In my view, the elephant in the room is central banking. It's hard to know the true value of a company anymore, as the stock market it flooded with trillions of $$$$ (the dow jones is at an all time high). Surely that capital is going to be misallocated based on your criterion; power _starts_ in the hands of those sociopath VC's as the money gets created in startup valuation.
Twitter is valued at more than 30 billion dollars, yet it has never sold a single thing in its life.
Likewise, the OpenSSL folks scrape by trying to find enough capital to not make the entire economy collapse from a buffer overflow.
Haskell folks have trouble finding jobs despite being the most brilliant coders out there (some criterion: # of bugs, quality of tools).
FWIW, someone for whom the Gervais hierarchy is interesting or novel is almost certainly in the Clueless category. The Sociopath reaction to hearing about it is "Goddamn, this is going to result in some hassles when getting people to do what I want. I better discredit or minimize it." The Loser reaction is "Well duh, I'm surprised this is news to anyone. I'm going to go over to my friend's house now."
That's quite an interesting point, and totally agree on the reaction of the Loser and the Clueless.
Concerning the Sociopath, it's not clear to me, because I think some of them manage to themselves to genuinely think they are doing good work, for the good of the whole company. I've seen cases where I couldn't understand if they were really good comedian (or: if I could be so easily fooled :-( ) or if they really believed what they were saying.
These are caricatures to make the point - of course most people aren't going to be twirling their evil-villain mustaches. I'd say that the defining characteristic of MacLeod Sociopaths is that they are self-interested, not that they are evil; if their interests align with yours, they're actually quite good, and most of them actively work to align their interests with a large number of people. Much easier to get things done that way.
The vast majority of MacLeod Sociopaths would just keep silent on discussions about the MacLeod hierarchy, as there's fairly little they could gain from participating in the discussion, and it just makes them look Clueless. That was my initial plan, but I'm a pretty recent Sociopath and it still doesn't quite sit right for me, so I'll indulge my momentary impulse toward Cluelessness.
Twitter is valued at more than 30 billion dollars, yet it has never sold a single thing in its life.
Likewise, the OpenSSL folks scrape by trying to find enough capital to not make the entire economy collapse from a buffer overflow.
Haskell folks have trouble finding jobs despite being the most brilliant coders out there (some criterion: # of bugs, quality of tools).
-- sinetek, who wishes someone would listen