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The Ark of History's avatar

Personality-driven egocracy is the natural result of the repackaging of politics as a pure entertainment product, as described in Neil Postman’s “Amusing Ourselves to Death”

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Nicholas Weininger's avatar

For an example of how an attention-optimizer at the other end of the moral character spectrum from Trump can gain power, consider Volodymyr Zelenskyy, who literally got elected president out of nowhere by playing a guy who gets elected president out of nowhere on TV. If we are doomed to be dominated by attention-optimizers in this generation, we might do well to think about what mechanisms could favor Zelenskyy types over Trump types.

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