It's in some weird-to-link-to facebook format.
Basically, it's the same as the edge essay, but you should replace the last paragraph with...
Robert Altmeyer's research shows that for a population of authoritarian submissives, authoritarian dominators are a survival necessity. Since those who learn their school lessons are too submissive to guide their own lives, our society is forced to throw huge wads of money at the rare intelligent authoritarian dominants it can find, from derivative start-up founders to sociopathic Fortune 500 CEOs. However, with their attention placed on esteem, their concrete reasoning underdeveloped and their school curriculum poorly absorbed, such leaders aren’t well positioned to create value. They can create some, by imperfectly imitating established models, but can’t build the abstract models needed to innovate seriously. For such innovations, we depend on the few self-actualizers we still get; people who aren’t starving for esteem. People like Aaron Swartz.
Aaron Swartz is dead now. He died surrounded by friends; the wealthy, the powerful and the ‘smart’. He died desperate and effectively alone. A friend of mine, when she was seventeen, was involuntarily incarcerated in a mental hospital. She hadn’t created Reddit, but she had a blog with some readers- punks, fan girls and street kids. They helped her to escape, and to hide until the chase blew over. Aaron didn’t have friends like that. The wealthy, the powerful, and the ‘smart’ tend not to fight back; they learned their lessons well in school.
To be fair, it might be easier to protect someone that the top authorities aren't gunning for. Hiding Aaron Swatz under the federal case blew over wasn't an option.
Michael Vassar has written a provocative response to this year's Edge question: "What *should* we be worried about?". But, I'm confused about his post. My attempt to summarize his point of view follows:
1. People have physiological needs (food, shelter, safety etc.) and social needs (esteem, love, respect etc.).
2. People have mental programs to try to achieve both needs.
3. Modern society has been exceptional at fulfilling people's physiological needs but not very good at fulfilling their social needs.
4. Thus, mental programs that were meant to achieve physiological needs do not develop very well relative to mental programs meant to achieve social needs .
5. Mental programs for achieving physiological needs are more precise and hence harder to hack. Mental programs for social needs are fuzzy and vague and thus more easily hackable.
6. Thus, and because of (4), people are more hackable.
7. This manifests operationally as a few powerful people (the rich, the politicians etc.) hacking the majority into submitting to their will.
8. But even the powerful do not have significantly better mechanisms for precise thought. It is just that their social weirdness (need for power, lack of empathy etc.) allowed them to be the hacker instead of the hacked.
9. Thus for most of our useful innovations, we are forced to rely on the rare people who are capable of precise abstract thought because they worry less about their social needs.
So, I guess Vassar's point is that this pattern is what we should worry about as it systematically suppresses useful innovators.
Would agree about my reading of his short essay?
How solid do you think his argument is?