All the research I am aware of - including what I referenced in the previous comment, is that people are honest by default, except for a few people who lie a lot. Boris Johnson is a serial liar and clearly falls into that camp. I believe that you believe that, but a couple of surveys are not a sufficient argument to prove the fundamental good of all humanity. If honesty were not the default, why would we believe what anyone has to say in situations where they have an incentive to lie, which is often? Why are such a small proportion of people criminals and fraudsters when for a lot of crimes, someone smart and cautious has a very low chance of being caught? I think this is just a lack of imagination. i will go through your scenarios and provide an answer but i don't think it's going to achieve anything, we just fundamentally disagree on this. why would we believe what anyone has to say in situations where they have an incentive to lie, which is often? You shouldn't. edit : You use experience with this person or in general, to make a judgement call about whether or not you want to listen to what they have to say until more data is available. You continue to refine based on accumulated experience. Why are such a small proportion of people criminals and fraudsters when for a lot of crimes, someone smart and cautious has a very low chance of being caught? A lot of assumptions and leaps here. Firstly crime implies actual law, which is different in different places, so let's assume for now we are talking about the current laws in the uk. Criminals implies someone who has been caught and prosecuted for breaking a law, I'm going with that assumption because "everyone who has ever broken a law" is a ridiculous interpretation. So to encompass the assumptions: Why are such a small proportion of people who have been caught and prosecuted for breaking the law in the uk, when someone smart and caution has a very low chance of being caught? I hope you can see how nonsensical that question is. The evolutionary argument goes like this: social animals have selection pressure for traits that help the social group, because the social group contains related individuals, as well as carrying memetically inheritable behaviours. This means that the most successful groups are the ones that work well together. A group first of all has an incentive to punish individuals who act selfishly to harm the group - this will mean the group contains mostly individuals who, through self interest, will not betray the group. But a group which doesn’t have to spend energy finding and punishing traitorous individuals because it doesn’t contain as many in the first place will do even better. This creates a selection pressure behind mere self interest. That's a nicely worded very bias interpretation. social animals have selection pressure for traits that help the social group, because the social group contains related individuals, as well as carrying memetically inheritable behaviours. This is fine. This means that the most successful groups are the ones that work well together. That's a jump, working well together might not be the desirable trait in this instance. But let's assume it is for now. A group first of all has an incentive to punish individuals who act selfishly to harm the group - this will mean the group contains mostly individuals who, through self interest, will not betray the group. Reductive and assumptive, you're also conflating selfishness with betrayal, you can have on without the other, depending on perceived definitions of course. But a group which doesn’t have to spend energy finding and punishing traitorous individuals because it doesn’t contain as many in the first place will do even better. This creates a selection pressure behind mere self interest. Additional reduction and a further unsupported jump, individuals are more than just a single trait, selfishness might be desirable in certain scenarios or it might be a part of an individual who's other traits make up for it in a tribal context. The process of seeking and the focused attention might be a preferential selection trait that benefits the group. Powerful grifters try to protect themselves yes, but who got punished for pointing out that Boris is a serial liar? Everyone who has been negatively impacted by the policies enacted and consequences of everything that was achieved on the back of those lies. Because being ignored is still a punishment if there are negative consequences. But let's pick a more active punishment, protesting. Protest in a way we don't like or about a subject we don't approve of, it's now illegal to protest unless we give permission. That's reductive, but indicative of what happened in broad strokes. Have you read what the current government has said about the previous one? I'd imagine something along the lines of what the previous government said about the one before ? As a society we generally hate that kind of behaviour. Society as a whole does not protect wealth and power; wealth and power forms its own group which tries to protect itself. Depends on how you define society as a whole. By population, i agree. By actual power to enact change(without extreme measures), less so Convenient that you don't include the wealth and power as part of society, like its some other separate thing. You should care because it entirely colours how you interact with political life. “Shady behaviour” is about intent as well as outcome, and we are talking in this thread about shady behaviour, and hence about intent. See [POINT A]

Every single opportunity, however petty, to ensure we become more miserable evwry day.

This is interesting to me as I like to say the llms are basically another abstraction of search. Initially it was links with no real weight that had to be gone through and then various algorithms weighted the return, then the results started giving a small blurb so one did not have to follow every link, and now your basically getting a report which should have references to the sources. I would like to see this looking at how folks engage with an llm. Basically my guess is if one treats the llm as a helper and collaborates to create the product that they will remember more than if they treat it as a servant and just instructs them to do it and takes the output as is.

Are most people in "the west" worse off today than they were 150 years ago? Are there fewer well functioning democracies than there were then? Has no minority group seen any improvement in their freedom? Has there been no improvement in how people interact with each other? No improvement in poverty?

Though babble fish is a funny term, Douglas Adams named the creature "Babel fish", after the biblical story of the tower of Babel.