow older and our horizons expand, we realize that our parents are just slightly more advanced humans. Eventually, we reach their level and even surpass them. In our minds though, we still keep this innately built-in position for an “almighty” caregiver. When our parents lose this position in our eyes, we find ourselves “all alone” in this scary world. There are really two ways of dealing with it. Either you become self-relying or you fill the void by finding a replacement caregiver – an almighty someone/something to continue watching over you. Whether you create one yourself or go along with any of the well-established gods depends on your environment and experience.

In old age, we become frail and reliant on others. It feels familiar, almost like we’ve been through this before… It sure would be nice to have almighty parents again. Some people find religion to keep them strong during the long good-bye from this world.

Where else do we often find religion? In prison, in war, during disease – generally in situations when we desperately need someone to come and save us – as our parents used to when they were almighty.

• 

This was originally written as my contribution to the “system for happiness” brainstorming session.

Constant pursuit of goals and desires (dopamine)

Always, always (always!) without exceptions have well-defined desires and goals that fit into 3 categories:

• Short term – things to look forward to today, tomorrow, this week
• Mid-term – things to look forward to within the next 3 weeks
• Long-term – things that are not within reach yet, possibly due to timing or work/effort that needs to be put in before the goal becomes attainable

Every category should have several goals defined at any given time. The short-term category is for goals that you come up with on the spot and go execute on a whim or schedule for later that day (go see a friend, research a new idea, watch a movie, stuff that makes you happy, and is easily within the reach. The more the goal is in the future, the bigger it is. Long-term goals are more likely your desires. They might be stuff like building a home, starting a family, creating a billion-dollar company.

When you go to bed at night, let the last 30 minutes of your brainpower be reserved for your goals. Think about strategies to achieve them, think about new goals worthy of your time. How will you start working on them? When you wake up in the morning, stay in bed for a while (if you can) and keep planning out your goals – let goals be the first thing your fresh mind works on.

After a while, your brain gets rewired to focus on progress. With a full schedule of things to look forward to there is literally no time for worries, fear, negative feelings of any kind. Those, when they creep in, are seen as distractions that must be dealt with swiftly so that you can get back to your plans. Whenever you have some brainpower to spare, your mind will default to planning out and setting goals.

Filter rigorously

Don’t confuse your goals with desires. Desires are like GPS coordinates. Goals are the concrete steps that need to be taken on the way to the final destination.

Define your desires, arrange them by importance, and set your goals so that each brings you closer to the most desired final outcomes.

You don’t have to execute on every idea that you get. You don’t have time to work on everything that your imagination can come up with. Donate your ideas to people who would appreciate them and keep working on those that are most important to you.

Dopamine detox

Chasing dopamine is addictive. A cool new idea is always more exciting/rewarding than working on something that was cool when you started but has since turned into serious work. A constant pursuit of dopamine through ideas can result in a ton of half-finished projects which never get completed. The faster you can come up with cool new ideas and jump between them, the more your brain adapts (gets desensitized) to the constant supply of the resulting dopamine, and the more you will need to keep the supply up.

Any serious project turns into hard work as soon as the novelty wears off. By focusing only on projects that bring pleasure at the present moment you sabotage your upside potential and feed into the dopamine addiction.

In contrast, doing things you don’t enjoy sensitizes your brain to any small quantities of dopamine it can get, to help you cope with the hardship. Thereafter you find more pleasure in little things.

So set your priorities, and plow through hard work on the way to reaching your goals. Structure your path so that the goals are realistic and attainable. That way you will get bursts of dopamine each step of the way.

Be stubborn about your goals but flexible about your methods. Now go get them.