I think in general people are vastly uncalibrated (in both directions) of the degree, and in some cases even the direction, of positive correlations/positive manifolds of different kinda-normal behavior with extreme behavior.
As an example of something with a superficially opposite moral of your post, I’ve seen multiple people confuse meta-honesty (of the form where someone will cheerfully tell you they’re lying to you/lying to other people) with object-level honesty.
I think the implicit mental motion is that if somebody’s telling you they’re lying to you about X, they’re less likely to lie to you about things other than X. Or if somebody tells you they’re lying to other people, you’re special and they won’t ever lie to you, would they? Or something like “all politicians/CEOs lie, at least this dude’s honest about it.”
Whereas I much more have the view that any lie you see is the tip of the iceberg, and somebody cheerfully telling you how much they lie is probably positively correlated with the number of lies you don’t know about.
I think in general people are vastly uncalibrated (in both directions) of the degree, and in some cases even the direction, of positive correlations/positive manifolds of different kinda-normal behavior with extreme behavior.
As an example of something with a superficially opposite moral of your post, I’ve seen multiple people confuse meta-honesty (of the form where someone will cheerfully tell you they’re lying to you/lying to other people) with object-level honesty.
I think the implicit mental motion is that if somebody’s telling you they’re lying to you about X, they’re less likely to lie to you about things other than X. Or if somebody tells you they’re lying to other people, you’re special and they won’t ever lie to you, would they? Or something like “all politicians/CEOs lie, at least this dude’s honest about it.”
Whereas I much more have the view that any lie you see is the tip of the iceberg, and somebody cheerfully telling you how much they lie is probably positively correlated with the number of lies you don’t know about.
Relatedly, “figuring out whether someone’s a psychopath” is one of the situations where I trust empiricism and ordinary scientific reasoning over vibes, even for social questions.