Schools for Leaders, their need and their conspicuous absence
Schools are places of learning and it begins in the form of general knowledge in all or most subjects of importance like language, math, science, history, etc. Later in the realm of higher education students must make a choice which field of study they would like to devote the rest of their education to; they must decide, based on their preference and aptitude, which field and which sub-field they would like to make a career of.
Now, if one does a survey of higher learning, there's a degree for every conceivable subject the acquisition of which makes a student qualified and, fingers crossed, highly competent in the given subject. This has the benefit of making such qualified people into experts in their respective fields and thus become people we can put our trust in.
There are schools for doctors, engineers, lawyers, etc and they do exactly what I described in the previous paragraph and we, those who need their services, go to them with full confidence in their abilities to solve our problems. In short we have an ingrained, fully justified, belief that to solve a particular problem we need to consult an expert in that field and to produce such experts we need schools and education programs in those fields.
One area where there's a sore need for experts is in governance. I'm vaguely aware that there are courses in leadership and management available out there but there are no degree level courses for presidents and prime ministers or senators or governors. This may be naive thinking on my part but if people want a doctor, a qualified and experienced one at that, for their aches and pains, i.e. they look for experts in the problems that concern them, why is it that they don't impose the same exacting standards for their leaders (presidents, senators, governors, etc)?
Now, if one does a survey of higher learning, there's a degree for every conceivable subject the acquisition of which makes a student qualified and, fingers crossed, highly competent in the given subject. This has the benefit of making such qualified people into experts in their respective fields and thus become people we can put our trust in.
There are schools for doctors, engineers, lawyers, etc and they do exactly what I described in the previous paragraph and we, those who need their services, go to them with full confidence in their abilities to solve our problems. In short we have an ingrained, fully justified, belief that to solve a particular problem we need to consult an expert in that field and to produce such experts we need schools and education programs in those fields.
One area where there's a sore need for experts is in governance. I'm vaguely aware that there are courses in leadership and management available out there but there are no degree level courses for presidents and prime ministers or senators or governors. This may be naive thinking on my part but if people want a doctor, a qualified and experienced one at that, for their aches and pains, i.e. they look for experts in the problems that concern them, why is it that they don't impose the same exacting standards for their leaders (presidents, senators, governors, etc)?
Comments (68)
No, schools are places to keep children occupied so their parents can work, if any learning takes place it's a bonus, and the subjects are those thought most appropriate to a colonial ideal which are sorely in need of updating, not anything to do with importance, otherwise they would be computing, economics, household maintenance, and organisational skills at the very least.
That tangential rant aside...
Quoting TheMadFool
Because people are not looking, in a leader, for someone who knows how to govern. Knowing how to govern would involve meeting the needs of the population in the long term (or something like that). People are, mostly, looking for someone to meet their needs in the timescale of their lifetime. And that's only if you're lucky enough to get people who think about it at all. The incumbent president almost always gets a second term - why? - because he looks like a president. Policies can go hang, personality - forget it, he can be barely able to read - who cares. He looks right. "Oh look - he's the guy off the telly..."
Put potential leaders through governance school (even assuming that school would actually teach them anything about governance), and they'll be soundly beaten in the next election by the latest winner of Pop Idol, or a Disney cartoon character.
I'd first think about why people need a leader at all. What is it about the nature of people in a society which prevents them from simply going about their day-to-day lives without any leader at all?
A popular narrative is that when there are disagreements about shared resources someone has to have the final say, but we could also argue that people could just fight it out/vote/reach consensus by themselves with no great loss. Many perfectly functioning groups in fields as disparate as business and the arts are leaderless and function perfectly well. So I don't think we can use this need with any certainty.
Another is administrative, someone has to take charge for the efficient progress of a group. But again, there's actually limited support for this theory too. Groups which contain more independent actors actually tend (in some tests) to be more efficient at complex tasks than groups which are under the yoke of a strong leader. I know it's pretty clichéd business-speak, but the reason they're all put on endless team working courses is because it's an efficient goal (not saying anything about whether the courses actually achieve this goal). So I don't think there's much mileage there either.
My favourite theory of leadership actually comes from a paleoanthropologist studying neanderthals. In changing environments it pays to be innovative, to derive new solution to problems, but innovation costs energy in brain terms, so an efficient community only needs a few innovators. The rest are better off being conservative (small 'c') as it's far more efficient to rely on tradition to tell you what to do rather than work it all out from scratch.
In times of stability, however, innovation isn't needed (and can actually be problem-causing).
So a good leader is an innovator, but they themselves might be a good or a bad choice for a community depending on the stability of the environment. Stable communities don't really need leaders at all.
This loops back to what I said about requiring qualified experts for any and all jobs. I mean governing a state or a country isn't something an unskilled person person can handle. I'm not to sure about it but guiding a nation in the modern world with its diverse peoples requires great wisdom and wisdom is exactly what most people lack, making them unfit to be heard so we can forget the idea of referenda and plebiscites achieving anything worthwhile.
In addition, one among many things is that the general populace has to feed themselves or their families which is in itself a difficult task for many, precluding the possibility of them being well-informed enough on many crucial issues that are on the nation's agenda. To allow the masses to make decisions would be a grave error. Of course this doesn't mean we ignore popular opinion but you did mention good candidates for leaders losing to pop idols and Disney cartoon characters and that really puts a dent in the reliability of the masses to make right choices; this vindicates my call for good leaders and institutions where they may be trained .
This belief is deeply ingrained but not at all justified.
In fact, it is even a dangerous belief. As a matter of fact, we must never "trust" service providers.
The reason why we may carefully believe a "ruling", i.e. a conclusion, a "professional opinion", is entirely contained in the fact that the justifying paperwork is verifiable, and that we have carried out the procedures for verification.
In that sense, it does not matter in the least who exactly has produced the justifying paperwork. On the contrary, if it matters who has said it, then what he has said, cannot possibly matter.
It is exactly when we trust these people that they will abuse our trust. It is the trust itself in the deceptive statement, i.e. that a=b, that fuels the growth in the total amount of deception (b-a)².
This approach to trust service providers, fully explains the distinction between the intellectual have-nots and the intellectual haves. The have-nots believe a proposition because of who says it (personal "authority"). The haves believe a proposition because its justification is verifiable, i.e. how it was said.
The belief in personal authority of experts simply turns you into an intellectual have-not. Seriously, in God I trust and in nothing else.
Indeed. Now is definitely not a stable time.
Quoting TheMadFool
Well, no. You're stuck on two grounds
1. The people doing the teaching and the curriculum itself would be drawn from that very mass we've just concluded can't be trusted. You'd have somehow ensure that the institution was started and maintained by the very quality of person you're saying is lacking as a leader. If we can't find them to make leaders out of, then what makes you think we can find any to do the teaching?
2. Even if you found some people, to install them as either leaders or teachers in an institution requires the consent of the masses. The masses are simply more powerful than any group which might oppose them (hence the election of cartoon characters). So whomever you chose to be teachers you'd be faced either with a rebellion in the school to replace your choice with a more 'popular' one, or a rebellion in government to replace the school-taught options with ones from outside that institution.
Bullshit, it's just about believing a person's claim to have more experience in a field (ie having accumulated more data than you) because trusting people to a degree is more efficient and certainly a lot nicer than your paranoid delusion that the whole Western world is run by Satan.
Quoting alcontali
And who told you about God?
Not really.
In fact, not at all. Trust is exactly what fuels deception.
Quoting Trustless systems
The more there are who people trust, and the more blindly they trust, the more dangerous the environment becomes to all people. It is exactly because they trust it, that it turns on them. If they had not trusted it so much, it would not have.
For example, if people did not trust the mainstream media so much, these media would not be incentivized to lie so much. In that sense, it is the audience of the mainstream media who corrupt them with their trust. In another example, it is by trusting the Federal Reserve that its users corrupt the US Dollar. Trust corrupts the trusted party. More trust means more corruption.
The idea of cryptocurrency technology is to eliminate the corruption caused by trust. In trustless technology, it is because we do not need to trust other parties that we can trust them. Trustless technology is incredibly efficient at achieving this goal. Furthermore, people are happy to use it in order to transact with other people. Hence, it allows people to be nice to each other.
Therefore, a trustless approach is more efficient and nicer than corrupting other people with trust.
Quoting Isaac
Quoting Wikipedia on the concept of Fitrah
Simply because the idea of leaders coming from a school and then assuming leadership roles in a Democracy or a Republic goes totally against the idea of a representative democracy.
And of course there indeed are schools in nearly every nation where one part of the leaders of the nation all come from: that is the higher military schools where captains and majors are educated to become field officers. Not your Officer Schools or institutions like West Point, but the advance schools where from all the generals come from. The system dates back to the Austrian and Preussian militaries and the idea of there being a General Staff.
(Command and General Staff College, Fort Leavenworth US. Notice how old these students in the picture below are compared to university students. In this picture (from 2013) it is highly likely that there are many future generals of the US Army, though likely the South Korean officer in front won't be)
The example of the military shows that a true leadership school works only for very hierarchial organizations where higher level leaders are chosen by a formal process.
Yep - just expanding on your point here, in the US these types of leadership schools are present at basically all levels including the enlisted. For instance, once you make Sergeant (E-5) you're sent off to a leadership course and ditto when you hit climb up to E-7 when you're now supervising sergeants. Leadership education is pretty big in the US military.
(The Commandant of the USMC with the Sergeant Major of the Marine Corps interviewing a wounded Marine sergeant. Not a coincidence that the two are together.)
Of course hierarchial systems are prone to become too unyielding: the divide to officers / noncommissioned officers and the enlisted shouldn't become a barrier. If the most capable person isn't used because he or she is in the wrong formal category for the job, there is something wrong with the system.
Just how well the whole system of officers/sergeants/enlisted men works actually tells extremely much of the society itself. Poor performance of a military can be traced back to problems in the society itself, especially if the officers come from one rigid class/caste and the enlisted from another. Militaries are a reflection of the society that produces them. We may often the say that military was lead poorly, but rarely is it about just having poor generals in charge. (A dictator with poor judgement is another thing.)
The simple fact is that societies, where authoritarian leadership is typical and where subordinates have no say and are assumed just to follow orders, simply don't work effectively. It creates class division and weakens social cohesion. It prevents innovation. In wartime this can be literally observed: if the enlisted have not been taught to think and use their own initiative, once the officer is out, they are often paralyzed and cannot work as an effective team.
Perhaps in academic circles too much is importance is given to the social control aspect of these hierarchies, along the lines of Michel Foucault, and the simple pragmatic reasoning just why things like the military are hierarchial with centralized leadership are sidelined.
And btw. the military is a great topic for this thread when we are talking about political leadership, because they have the weapons. That many countries have this "merry go round" of going from democratic leadership to military rule, which is then followed by democratic leadership while in other countries the armed forces can stay firmly in their role in preparing for outside threats is interesting. Here the issue isn't so much about leadership, but there being the ability to lead the sometimes quite dysfunctional institutions and organizations.
(When civil-military relations aren't the best:)
I haven't read Foucault... but I do have over 5 years active duty military experience in the US (I am in the military.)
The effective function of the US military in peace time - obviously there's the national security part - but aside from that it brings people and families into the middle class (on the enlisted side.) You'll see Dave Ramsey posters at whatever duty station you're at and I can tell you that there'll always be lectures and classes on financial readiness no matter where you are. The US military absolutely has a vested interest in its soldiers being financially stable and this often a very pertinent issue because you have often young people from lower class backgrounds getting decent, stable paychecks for the first time in their lives. There's much more that could be said about this: The GI bill encouraging college attendance and the VA home loan giving someone the option to purchase a home with 0% down to name a couple.
On the other hand, as soldiers get married they do get dependent on this system and leaving would result in a pay cut so that's a definite reason how you get soldiers to stay in for the full 20 years plus the option of a pension and this is especially true once kids enter into the picture.
I'd be interested to read what academics have said about the military and if you've read that material I'd be interested in hearing it.
It works exactly the other way around.
According to the Dunning-Kruger study, intelligence is defined as:
Knowing when you do not know.
Intelligence has nothing to do with what people do in college, i.e. memorizing phone books filled with trivia.
What happens when you give someone a certificate which says that he knows, i.e. a degree, while he has merely read some trivia on the matter and has absolutely no experience in the field? That person will think that he knows while in fact, he does not. In that sense, a degree increases that person's arrogance and reduces his intelligence.
While a track record of successfully solving problems is a good reason to believe that people are competent, a college degree is the opposite: it is an excellent reason to distrust their ability to do the job.
Who do you go to when you get sick?
Quoting alcontali
Oh, I see. There are many obstacles between those who seek expertise and those who possess expertise, one of them being trust. In my humble opinion, there are two types of trust at work here viz.
1. Trust in the knowledge of an expert
2 Trust that the expert is concerned about your welfare
I don't know how society functions in terms of these two kinds of trust but if I'm to be realistic the primary concern for us would be type 2 trust which can mess up type 1 trust which can be extremely problematic. I mean if an expert has no interest in your welfare then his knowledge/expertise is of no value to you for it can be withheld or misused.
To the extent that I'm aware, this problem of trust hasn't escaped our notice; the courts can probably justify this for me. The "solution" to this problem of trust that I'm aware of is to make experts value their expertise and knowledge above all else and this can be done by placing a premium on knowledge itself; for instance we consult not just any doctor but the best among them and the same applies to other areas of knowledge. If people adopt this policy, and they probably have, experts would strive to be their best and also, more importantly, do their best i.e. we can guarantee our own welfare by prizing knowledge and expertise. Also, doing this would align the expert's own welfare with that of those who seek his/her expertise; after all, if s/he doesn't perform well in solving our problems s/he would lose credibility.Quoting Isaac
I see but how do you explain the existence of experts (in other fields)? Maybe the answer to your question lies there. The way you put it, experts would be nonexistent and yet there are experts in every possible field and teachers too. Why should leadership in re learning and teaching be any different?
It isn't the case that everyone is incapable of learning or teaching leadership. There'll always be some with adequate knowledge to impart lessons on being a good leader and there'll always be some who have an interest in and an aptitude for leadership. All we have to do is connect these two kinds of people. The masses can't be trusted, not because all of them are incapable of becoming leaders or lack knowledge on how to become leaders, but because most of them don't have the time or the resources to invest on issues that matter. I think the same applies to other fields, hence the existence of experts in them.
Quoting ssu
Read below:
Quoting Isaac
Quoting alcontali
Quoting alcontali
Dunning-Kruger effect: "the miscalibration of the incompetent stems from an error about the self, whereas the miscalibration of the highly competent stems from an error about others."
Dunning-Kruger Effect
Sorry, I can't post pictures. If you look at the graph there are two peaks - one at the extreme left consisting of the incompetent and one at the right consisting of the highly competent. Doesn't this indicate that the competent are also very confident of themselves, oddly, as much as the incompetent are.
Also, it's a bit vague as to what exactly they mean by expertise. Could it mean a degree?
I go to a doctor.
However, depending on what is at stake, I do not just blindly trust him. Here in SE Asia, their services are affordable enough to ask for a second opinion. Furthermore, you can search online for people with similar medical conditions and double-check their experience. I certainly trust the narrative by other patients a lot better than what one, arbitrary doctor says. This is just a simplistic description of how you could start building a verification procedure for what medical doctors tell you (when it really matters ...). The problem is obviously harder than that.
The medical industry is badly afflicted with corruption and misplaced trust. The ongoing opioids crisis is just one example of things that can go wrong.
Quoting TheMadFool
You can reasonably assume that the expert is first and foremost concerned about his own welfare.
That is not necessarily a problem as long as you are aware of that. I do not believe in their hypocritical "oath" either. The more a service provider talks about ethics, the more likely his industry is fraught with moral issues.
Quoting TheMadFool
Exactly.
His expertise may also be ideologically tainted.
For example, some doctors will refuse to prescribe Indian generics, even though they are equivalent and ten times cheaper, because they do not want to miss out on the incentives offered by the pharmaceutical oligarchy. His own interests obviously come before yours:
Quoting Financial Times on the morality of the pharma oligarchy
The next step is to convince doctors to make their patients believe that any alternative to that antibiotic mixture is "highly unsuitable" for the patient. I just safely assume that these people are lying all the time.
Quoting TheMadFool
What is "the best" in this context?
Other industries are not necessarily better.
For example, universities just want to saddle you and/or your children with exorbitant student loans in exchange for a worthless degree that will guarantee a successful coffee-slinging career at Starbucks.
I do not believe that there is a simple solution, especially when the incentives are stacked against you. The entire system is purposely built like that, with a view on sucking you dry. It is a minefield. Lots of people knew back then that it was going to run out of control, and now it has.
In some fields, the right and the wrong answers are matters that people, in general want to put to some purpose. People allow/support experts in engineering, for example, because they want bridges to stay up. Experts are the ones which make that happen. With leaders, you have two confounding factors. One is that the leader's decision is only partly responsible for the outcome (external factors affect things like well-being of the population), and secondly there is no clear 'right' way to do many of the things leaders need to do. Together, these mean that people (the masses) do not have a particulary high cognitive dissonance to face if they believe a particular leader (some pop idol contestant) will deliver the results they desire.
Get a pop idol to build you a bridge, it's quite hard to convince yourself it wasn't their fault when it falls down. Get a pop idol to implement an economic policy, it really easy to convince yourself (when the economy doesn't do so well) that it was global factors, the previous government, the media, the weather etc.
This is one of those smart moves the US have ever done, which likely has had a huge effect. 16 million Americans served in WW2 and not to care about them after the war would have been a political, social and even in the long term an economic disaster.
After WW2 my country (Finland) didn't have the resources and just gave the young veterans small parts of land to cultivate or a meager payment. Giving the young veterans a free education would have been a great idea, but I don't think there would have been the resources back then. The country had to handle also 420 000 people (over every tenth person those days) that had been evacuated from areas annexed by the Soviet Union and give them a new homes, which amazingly was done. That the US armed forces is a way for many Americans to get a degree, which otherwise would be out of touch for them, tells actually a lot about the US.
In fact, many war-ridden countries would desperately need an equivalent of a GI bill to truly put the conflicts and insurgencies into the past. To dismantle an armed forces and just leave huge number of people (men) that know only how to use weapons unemployed is a really stupid idea, but of which there is the wonderful example of Paul Bremer's decree of dismantling the Iraqi Army and not care about the consequences. What possibly could go wrong with 400 000 military men being made unemployed and be let alone to their own devices in a country that you are btw. occupying?
(At first, they participated in a demonstration, then something else:)
Quoting BitconnectCarlos
I don't know of classics in this field, but usually the field would be called Civil-Military relations. There the military is viewed from another viewpoint than from the military/war fighting viewpoint (as in military history). In some countries this is quite painful if there has been military junta and literally many of the academic people have been jailed and/or shot by the military. You can guess how they view afterwards the military. Another thing is that understanding the military without seeing it from inside can be puzzling and hence the term of Civil-Military culture gap is used often in the US. Only 0,5% of Americans serve in the military and only 22 million (of those living) have served in the military and that is a small minority. Those who served under the Draft are starting to be quite old.
Of course having universal conscription or not has an impact on these issues. In Finland roughly 75% of all males still do their military service, where everybody starts with basic training, then some are picked into the NCO school and from there some are picked into the Reserve officer shool. After this conscription is over then the best of the reservists are picked for advance positions. This in turn creates a great example of the meritocracy of our society. You can imagine how different the US Army would be if 75% of the boys from your school class would have served in the army. It was this before the all volunteer force. At basic training you meet variety of people, people who you would never otherwise work with. Later in your the war-time position your peers are likely to in same type of work as you are. For example, the majority of male university professors in Finland have either been or are reserve officers. Males who are in managerial positions are likely reserve officers or NCOs. In politics, there are only few male Members of Parliament that haven't done their military service and of those, the majority are reserve officers or NCOs.
It would be the same as if you would divide the people to those that have an university level degree and those that don't and then start looking at how is the political and business elite made by these two groups. The school drop-out billionaires are literally a few. The educational system is a hierarchial system also.
Yes, I agree. The extreme left is hugely incompetent and doesn't understand things. :grin:
Dunning-Kruger effect is surely real, but also there is a genuine distrust of institutionalized leadership. If only those that have passed a formal school or test can take political power, then that school itself holds a lot of power. And in a representative democracy the representatives should really represent the people.
Anybody should understand that implementing Plato's ideal society where people are divided to workers, soldiers and guardian king philosophers, those that decide just where a person will be have a lot of power. And those calling themselves 'Guarding Philosopher Kings' might not care a god-damn thing about philosophy, but are there only for the power and the wealth. Anybody opposing them will be put to be the lowest class worker there is.
Remember that 'rule of the best' is called Aristocracy. How did that work in the end in real life?
How leaders should be educated is a very interesting topic with I have thought about before, which is why I join this dialectic.
I found it odd when thinking about the incompetence of many politicians as to why this is the case, for surely it would be the so that if an individual was chosen to govern the state they would be confirmed as able through some rigorous method. The system of popular vote which forms the backbone of democracy has the potential to fail on its own due to the fact that people will vote for those they like and not those who are good rulers. To circumvent that I thought of adding an additional kind of test besides the judgement of the many, which I was inspired by from the Tang Dynasty scholars examination. The idea being that politicians should be judged also by a kind of test of knowledge and ability that incorporates elements of modern psychology too to determine the ideal way of measuring these features within our current limitations and to tell as to what the individuals personality is truly like and if it is fit for being in a certain position in government. Of course the institution that would create such a test and the maintaining of the quality of it, making sure that whoever runs the process does not become corrupt, are things which only the processes nigh infinitely complex of history can make arise. We must be a thoughtful public which is educated too about wether nonsense is being said by an individual. If we teach people how to be more rational through the greater understanding of the self and make it a place in education then the likelihood of things such as the test I mention above and a more rational society to survive will increase despite human nature.
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It seems, kind sir/madam, that according to your most valuable post on the Dunning-Kruger effect all of us are under the spell of one or more cognitive biases, giving the issue of trust a whole new and uglier twist: we can't trust our own selves so we can forget about trusting anyone else and I'm afraid most of us, including myself, fall in the category of incompetent and yet very confident of themselves.
It's odd then that the people who need help the most are also least likely to seek it and this description, in my opinion, fits the majority.
Just curious but if all of us have such deep trust issues, why doesn't society collapse? There seems to be some kind of checks and balances in place that prevent mutual distrust from spiralling out of control. I'm not sure about other fields but as far as doctors are concerned they're under legal obligation to disclose all relevant info pertaining to your illness - pros and cons of tests and treatment - to you and that seems adequate to trust them.
And you trust the medical websites and search engines to provide you with a statistically viable sample? Why?
Quoting alcontali
You've tested them personally have you? Your own lab facitilies and access to controlled trials, remarkable.
Quoting alcontali
Assuming they're lying doesn't get you anywhere because it doesn't provide you with the alternative. Presuming everyone is lying just tells you anything you haven't directly tested yourself might be false. Great. Now what? You don't have the facilities to test everything yourself, so what are you going to do now? Ask God? Last I heard his advice on the correct antibiotic was a bit thin on the ground.
Quoting Aristocles
If the one who ought to govern simply cannot, then power lies with other people. And do notice that representative democracy doesn't mean that all positions of power are given to representatives of the people. Behind the media focus there are allways the career professional civil servants or people like the military generals. They have gone through the hierarchial system, which hopefully trains and picks the most able people into leadership positions.
One just has to think about absolute monarchies, where power is hereditary. The hereditary nature is used to prevent power struggles that may rip the society otherwise apart, but of course this may backfire in that not only the new sovereign can be mediocre, but truly incapable of acting in any kind leadership role. Yet this doesn't allways lead to problems. If there is an able court, an effective regime under the sovereign and no real problems, a monarchy with an incapacitated sovereign can easily chug along. And this ability has lead to the modern ceremonial monarchies.
(From first to the present prime minister of one country out of 16 (at present). One can be a ceremonial head-of-state, but even that gives power to a person assuming you have something important you want to say.)
Quoting Aristocles
Sure. But usually we can trust that the people are rational and have sound judgement. When the society and the economy performs OK and the people aren't hopeless or extremely divided, democracy works. Yet if there are huge social problems, deep divides and a lack of social cohesion, democracy can easily turn into ugly mob rule.
These days I've read about the Spanish Civil War and it really is difficult to understand how polarized a nation can become. I think when people hate so much others that they start digging up the bones of the dead to desecrate them, something abnormally pathological has gripped the people. But it happened in Spain and lately during the Yugoslav civil War, so in our lifetime too.
Quoting Aristocles
And respect your fellow citizens, even if they disagree with you.
I've always thought that the biggest problem is that we adapt far too easily to bad things. If politicians should all of the sudden start shooting each other, use thugs and mobsters and politics would become literally a battlefield, usually many would just shake their heads and wonder how it all came to this, but take it as the new normal. And those who say we should respect each other and uphold the laws would be declared to be naive and out of touch.
Quoting Dr. Peter Rost
Trust in doctors has plummeted by 75%. What can be done?
Quoting Doctors are becoming pawns of a system
Quoting Nassim Nicholas Taleb, Antifragile: Things That Gain From Disorder
As far as I am concerned, it is obvious that there are very good reasons for a healthy distrust of doctors, the pharma oligarchy, and the entire medical industry. Furthermore, what information I trust, is my own choice, and is something that I decide on a case-by-case basis.
Well, this is paradoxical: you should like good leaders since a good leader, by definition, is one who's dedicated to your welfare and that's a primary concern for you. Isn't it?
Where has the system of popular vote failed if those we like and vote for may not necessarily be good leaders? What I see here is a conundrum, specific to democracy: democracy is a government founded on the premise of mistrust. We can't have some folks in control of the government for more than a 4 to 5 years because we don't trust each other. Democracy's premise is that no one can resist the twin temptations of power and wealth.
Given that the idea of voting and democracy is based on a negative view of our own nature, it seems almost certain that we'll have a dim view of our leaders - they are people after all - and this fact makes it permissible to vote for those who we like instead of "good leaders" because good leaders don't exist as democracy's central premise indicates.
Iii didn't ask you why you distrusted doctors, I asked you why you trusted these other sources. If western pharmaceutical companies are just out to make money by bumping up prices, then why aren't the Indian ones just out to make money by cutting corners on quality? If the medical journals can't be trusted to print the truth becasue of their biases and their sponsors, then why can those sources you just cited who have biases and revenue streams to consider too?
I'll give you a clue - it's because what they're saying fits a pre-conceived narrative you prefer.
Either your trust no-one and do all first hand research on everything yourself or you just pick who to trust.
Quoting alcontali
Really, a minute ago what information we trust was up for public debate when it was everyone else's choices being critiqued.
I can accept the notion that good leaders do not really exist in an eternal state, therefore when interpreting the following statement take good as meaning as good as possible for leadership.
On your statement that we should like good leaders because they are dedicated to our welfare, are you implying that individuals can identify intuitively if a candidate for some kind of office is good for it? People can easily be deluded and not realise that one man is concerned about welfare and another is not. Of course I think the best criticism here is that I would need evidence for this statement.
Where is the paperwork for the first product and where is it for the second product? What products exactly are you comparing? If you think there is something wrong with the paperwork for either product, then staple a clarifying note to the document that is in doubt.
As I have said before, there may not even be a standardized tool to compare pharmaceutical products. Therefore, there may not exist software that properly embodies the proper procedure to verify the products' paperwork. Hence, an adequate procedure will have to be discovered on a case-by-case basis.
For mathematical theorems and proofs, there exists a standardized procedure. Encode the theorem and its proof in the formal language of Coq, Isabelle, or Lean, and then run the verification function. Unlike for mathematics, not all types of paperwork can be mechanically verified. Furthermore, there may not even be a complete tool for that purpose.
Its called Military School like Westpoint. The modern US Military is nothing like the military of the 19th century. Not many people have what it takes to be in the modern US Military.
Right, so despite having given some pseudo-technical garbage showing its not possible to personally verify either of the rival claims (which is what I'd already said), you've still not answered the first question. You have some condition, you need to take some medication, how do you decide which?
We've just established you can't decide mechanically, you can't gather the raw data yourself, God (the only person you claim to trust) doesn't have a prescription service. Personally, I decide to trust someone on the basis of how I feel about them. You apparently don't, so what do you do. Toss a coin?
I'm saying it doesn't matter whether we elect Pop Idols, Super Models, or Action Stars or not. They're either as bad as or as good as any possible good leader, the main aim of democracy being to roadblock the good leader from metamorphosing into a Dear Leader.
I see now, in a vague way, why people prefer democracy; it's got a sound foundation, one built on a true understanding of human nature. Any other system of government has conditions that favor Dear Leaders and that we know is only a matter of when and not if without democracy.
I wonder though how this fits into what I was saying about needing schools for leaders. Is it possible to make someone immune to the temptations of power and wealth, a necessity if anyone is to qualify as a good leader? I guess it's too much to ask.
What would there be wrong with e.g. Coq?
Quoting Mission statement of the Coq proof assistant
It is an excellent tool to verify mathematical theorems with their proof. It is clearly the benchmark for mechanical verifiability of claims. Other tools or procedures can merely aspire to attain that level of fitness for purpose. As I have mentioned before, you cannot expect tools for verifying pharmaceutical paperwork to be at that level.
Quoting Isaac
As I have said already, it depends on what exactly it is about. Let's pick an arbitrary example from the drugs.com database: Methimazole.
Generic Name: methimazole (me THIM a zole)
Brand Name: Tapazole, Northyx
Let's pick an arbitrary Indian generic alternative: "Methimez from Sun contains Methimazole."
Next step: Figure out prices for Tapazole and/or Northyx in North America.
Next step: Check what Methimez costs in India and other countries with a relatively free market in pharmaceuticals.
Quoting IBEF record for Sun Pharmaceuticals in Uttar Pradesh, India
Now, that is already quite a reasonable starting point for the Indian generic, Methimez, and its manufacturer, Sun Pharmaceuticals in Uttar Pradesh.
One cheap and easy procedure would be to double check in how many different countries their Methimez product has been certified for local distribution. Each of these certifications will have a laboratory reports available. Many countries put their reports online. Some countries do not test by themselves but just reuse the test reports produced by other countries. Then, you have independent laboratories doing their own tests. And so on.
What makes you believe that the paperwork for Tapazole and/or Northyx would indicate that these branded alternatives would be safer to use than Methimez (the Indian generic)? As I have said already, we would need to dig up all the paperwork, scrutinize it thoroughly, and discover the proper procedure to verify it, while doing that. It is a lot of work.
Furthermore, I am much more interested in dealing with mathematical theorems than with this kind of stuff. I would only investigate all that paperwork, if I really needed to use the product. I don't. I do not intend to use this otherwise arbitrarily-chosen product, "Methimez", because I do not need it.
Lenin and Hitler come to mind in recent political history. Their goals were wrong, but boy they could lead.
It's a tool for mathematical theorms. Hence it is pseudo-technical to suggest it could apply outside of mathematics. Unless someone in a technical field has made that connection.
Quoting alcontali
Whom you'd have to trust to be providing you with the correct information.
Quoting alcontali
Whom you'd have to trust to be providing you with the correct information.
Quoting alcontali
Where you'd have to trust the certification system.
Quoting alcontali
Whose processes and integrity you'd have to take on trust.
Quoting alcontali
Nothing. I don't trust the manufacturer of any medicine these days. Every pharmaceutical company has maximising profits for its shareholders as their primary motivation. That's not conspiracy theory, its written in their legal documents. So every product they produce will be the one which maximises their profits. If it also cures you, that's little more than a coincidence.
What I objected to is your demented anti-western bias making out that Indian companies are going to be any better than the Western ones. If Western companies are bumping up prices by some illicit means, then the Indian company is probably cutting prices by some equally illicit means. Screwing the consumer to make money is not an activity confined to Western markets.
Quoting alcontali
We cannot do that without trust. You're acting as if we can eliminate empirical data somehow and somehow derive knowledge without it. Somewhere along the line we'd have to include empirical data the gathering of which we were not personally involved in.
All this of course is assuming we trust our own faculties more than others even if we could somehow do all the experiments ourselves. I for one would rather trust what an experienced lab technician said happened than what I think I saw.
I was talking about tools to verify the paperwork of a claim. The ideal is something like Coq, but it only works for mathematical paperwork. Furthermore, you need to follow a particular procedure to make it work. First and foremost, you must encode the mathematical claim in the tool's language.
Concerning pharmaceutical claims, you also end up with all kinds of paperwork, and therefore, with a procedure to verify that paperwork. No matter how good the tool for verifying such paperwork, it will never attain the level of accuracy of something like Coq. One reason already, is that the paperwork will be about experiment test reports. These test reports, if conducted correctly, can only be held against other test reports, assuming that they even exist; unless you want to do the tests again. The data will be of falsificationist nature. That is not as solid as data about reasoning from first principles. That alone will be already a problem.
We were discussing how to verify and/or compare information. As I have mentioned already, it will not be that simple to do, and we will have to discover the details of a workable procedure for that purpose.
Quoting Isaac
drugs.com is a database with mostly definitions (well, the part that I have used). Definitions can be corroborated with definitions from other databases. For example: "Tapazole, Northyx, and Methimez are said to contain Methimazole." That is some kind of master metadata that is not really in doubt.
Another piece of information is what Methimazole is used for:
Quoting drugs.com on methimazole
That is a witness deposition. There will be other knowledge databases asserting this information. It may be possible to maybe even get hold of databases with the clinical-trial information that backs this claim. It depends on whether you believe that this information is in doubt. It certainly could be. That wouldn't be the first time anyway.
Quoting Isaac
All of that is still backed by experimental test reports. I do not need to trust the certification. I corroborate their reports with the reports from other certification parties.
Quoting Isaac
I have never said that they would be "better". In my experience, however, they certainly tend to be cheaper.
Quoting Isaac
Bumping up the price in the North American market is a known process. The pharma oligarchy simply manages to dramatically restrict competition and hence gauge prices. The oligarchy is tremendously being helped by the FDA through regulatory capture.
Quoting Wikipedia on regulatory capture
Quoting Project On Government Oversight on Regulatory Capture of FDA
The reason why the North American pharma oligarchy can strip their customers clean is because it is them who make the rules. The Indian generics vendors cannot do that. Therefore, they cannot extort a regulatory-capture premium from their customers.
Quoting Isaac
Yes, possibly, depending on the procedure that you wish to implement. Redoing the experiment testing may be prohibitively expensive. But then again, there is no way to know without looking at existing test reports. As I have said before, we would have to discover the details of the procedure to follow, "as we are going". Furthermore, there could be other parties interested in a report on redoing the experimental testing. Maybe they would help paying for it. Maybe crowdfunding amongst patients would be possible. It is not possible to know what to do without first getting your feet wet.
Quoting Isaac
The problem is not the experienced lab technician. That kind of fraud is rarely perpetrated at such a low level. It is more about C-level executives doctoring the reports by cooking their conclusions. That is, for example, what happened at Purdue Pharma, when they cooked the results of the clinical-trial testing and triggered the opioid crisis in the USA:
Quoting Wikipedia on Purdue Pharma
Quoting USA/HRSA administration on opioid crisis
The problem is really not about the small guy or about lab technicians. The problem is about how the pharma oligarchy manages to write the laws and then contort their application, while killing an increasingly large number of their customers in the process.
Yeah, that's the whole point. You can't escape from forming a simple gut belief about whether some data is worth doubting. You talk about databases and multiple corroboration, but that's exactly the procedure used to justify the experts you earlier decried. Their knowledge bases is accesed and tested multiple times by multiple individuals and their status as an expert is maintained by their ability to provide functioning solutions each time (or at least mostly). An expert engineer has built multiple bridges for multiple clients. His expertise in bridge-building has been corroborated in exactly the same way you're now suggesting we can do with databases.
Quoting alcontali
Yes, but to advocate them, you need to trust that they are at least not worse, ie that no corners have been cut in order to secure that lower price. How can you possibly know that?
Quoting alcontali
Lowering the price by using lower quality materials, quality and safety checks, and worse manufacturing techniques is also a known process, so I don't see where this gets you so far as choosing between the two is concerned.
Quoting alcontali
I'm not talking about where the problem with the pharmaceutical industry lies, I'm in almost complete agreement with you about that. I'm talking about where the problem with any alternative might lie. Companies producing cheap knock-offs are motivated by exactly the same greed as the big companies. They have exactly the same ability to extort and manipulate laws (albeit more likely with bribes than lobbying), they have exactly the same c-level management).
It's not your assessment of the problem I take issue with, it's your assessment of the solution.
The cost of producing drugs is not in manufacturing:
Quoting BBC News on cost of manufacturing in pharma
The manufacturing cost per unit produced in pharma is very much like for software, books, music, and movies: very low to nonexistent.
Therefore, it is not even worth saving money on the production process. The prices do not reflect manufacturing cost but other things:
Quoting BBC News on pharma manufacturing cost
And, of course, there is also another notorious expense in "Big Pharma":
Quoting BBC News on Big Pharma bribery
As I have said previously, it is absolutely not sound to trust the advice of doctors and chemists on big-ticket pharmaceutical drugs without pushing their advice through a thorough verification procedure. Seriously, your doctor simply gets paid by the pharma oligarchy to lie to you. Why would anybody tell the truth if his very livelihood depends on furthering lies?
Quoting Isaac
If the alternative vendor produces exactly the same molecule/product as Big Pharma, i.e. a "generic", but a lot cheaper, and unless you have an excellent reason to believe that there are manufacturing quality problems -- rather unlikely -- then it always makes sense to buy the generic alternative.
The problem of fitness for purpose is in fact the same in both cases. So, that should not factor into the decision to pick the one product or the other.
Quoting Isaac
No, they don't.
For example, Sun Pharma in Uttar Pradesh does not have the same stronghold on the American FDA as e.g. Merck or Johnson & Johnson. It simply does not work like that.
Quoting Isaac
The solution that I would apply is to investigate related paperwork and then to proceed by purchasing online an Asian generic version of the drug, typically from the Indian subcontinent (India, Pakistan, Bangladesh) which seem to specialize in keeping afloat an alternative production of generics.
I do not have the nitty-gritty details of the verification procedure for their related paperwork because I have never had to carry out such replacement. Doctors in SE Asia always tend to prescribe the generic version anyway.
What's more, in SE Asia, even the branded pharma costs substantially less anyway. I guess that this is Big Pharma's way of adjusting to competition in a market where they do not have a stronghold on the regulator and where they cannot restrict market access to the generic competition. So, whenever I buy branded pharma, I typically pay less than a 10th of the price in North America anyway. I am quite sure that Big Pharma still makes lots of profit on that much reduced price.
That was just an example. Maybe the cost is in R&D (maybe not, if you trust the BBC journalism), paying for regulatory checks, whatever. The point is the companies in India are not charities. If they're offering the thing cheaper it's because they're not paying for something the more expensive companies are paying for. To conclude that they're worth going for, you need to know what that something is and be sure you can do without it. To know that you have to trust somebody who is an expert in the field telling you what that thing is.
Quoting alcontali
I'm not limiting this to America.
Quoting alcontali
I wouldn't trust some random Internet sale with my health. That would be borderline lunacy. How do I even know the pill contains anything but sugar? How do I know they haven't just fullied a generic-branded packet with leftover pills from some less well-selling bulk purchase. How do I know that new medication will still be properly funded? How do I know adverse reactions will be properly accounted? That's a crap solution, and some hand-waivy reference to 'paperwork' won't wash.
Whatever that may be, it is not the manufacturing cost of the chemical molecule that we are talking about, because in the greater light of things, that cost is considered to be peanuts.
Quoting Isaac
What is needed, is some kind of assurance that Sun Pharma is indeed shipping methimazole in their Methimez product. According to my preliminary investigation, there is absolutely no reason to believe that the problem, "Does Methimez contain methimazole?" is worse or better than when you buy Tapazole or Northyx.
Furthermore, I really do not need the opinion on that matter from an expert liar paid by Big Pharma.
Again, why would these expert liars even consider telling you the truth when their income depends on diligently lying to you?
Unless you convincingly show me otherwise, as far as I am concerned, I would conclude that Methimez is a legitimate substitute for Tapazole and Northyx, and proceed accordingly.
Quoting Isaac
If you do not trust internet sales, then you should not use them. A can of beans ordered online from Amazon could indeed contain rat poison. How do you know it doesn't? Huh? Huh?
Furthermore, unlike your neighbourhood chemist chain, foreign internet platforms are way less likely to collude with Big Pharma. Again, you insist on putting your trust in people known and documented to make a living from lying to you, while distrusting other people who obviously have less of an incentive and less of an opportunity to manipulate you.
Quoting Isaac
How do you even know that Tapazole or Northyx contains anything but sugar? You have not given any evidence why this problem would be better or worse for Methimez.
Quoting Isaac
The side effects of the methimazole molecule are the same for all brands under which name it is being shipped. You are mixing problems here. You are just black mouthing products like Methimez for no good reason at all. I would buy Methimez and not Tapazole or Northyx, because I do not see any benefit for me to subsidize the scheming liars and manipulators of the Big Pharma oligarchy.
They led but they weren't good leaders. Perhaps leader isn't such a good word to use here.
Quoting TheMadFool
Maybe what we need to consider is people who are used to dealing in power, who come from a cultural background where power is something they’ve learned to deal with, grown up with. It does sound elitist, but maybe that’s what real leaders are, instead of a corporal gaining power and wielding it without experience.
Quoting TheMadFool
Do you think that Churchill was a leader during the war? Or Roosevelt?
Quoting god must be atheist
I don’t think they fit the definition of leader. If you rule through fear then you’re hardly leading.
I think leader is still the right word to go by.
How is that relevant to what I said? Churchill and Roosevelt were formally installed as leaders by way of elections. Does that alone make them leaders? I don't know but surely the people expected much from them to have them voted into office.
You asked if there was anyone that fitted the description of a leader that we knew of. I'm suggesting Churchill and Roosevelt fit that discription during the war years.
Maybe.
Well then we can learn from them and use whatever traits they possessed as part of our model of the "perfect" leader which we can ask future leaders to emulate.
You keep getting sidetracked into your evidence against big pharma and missing the point.
I completely agree with you that Big Pharma do not have my welfare in mind, that they will, and do, happily lie to me to sell their products which may or may not have any beneficial effect on my health. OK. So can we stop getting sidetracked into your rants about how bad they are. I haven't taken any form of medicine at all (not even paracetamol) fro the last decade, despite some close shaves. I don't trust them because they have demonstrated that they are untrustworthy. This is not an issue on which we disagree.
The issues I'm raising here are twofold.
1. In order to learn this stuff about Big Pharma, about which we both agree, you had to trust someone on the basis of their purported expertise. You did not personally find all this out, you listened to experts - whether they we investigative journalists, drug database system administrators, certification authorities, testing labs - you had to decide that these people were likely to be telling you the truth. You say you used corroboration, but that is exactly the method used to assess all experts at a base level.
2. In trusting the Asian alternative companies you are presuming, without warrant, that simply because they are not engaged in the deceitful activities of the Big Pharma, they are not engaged in any unsavoury activities at all. Again, this is either an act of trust, or it is monumentally naive. There are all sorts of ways in which these companies might make money at someone's expense, even if the actual molecule they supply is the same one Big Pharma do. That is not the only effect a company has in conducting it's affairs.
a. Which company has a better record on workers rights and environmental protection?
b. What other ingredients, besides the active one, are allowed into the pill which the FDA may have banned?
c. Are the company paying any money towards researching new better drugs?
d. Do the company have a proper system for reporting side effects so that future patients can be better informed?
e. Who checks the medicines to ensure they contain the ingredient they claim and can those people be bribed/coerced?
You cannot personally verify any of these things. To do so you must decide to trust experts. You need not make this decision blindly, but you absolutely must do so in at least partial uncertainty. That's what trust is - not blind faith, but a judgement in a state of partial uncertainty.
The question was one about trust in experts, not about which medication to take for hyperthyroidism
I guess that this a point on which we may disagree somehow.
We (quite) often need other people to discover knowledge for us -- e.g. to what medical condition do my symptoms likely correspond? -- but we do not necessarily need other people to verify the paperwork for such newly-discovered knowledge. Since the paperwork for formal knowledge is mechanically verifiable, there is no need for an expert to verify it. A machine can do that too; better and cheaper. Hence, my outspoken preference for formal knowledge.
I do not recognize "experts" in disciplines for which the paperwork cannot (conceivably) be verified mechanically. At best, their bet is as good as everyone else's. On average, it is much worse, because they tend to get paid to lie to you.
We have discussed an example from the pharma industry. Large areas in medical knowledge are epistemically part of science, and therefore, their paperwork can (conceivably) be verified mechanically. In that respect, it is a relatively safe subject in which I do recognize the existence of experts, even though for a plethora of different reasons, a substantial and noticeable proportion of the medical practitioners will end up being rather dangerous than helpful.
So, I occasionally use experts to discover new knowledge but only if the paperwork for such new knowledge can (conceivably) be verified mechanically. Otherwise, I do not trust these people.
Quoting Isaac
I did not extend any form of blanket "trust" to Sun Pharma from Uttar Pradesh. I only said, after a short preliminary investigation into the matter, that I do not see any reason to distrust their Methimez (generic) product any more than the Tapazole or Northyx (Big pharma) alternatives.
Quoting Isaac
Well, no, I can always verify the paperwork for expert claims, because I do not recognize experts in disciplines of which the paperwork cannot (conceivably) be verified mechanically. I share Nassim Taleb's opinion that that kind of people are just "empty suits". Their claims are simply not knowledge, in an epistemic understanding, i.e. what they proclaim are not objectively justified beliefs. If the beliefs in a professional field are objectively justified, then their paperwork can also (conceivably) be verified mechanically. If that is not the case, then there simply are no experts in that particular field.
Hence, I never trust experts to verify the claims' paperwork. I only trust mechanical procedures for that purpose. I only use experts to discover candidate claims, i.e. hypotheses, and to produce the paperwork, which later on, will need to be verified mechanically (well, ideally).
http://www.summerhillschool.co.uk
You're not providing, in this binomial assessment, any means of dealing with uncertainty. There's knowledge who's paperwork can be verified, we trust that and proceed as if it were the case. Then there's knowledge who's paperwork cannot be verified mechanically (say much of psychology, my own area of expertise). We do not trust that.
But what if you needed, nonetheless, to make a decision in a field who's paperwork cannot be verified mechanically? Let's say economics. The paperwork for its knowledge claims cannot be verified mechanically, but what grounds have you for claiming this binomially. Maybe its paperwork is nearly verifiable, or nearer to verifiable than other systems. Maybe it's probabilistically a better guess. If you're forced into making some kind of decision either way, you'd be best going with the more verifiable system, even if that paperwork is messy and flawed, better than no paperwork at all.
Quoting alcontali
No, you actually said you would choose them over the other, meaning that you either consider them better or, for some reason not yet clear, you consider money to be the only factor (they're cheaper so I'll go with them).
Quoting alcontali
Again, as above, you are treating this, for some reason, as if the only options were mechanically verifiable paperwork (trustworthy) and not mechanically verifiable paperwork (not trustworthy). I don't know why you're excluding partially verifiable paperwork (slightly more trustworthy than not, and a goid option if you've no better choice).
Quoting alcontali
In 'ideally' here you're ignoring one crucial pragmatic factor which is time. We can posit any algorithm we like and claim it to result in the 'right' answer, but if we cannot complete that algorithm in the time by which the answer is required then its pointless, no matter how 'right' it ends up being.
Often 'experts' are just a shortcut to knowledge which you yourself could verify but not in the space of time you have by which you need to make an informed decision.
Yes!
I consider economics to be an ideology. We already knew that because the Soviet Union had their own completely different brand of economics. If it is possible to have two completely different takes on the same subject, without ending up in glaring contradictions, then the subject is ideological.
Stiglitz and Krugman, both Nobel prize laureates for economics got completely slagged off by the bitcoin community for their incompetent views on bitcoin. Nassim Taleb has also wrecked a Nobel prize laureate for economics:
Quoting Wikipedia, Taleb on Myron Scholes
I do not consider Stiglitz, Krugman, or Scholes to be experts. I have already dismissed and disregarded their advice, and done much better because of it. The following is what Nassim Taleb says on the matter:
Quoting Nassim Taleb on being stubborn and disagreeable
Taleb explains this idea at length in The most intolerant wins. The dictatorship of the small minority. Ultimately, society is shaped by naysayers, i.e. people who do not listen. Hence, the message is clear: don't listen. Disbelieve it for the sheer sake of disbelieving it. Why? Because in God I trust and in nothing else.
Quoting Isaac
Yeah, but a large number of messages in a commercial or even societal setting are meant to mislead you, especially, if they already know that you will not be verifying anything. It is by trusting these messages that you make it more profitable for the liars to lie even harder. You are simply turning your own environment into a living hell by doing that.
So no answer to the actual question then?
Quoting unenlightened
Quoting George Orwell in Politics and the English language
Democracy is a scam. The true nature of the word alone, says it all. So, they want a better school to better train professional scammers, as if there aren't enough of those already. Well, yeah, go for it. Why not?
There is, sad to say, a lot of truth in your statement. Schools have been described as management of the masses, regulation of the labor pool, keeping youth off the streets where they might interfere with the gears of capitalism, etc. Two caveats:
a) the children of the elite receive excellent educations, as do some others who will fill positions serving the interests of the elite
b) "school" is less important now than it was in the past (this itself is a dated observation) because 24/7 mass media now shapes people into the kinds of consumers that are needed.
One reason is that "leadership" is sort of ineffable. Can you describe for us what traits and features the perfect (or even half-ways tolerable) leader would have? What kind of leader(s) do you want?
I'm not sure to what extent "leaders" are born and to what extent they are made. Then there are their followers. Followers have something to do with the behavior of leaders. So do "stakeholders". Every corporation and rich SOB that makes a big donation to a political campaign has a hook in the elected official. Hitler was financed; he didn't just run things based on his innate charm.
My guess is that certain inborn traits, coupled with playground experiences, life in families, classroom experiences, class-linked experiences, and so on go into making leaders. Then too, different circumstances require different kinds of leaders. A country thrust into a war (like, by being invaded) needs one type of leader; a country suffering from severe economic depression needs another kind of leader, perhaps.
I wish we knew how to get the kinds of leader we need.
You cannot have a scam without there being legitimacy. One cannot be deceived unless there is a truth of the matter.
I still agree with George Orwell. The term "democracy" is a meaningless word primarily used to fuel an entire agenda of dishonesty. There is indeed a reason why it has no precise definition. It needs to be flexible enough to be continuously re-purposed for evermore nefarious ends.
Well, I'm not so sure. The children of the elite certainly end up with sufficient paperwork to get into whatever institutions they desire. I'm not sure I'd call that an excellent education. I doubt any of them could fix a tap. Mind you, they only need to know how to get the 'staff' to do it.
Quoting Bitter Crank
Interesting. Schools of the future could just be rooms with a guard on the door, Facebook on the big screen and chairs bolted to the floor. Next they have isolation rooms as punishments... Oh no wait, they already have.
Why not ever less nefarious ends? I applaud your suspicion, but not your despair. For the word to be repurposed and betrayed it must have a meaning and a purpose.
No, but they didn't get into power by killing their competitors, like Stalin and Hitler did.
That truly is a big issue. A big dividing issue.
People who don't have a problem to kill their own peers to gain power are problematic people, especially in a World where democracies, republics and nations having constitutions are the norm. You see, once a leader does that the whole social interaction changes. They cannot stop looking over their shoulders. They cannot close that Pandora's box once they have opened it.
Anyway, democracy is a simply a simple safety valve which usually works. That's all there really is to it: a safety valve.
Yes indeed, defining a good leader is the first hurdle and the first things that come to mind is they should be immune to the temptations of power and wealth - the two most difficult attractions to resist in the Disneyland of politics.
A safety valve put in place to offset our innate nature to accumulate wealth and wield power.
For wealth, I'm not so sure. Not all of those hungry for power desire wealth and riches, especially those who have an ideological push and/or see themselves being on a mission.
Then there are the one's who obviously do like gold.
And the gold that they get by wielding power.