Wealthy people are more reliable because on average reliability is one of the inputs to wealth building
Wealthy people are less reliable because they can afford to blow things off if at any given moment their BATNA exceeds their agreement (lower switching costs as a fraction of their wealth + less concern about future problems from defecting)
Hard to predict which dominates...
I frame it like this because rationalists are, globally speaking, quite wealthy. And I expect that people are about as trustworthy as they’ve found they need to be. If you are wealthy, and excessively trustful, your excess trust will get arbitraged down. People are quite proud of not falling for ingroup outgroup dynamics. But ingroups are also well kept gardens, where trust doesn’t get exploited and thus high trust value chains can get constructed. Later, once fully fleshed out and understood, such chains can be exported to lower trust environments via formal rules. But their formation is fragile.
Wealthy people are more reliable because on average reliability is one of the inputs to wealth building
Wealthy people are less reliable because they can afford to blow things off if at any given moment their BATNA exceeds their agreement (lower switching costs as a fraction of their wealth + less concern about future problems from defecting)
Hard to predict which dominates...
I frame it like this because rationalists are, globally speaking, quite wealthy. And I expect that people are about as trustworthy as they’ve found they need to be. If you are wealthy, and excessively trustful, your excess trust will get arbitraged down. People are quite proud of not falling for ingroup outgroup dynamics. But ingroups are also well kept gardens, where trust doesn’t get exploited and thus high trust value chains can get constructed. Later, once fully fleshed out and understood, such chains can be exported to lower trust environments via formal rules. But their formation is fragile.