The Disappointing People Trilemma

I find myself leaning on this thought process when reasoning about people in power. I'm writing it up here as a clean statement.

The Disappointing People Trilemma:

Suppose that you repeatedly observe, and are disappointed by, the actions of people holding a certain office, serially over time or broadly across a type of office. One of the following must be true:

1. Through some very unlucky stroke of chance, all the people you observe just happen to be bad actors
2. There is a filter selecting the people who fill the office, and this filter ensures that only bad actors will fill the office
3. Your expectations are based on missing or false information and your disappointment is not warranted

Corollary to The Disappointing People Trilemma:

Suppose that you repeatedly observe, and are disappointed by, the actions of people holding a certain office, serially over time or broadly across a type of office. Then you should focus your efforts on either

1. Understanding and eliminating the filters; or
2. Amending your own understanding of the issue to ensure your assumptions are good

I think the proof of the Trilemma is immediate (modulo some words about weighting acknowledging it could actually be some of both). If there is a solution to a problem that presents itself to reasonable people, and 10 people in a row have declined to use this solution, you can conclude with high confidence that either the "sample' of 10 people were selected to be unreasonable, or the solution itself was less reasonable than you had imagined.

This applies to, for example, university presidents. If the last 8 university presidents have disappointed you, it follows that either the Board of Trustees is filtering out all the good ones, OR, many of the presidents have been fine, and your expectations are off. By the corollary, you should not waste any efforts haranguing or personally attacking the current president for disappointing you. If the Board is filtering out the good ones, (or perhaps the presidents who self-select when applying for the office are not the good ones) the next one will be no better - you need to focus your attention to the filter.