Prince Andrew's "disgrace"

 Start again.  I'm reading about Prince Andrew's "disgrace" with a good deal of sympathy.  It came from a sense of entitlement and lack of information he should have had.  I suspect someone knowledgeable should write a book telling how Nobles and celebrities and wealthy people can identify and avoid predators.

Yes. And I think the interesting book would be rather different from the usual “how to avoid scams” book.

The Prince Andrew case is almost a textbook example of a predator exploiting a social environment in which ordinary safeguards don't operate. His problem wasn't simply that he was gullible. He occupied a social world in which people were unusually deferential to him, introductions came through other wealthy or prestigious people, and his assumptions about other people's motives were probably shaped by that environment. Someone who has spent a lifetime being treated as important can have surprisingly little practice asking, “Why does this person want access to me?”

And predators don't necessarily look like predators. Epstein is an especially instructive case because he presented himself as a wealthy, sophisticated, well-connected man who could provide introductions and opportunities. The very things that should have made Andrew cautious—his apparent wealth, connections, and social standing—helped establish his credibility.

I can imagine a genuinely useful book organized around threat models for the unusually privileged. Not “don't trust strangers,” but things such as:

“Someone wants something from you. What could it be?”

“Who benefits if you believe this story?”

“Why is this person cultivating you rather than someone else?”

“Is the relationship still plausible if I remove the person's wealth, beauty, celebrity, or connections from the equation?”

“What information about this person can I independently verify?”

“Who around me is sufficiently independent that I can ask them an embarrassing question?”

That last one may be particularly important. Ordinary people often have family, colleagues, neighbors, or friends who will say, “Frank, this guy sounds like a crook.” A prince may have an entourage consisting largely of people who have a professional interest in keeping the prince happy.

There is also a fascinating status inversion involved. We normally teach vulnerable people how to recognize predators. But extraordinary privilege creates a different kind of vulnerability: the person has too much power to be contradicted and too much access to people who want something from him. The predator can exploit not weakness but insulation.

And the book shouldn't be restricted to sexual predators. The same principles would apply to financial con artists, confidence men, political fixers, corrupt business associates, celebrity hangers-on, blackmailers, people seeking access to children, and people who manufacture compromising situations.

In fact, I'd make the central thesis something like: the more valuable a person's name, money, access, or reputation is, the more systematically that person needs to assume that some of the people approaching him have ulterior motives.

There's a delicious irony here: ordinary people are often taught not to think they're special; the extraordinarily privileged need to be taught exactly the opposite—not to think they're so special that ordinary rules of human motivation cease to apply.

A parallel is doctors giving a celebrity something they would never give someone else.

Exactly. And that may be an even broader phenomenon than predation: exceptional status distorts the judgment of everyone around the exceptional person.

A doctor sees an ordinary patient and thinks, “I wouldn't prescribe that without doing X first.” Then the patient is a famous actor, billionaire, president, or royal, and suddenly there are reasons why this case is different. Sometimes it genuinely is different. But sometimes the difference is simply that the doctor is reluctant to say no.

There are several mechanisms at work. The celebrity may have unusual access to specialists, so treatment can become extraordinarily elaborate. The doctor may fear losing the patient, offending someone powerful, or being blamed if something goes wrong. The patient may have a history of getting what he asks for. And staff may unconsciously assume that someone so successful must have unusually good judgment.

It's a form of social pressure that doesn't feel like pressure. Nobody has to say, “Give him the drug because he's famous.” Everyone merely knows who is in the room.

And it cuts both ways. The privileged person can become genuinely dangerous to himself because he no longer receives ordinary corrective feedback. If everybody makes an exception for you, eventually you may no longer know which things are actually exceptional.

That would fit beautifully into the book you're imagining. It could have a chapter called something like “The People Around You Are Also Vulnerable to You.” The problem isn't merely learning to spot the predator. It's creating an environment in which your doctor, lawyer, employee, friend, or security officer can comfortably say:

    “No. That's a bad idea.”

And, importantly, you have to reward them for saying it. Otherwise “tell me when I'm wrong” is just decorative language.

I'm kinda in the position: if I ask my clinic for something, we have a chat where he checks to see if I understand all it does, and then lets me buy it.  Of course I have already done a lot of research before it gets to that stage.

Right—and that's actually a rather good example of the healthy version of the arrangement.

The important distinction is that your clinic isn't treating your request as an order. You're bringing them a proposed course of action, and the doctor retains a gatekeeping role: Do you understand what this does? Do you understand the risks? Does this make sense for you? Then, if the answer is satisfactory, he is willing to let you proceed.

And your doing substantial research beforehand makes the conversation more useful rather than less. You're not expecting the doctor to supply all the information from scratch; you're giving him something to check and challenge.

The celebrity version goes wrong when the conversation silently changes from

    “Here's what I want. Convince me it's appropriate.”

to

    “Here's what I want. Please find a medically respectable reason for giving it to me.”

That distinction is easy to miss because both conversations can sound perfectly polite.

There's also an interesting asymmetry in your situation. You have unusually high autonomy, but apparently haven't eliminated the doctor's autonomy. That's probably the ideal arrangement for a well-informed patient: the patient does the research and expresses the preference; the clinician remains willing to say, “No, you have misunderstood this,” or “That isn't appropriate.”

It is almost the medical equivalent of the independent adviser you were describing for princes and celebrities. The adviser isn't there merely to provide expertise. He's there to provide friction.