Comment by godelski

  > I think there is a brain decay that occurs as people become more rich and powerful.

My prevailing hypothesis is that as you advance in leadership roles there's a natural tendency to have the ego grow. After all, you have evidence for your ego: you make important decisions and you've risen up in whatever social structure. And I think there's a natural bias to surround yourself with yesmen. They create less friction, so naturally we want that. And it's hard to distinguish yesmen from people who genuinely believe in the same things as you. But the yesmen are able to hide this way, even by being "disagreeable" in just the right way (which makes it hard to distinguish). With the more proficient yesmen themselves rising to the top too.

So I think it's important for leaders to surround themselves with a distribution of opinions. I think in order to make good decisions we need friction. We need frustration. We need people to tell us we're wrong when we're wrong. We also need people to tell us we're wrong even when we're right, because the challenge of the idea forces us to think deeper. But I think the real challenge is implementing this correctly. It needs most "advisors" to be acting honestly, independently, and in good faith. It's hard to cultivate that and I think to do so you need to let people trash talk you, even egregiously. Because a misinterpretation of punishing someone can be seen interpreted as retaliation (even if completely fair), and upsetting the whole balance. Context can easily be lost

I suspect it's an unstable equilibrium, making it really difficult to maintain.