Nadia Asparouhova: evaluation

Transcript context

…Once the charismatic founder dies of a movement, is a movement basically handicapped in some way? Maybe it'll still be a thing, but it's never going to reach the heights it could have reached if that main guy had been around? I think there are just different shapes and classifications of different types of communities here. I'm just thinking of different types of open source projects where there’s not one model that fits perfectly for all of them. I think there are some communities like effective altruism where the community has grown so much that if all their leaders were to, knock on wood, disappear tomorrow the movement would still keep going. There are enough true believers, even within the next order of that community, that it would just continue to grow. Whereas maybe certain smaller or more nascent communities that are much more oriented around a charismatic founder are just a different type where if you lose that leader, then suddenly the whole thing falls apart because they're much more like cults or religions. I don't think it makes one better or worse. The right way to do it is probably Bitcoin, where you have a charismatic leader for life because that leader can't go away and can't ever die, but you still have the North Stars. It is funny. A lot of prophets have this property where you're not really sure what they believed in so people with different temperaments can project their own preferences onto him. Take somebody like Jesus. You can be a super left winger and believe Jesus stood for everything you believe in and you can be a super right winger and believe the same.…

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