Month: April 2017

If Humble People Make the Best Leaders, Why Do We Fall for Charismatic Narcissists?

Source: If Humble People Make the Best Leaders, Why Do We Fall for Charismatic Narcissists?

The research is clear: when we choose humble, unassuming people as our leaders, the world around us becomes a better place.

it’s not that humble leaders can’t ever be charismatic. Researchers agree that we could classify charismatic leaders as “negative” or “positive” by their orientation toward pursuing their self-interested goals versus those of their groups. These two sides of charismatic leadership have also been called personalized and socialized charisma. Although the socialized charismatic leader has the aura of a hero, it is counteracted with low authoritarianism and a genuine interest in the collective welfare. In contrast, the personalized charismatic leader’s perceived heroism is coupled with high authoritarianism and high narcissism. It is when followers are confused and disoriented that they are more likely to form personalized relationships with a charismatic leader. Socialized relationships, on the other hand, are established by followers with a clear set of values who view the charismatic leader as a means to achieve collective action.

It’s not that charismatic and narcissistic people can’t ever make good leaders. … The problem is that we select negative charismatic leaders much more frequently than in the limited situations where the risk they represent might pay off.

While this may sound hopeless, there is another way of looking at it. Essentially, we have the leaders we deserve. As we collectively select and construct our leaders to satisfy our own needs and desires, we can choose humility or socialized charisma over narcissism.

Source: If Humble People Make the Best Leaders, Why Do We Fall for Charismatic Narcissists?

Why America’s Richest Cities Are Pulling Away From All the Others – The Atlantic

They are not just the places where the most ambitious and talented people want to be—they are where such people feel they need to be.

This dynamic is cumulative and self-reinforcing. … Moreover, the advantages that accrue to superstar cities are substantially more enduring than those that accrue to superstar talent.

I tracked housing prices in the more than 11,000 zip codes across America for which the real-estate firm Zillow has data. There are just 160 zip codes where the median home price was $1 million or more; 80 percent of them were located in the New York, Los Angeles, and San Francisco metro areas. All but four of the 28 zip codes where median home values were more than $2 million were located in or around these three cities: 11 in the San Francisco Bay Area, seven in LA, and six in New York. In 2016, 57 percent of homes in the Bay Area were valued at more than a million dollars, up from less than 20 percent of them in 2012. Meanwhile, 56 percent of the zip codes for which data are available have median home values of less than $200,000, and roughly 15 percent have median home values of less than $100,000.

How Many Houses Could the Price of One SoHo Apartment Buy in the Rest of the Country?

Despite these high land and housing prices, the conventional wisdom is that workers tend to be better off financially in superstar cities and tech hubs, which offer higher wages and salaries. … A different picture emerges when taking the higher housing costs of superstar cities into account.

After Paying For Housing, How Much Money on Average Do Workers Have Left Over?

The clustering force is at once the main engine of economic growth and the biggest driver of inequality. The concentration of talent and economic activity in fewer and fewer places not only divides the world’s cities into winners and losers, but ensures that the winner cities will become unaffordable for all but the wealthy. This unrelenting cycle is great news for wealthy landlords and homeowners, but bad news for almost everyone else.

Source: Why America’s Richest Cities Are Pulling Away From All the Others – The Atlantic

Why Luke Skywalker Was Wrong to Use the Force – The Atlantic

Machines can now see into the future, and we ignore them at our peril.

in our galaxy, technology is the Force. Increasingly, it’s computers that train our intuition. It’s computers that help us perceive beyond our senses.

You can avoid bad futures because you can actually see them. … It’s an entirely new kind of vision. We don’t often think of computation that way, as a visual aid, because it’s somewhat difficult to describe what it helps us see. Where telescopes and microscopes show us the very far and the very small, the computer shows us the very much, all at once. It makes time available to the mind and eye. Computation, in that sense, is a kind of compacting of imagination: It helps us generate and explore a zillion scenarios and digest them into a representation that’s easy to play around with.

This is going to start happening everywhere. We’ll use computers to explore possible futures, and over time we’ll learn how to see those futures for ourselves, almost to feel them, to the point where it’ll seem to those not in the know that we have command of an arcane force.

Source: Why Luke Skywalker Was Wrong to Use the Force – The Atlantic

The Regrettable Decline of Space Utopias | Culture & Politics | Current Affairs

Why is it only the libertarians who fantasize about space these days?

our species hasn’t been around terribly long, in the grand scheme of things, and if we’re honest with ourselves, most of us haven’t exactly been doing our utmost to better the world we live in.

my general feeling is that our fondness for dystopian narratives is a pretty nasty indulgence, especially for those of us who live mostly comfortable lives, far-removed from the visceral realities of human suffering. … Immersing ourselves in narratives where 99% of the characters are totally selfish also engrains a kind of fashionable faux-cynicism that feels worldly, but is in fact simply lazy. I say faux-cynicism because I don’t believe that most people who profess to be pessimists truly believe that humanity is doomed, at least not in their lifetimes, or in their particular geographic purviews … telling yourself that everything is awful, and nothing can be fixed, is a marvelously expedient way to absolve yourself of personal responsibility. There is, happily, nothing about an apocalyptic worldview that obligates you to give up any of the comforts and conveniences that have accrued to you as a consequence of global injustice; and you get to feel superior to all those tender fools who still believe that a kinder world is possible! It’s a very satisfying form of moral escapism.

We have come to view utopian narratives as inherently hokey, and preachy. But dystopias are, of course, their own form of preaching; they are preaching another hypothesis about humanity, which, due to moody lighting and oblique dialogue, has an entirely undeserved appearance of profundity, and the illusory farsightedness of a self-fulfilling prophecy.

Make utopias popular again. Fictional narratives are a huge factor in shaping our expectations of what is possible.

Source: The Regrettable Decline of Space Utopias | Culture & Politics | Current Affairs by Brianna Rennix

How Music Evolved: Billboard’s Hot 100, 1958 – 2016

Every top 5 song, from 1958 – 2016, so we can stop arguing about when music was still good

Source: How Music Evolved: Billboard’s Hot 100, 1958 – 2016

 

Yet another amazing “visual essay” by The Pudding and Polygraph:

Some ideas are too complex to discuss with prose alone. We use code, animation, and data visualization to explore topics that, otherwise, might get lost in a 10,000-word story.