It's whether or not a particular type of power you have can help you and yours in adversarial situations.
Can your Power of Teaching help you if a local thug wants you gone? Or, can your Power of Teaching help you when local governor decides to close down and raze your school, to be replaced with a factory? In both cases, someone else is exercising their power to directly or indirectly take away your livelihood (or life) - can your power prevent it, or at least mitigate the blow?
No power is good against all other powers, but some kinds of power are better at this in general. For instance, a wealthy businessman or politician could answer "Yes" to both scenarios above (replacing "school" with closest equivalent) - their money and influence can buy protection and work as a deterrent against the thug, and it can outweigh the influence of the local governor (or just allow for an effective bribe).
> I think beej's teaching power fulfills the second question in a very radical way which is that it is an act of caring for a large audience of strangers and does improve their lives.
Caring about large audience of strangers (or humanity in general) resonates with me, so I'll give this a passing mark here :).
> Power that isn't attached to the desire to reap a direct benefit is a strange thing to witness, but it's power nonetheless!
True. What I am trying to highlight here is that, when people talk about "power", in the sense of seeking more of it, or comparing people by how much of it they have, they usually don't count magnitudes of raw power, but rather how generic and how controllable it is.
This is similar to wealth, btw. Having $1M in cash makes you more wealthy in the immediate term than someone who has $1M in stocks, equipment, etc., as that other person won't get anything near a $1M if they try to convert their assets to cash.
It's whether or not a particular type of power you have can help you and yours in adversarial situations.
Can your Power of Teaching help you if a local thug wants you gone? Or, can your Power of Teaching help you when local governor decides to close down and raze your school, to be replaced with a factory? In both cases, someone else is exercising their power to directly or indirectly take away your livelihood (or life) - can your power prevent it, or at least mitigate the blow?
No power is good against all other powers, but some kinds of power are better at this in general. For instance, a wealthy businessman or politician could answer "Yes" to both scenarios above (replacing "school" with closest equivalent) - their money and influence can buy protection and work as a deterrent against the thug, and it can outweigh the influence of the local governor (or just allow for an effective bribe).
> I think beej's teaching power fulfills the second question in a very radical way which is that it is an act of caring for a large audience of strangers and does improve their lives.
Caring about large audience of strangers (or humanity in general) resonates with me, so I'll give this a passing mark here :).
> Power that isn't attached to the desire to reap a direct benefit is a strange thing to witness, but it's power nonetheless!
True. What I am trying to highlight here is that, when people talk about "power", in the sense of seeking more of it, or comparing people by how much of it they have, they usually don't count magnitudes of raw power, but rather how generic and how controllable it is.
This is similar to wealth, btw. Having $1M in cash makes you more wealthy in the immediate term than someone who has $1M in stocks, equipment, etc., as that other person won't get anything near a $1M if they try to convert their assets to cash.