You are not directly vouching for anyone here, but as a general point I’d like to argue that friendship is a poor predictor of ethical behavior.
It may be tempting to consider positive social experiences and friendship as evidence that someone behaves generally ethically and with high standards, but when dealing with more capable people, it’s not. Maintaining ethical behavior and building trust in low-stakes settings like friendship with few temptations to try and exploit for profit is trivially easy. Especially if you are socially skilled and capable of higher level power games and manipulation. The cutthroat moves are saved exclusively for situations where the profits are large enough.
(And a skilled manipulator will rarely engage in obviously cutthroat moves anyways, because the cost of being outed as an unethical cutthroat is high enough to outweight the potential profit of most situations..)
Because you’re someone with influence in the community, anyone with a manipulative bent and any smarts will absolutely give you their best impression. You have more value as an ally, and probably provide few opportunities for direct profit otherwise.
Following this tangent, I would say that judging other people is a skill. Some people are better at it, some are worse, and the Dunning–Kruger effect very likely applies. Learning this skill is both explicit (what to notice) and implicit (you get burned—you learn what to fear).
Examples of explicit lessons:
Notice how the person treats people other than you—very likely, they will treat you the same in the future, when they no longer need to impress you. Similarly, if the person tells you to treat other people badly, in the future they will probably do the same to you, or tell other people to do it.
Sometimes there are good excuses for seemingly bad behavior, but you should make a factual list of what the person actually did (not what they said; not what other people did) and seriously consider the hypothesis that this is what they actually are, and everything else is just bullshit you want to believe.
I also think that manipulators are often repetitive and use relatively simple strategies. (No disrespect meant here; a flawless execution of a simple strategy is a powerful weapon.) For example, they ask you what is the most important thing you want to achieve in your life, and later they keep saying “if you want {the thing you said}, you have to {do what I want now}”. These strategies are probably taught somewhere; they also copy them from each other; and some natural talents may reinvent them on their own.
If you want to extract resources from people (money, work, etc.), it is often a numbers game. You do not need a 100% success rate. It is much easier to have a quick way to preselect vulnerable victims, then do something with a 10% success rate in the preselected set, and then approach 10 victims.
The idea of someone who behaves ethically for years, and then stabs in the back at the optimal moment, sounds unlikely to me. How would a person achieve such high skill, if they never practice it? It seems more likely to me that someone would practice unethical behavior in low-stakes situations, and when they get reliably good, they increase the stakes (perhaps suddenly). To avoid bad reputation, there are two basic strategies: either keep regularly moving to new places and meeting new people who don’t know you and don’t know anyone who knows you; or only choose victims you can successfully silence.
You are not directly vouching for anyone here, but as a general point I’d like to argue that friendship is a poor predictor of ethical behavior.
It may be tempting to consider positive social experiences and friendship as evidence that someone behaves generally ethically and with high standards, but when dealing with more capable people, it’s not. Maintaining ethical behavior and building trust in low-stakes settings like friendship with few temptations to try and exploit for profit is trivially easy. Especially if you are socially skilled and capable of higher level power games and manipulation. The cutthroat moves are saved exclusively for situations where the profits are large enough.
(And a skilled manipulator will rarely engage in obviously cutthroat moves anyways, because the cost of being outed as an unethical cutthroat is high enough to outweight the potential profit of most situations..)
Because you’re someone with influence in the community, anyone with a manipulative bent and any smarts will absolutely give you their best impression. You have more value as an ally, and probably provide few opportunities for direct profit otherwise.
Following this tangent, I would say that judging other people is a skill. Some people are better at it, some are worse, and the Dunning–Kruger effect very likely applies. Learning this skill is both explicit (what to notice) and implicit (you get burned—you learn what to fear).
Examples of explicit lessons:
Notice how the person treats people other than you—very likely, they will treat you the same in the future, when they no longer need to impress you. Similarly, if the person tells you to treat other people badly, in the future they will probably do the same to you, or tell other people to do it.
Sometimes there are good excuses for seemingly bad behavior, but you should make a factual list of what the person actually did (not what they said; not what other people did) and seriously consider the hypothesis that this is what they actually are, and everything else is just bullshit you want to believe.
I also think that manipulators are often repetitive and use relatively simple strategies. (No disrespect meant here; a flawless execution of a simple strategy is a powerful weapon.) For example, they ask you what is the most important thing you want to achieve in your life, and later they keep saying “if you want {the thing you said}, you have to {do what I want now}”. These strategies are probably taught somewhere; they also copy them from each other; and some natural talents may reinvent them on their own.
If you want to extract resources from people (money, work, etc.), it is often a numbers game. You do not need a 100% success rate. It is much easier to have a quick way to preselect vulnerable victims, then do something with a 10% success rate in the preselected set, and then approach 10 victims.
The idea of someone who behaves ethically for years, and then stabs in the back at the optimal moment, sounds unlikely to me. How would a person achieve such high skill, if they never practice it? It seems more likely to me that someone would practice unethical behavior in low-stakes situations, and when they get reliably good, they increase the stakes (perhaps suddenly). To avoid bad reputation, there are two basic strategies: either keep regularly moving to new places and meeting new people who don’t know you and don’t know anyone who knows you; or only choose victims you can successfully silence.