The personality defect that leads you to become powerful is the same defect that makes you want to become even more powerful.
It's the job of the rest of us to restructure the system to prevent this kind of pathological runaway power accumulation. It means new laws, but also a more enlightened culture.
This is the multi-polar (or Moloch) problem, where (ruthless) individual rationality leads to collective ruin.
Unless the system makes it unprofitable, ruthlessness will always out-perform good behavior. Players who make suboptimal (ethical) decisions will lose over time. Corruption will outperform unless the cost of that corruption outweighs the benefit of it. The root cause isn't a moral failing of the players.
If incentives are aligned so that the winnginest behavior is also the most desirable, it doesn't matter if there are defective or unscrupulous players. We can harness selfish ambition for the collective good.
E.g. CEO compensation and behavior differences between Japan/USA, Potlatch (wealth redistribution) festivals among the Pacific Northwest indigenous.
> Then starting in 1905, Albert Einstein published a series of papers in which he hythesized that the pollen particles were moving because they were being bombarded by invisible molecules in the liquid...At the time, this theory was controversial, because the idea of molecules was not yet widely accepted.
What? The idea of molecules was not widely accepted in 1905?
Correct. Books talk as if atomic theory was accepted from early on in the modern era, but actually through the 19th century many prominent physicists and chemists considered it to be unproven speculation, and one reason is the theory lacked specific sizes and masses for atoms. Einstein's analysis persuaded people because it provided these and furthermore numerical predictions that fit the observed data.
Deterministic chaos is cool. But this is even more special in a sense: for a problem where random initial conditions are almost always chaotic, this is a catalog of periodic orbits—these are all non-chaotic.
It would be cool to pair this with a numerical simulator that shows what happens when you perturb any of them.
EDIT: oh, it already does this, thanks other comments
Apple was at its best and most creative during the long Steveless interregnum. The inmates were running the asylum, so they couldn't ship products or make money. But it definitely seemed weirder and more fun, at least from the outside.
Unsurprisingly this one generated a lot of responses.
My working hypothesis for this question involves colonization, technologically driven scales of time and space, and selection. The essence is totally obvious: either you develop sustainable practices or you go extinct.
Consider a group of people colonizing an area previously uninhabited by humans. When they arrive, they will disrupt the local ecosystem to some extent.
In some cases, the new combined system of ecosystem structure and human culture will settle into an attractor that can support humans for a long time (relative to frequency of colonization). In other cases, it will not, and the human population will die out. (Externally driven parameter changes can also turn a sustainable system into an unsustainable one.)
With a low enough colonization rate, most active communities will be operating sustainably.
Over time, technology increases the rate of spread of humanity. Cultures with more advanced technology increasingly spread into existing settlements as well as taking over existing land.
But the basic process continues: some systems last; some do not. The ones that last longer are the ones with sustainable practices.
This process is now operating at a global scale. Either we get sustainable, or things get bad.
Some people have concluded that the easier path is to colonize other planets.
Exact same story here. Same age kids (well, one just turned 5). I wonder how many CDs are being sold just because of parents trying to protect their kids from device addiction.
It's the job of the rest of us to restructure the system to prevent this kind of pathological runaway power accumulation. It means new laws, but also a more enlightened culture.