Why are some people honest?

and why am I?

I was raised Mormon, so the better question is — why did I stay honest after I left?

Both tough questions. I don’t really know. I have a few theories.

The way I see it, is that most of the time, people are what they say they are, they way they behave, and they way they look. Even relatively dishonest people. The output changes when incentives do: if people have an incentive to distort perceptions, then they do it.

The thing is that “incentives” aren’t this univesally applicable magic word that causes things to make sense even when they don’t. People are playing different games, and have different brains, which give them different incentives. Some people, knowing that reality is naturally chaotic and they can’t always guarantee they will get away with a distortion, commit themselves to honesty even when it costs them, as a signal that they can be trusted even when things are going south.

And I am playing the long game, though explicitly stating this is of little information.

There’s also a kind of muted arrogance and pragmatism that comes with being honest. The fact of the matter is that some people are simply more capable than others, and the longer people interact with others, the better they are at assessing that. As such, if somebody thinks they are capable, then it makes sense for them to play the long game.

If you are a capable person and you play the long game, all you have to do is manage reality. Show up. Put in the work. Invest if things look good, exit if things look badly. On the other hand, if you are a capable person playing the short game, you are making the game harder: you pretend to show up, pretend to put in the work, pretend to invest, and only are sincere about exiting. That’s exhausting.

It’s easy to see honest people as naive or “not part of the 150 IQ ironypilled above it all figured it all out club”, perhaps the truth flows in the other direction.

Traditionally, it’s been observed in scientific literature that intelligent people tend to be more honest. In a paper I wrote, I found that people with high scores on the ASVAB tended to report being more honest, their parents thought they were more honest, and their interviewers thought they were more honest. If you combine these three measurements, the correlation between IQ and honesty is 0.38, which is higher than the correlation between IQ and income.

from here

from here

Another thing I’ve inferred from watching myself and other people, is that sometimes people seem to take pleasure in telling a lie. That they were able to cheat them, dominate them — precisely. I’d wager that humans who are more dominance-attuned are also more likely to lie because they get a bigger kick out of getting away with it.

Online and in person, the talk of “holding women accountable” or “anonymous 2D internet demons” always resonated poorly with me. And I was uneasy about that, because I felt that I was similar in neurotype to the people who would make those complaints. Then, I realised, that was because that what those people are offering is counterfeit accountability.

“Counterfeit accountability” — what I mean by this, is that, when we talk about making somebody accountable for something, they have to be responsible for it. For them to be responsible, they have to be in charge. If they are not in charge of something, they can’t be accountable for it. I then ask, what are anonymous demons and women are the internet actually in charge of?

Metaphysically, you can’t escape your actions. If I shoot my dad in the heart, he dies. It doesn’t matter how I feel about it or what I tell my mom. Social accountability, on the other hand, can be negotiated — often effectively. Some person is given status (resources, attention, credibility, etc), and they are expected to convert that into something people care about: music, chairs, airplanes, literally anything. If they don’t honour their promise, their access to status is called into question.

When people try to “escape accountability” in the conventional sense, they are trying to keep their status despite not having proven to honour their commitments. And that can happen: a director can try their hardest to make a great film, but it might bomb at the box office for various reasons that they couldn’t predict or control. If that happens, it is both pragmatic and morally imperative to try to escape accountability and negotiate with the gatekeepers. Sometimes, that’s not the case.

In the example I raised earlier, ‘women’ and ‘2D internet demons’ can’t be held accountable for anything because only individuals can be held accountable, not groups.

I do lie, of course. It would also be pointless to say which lies, but almost all of my lies are motivated by:

1. Avoiding severe consequences, “severe” here meaning a consequence that basically nobody would blame me for lying about.

2. Just 4fun. One time, I played this game with my little sister where I told her she was muscular or strong (fuerte), and one day, when she asked if she was strong, I absent-mindedly said no. She started crying. And now we can’t play that game anymore. I want to write “lesson learned, I guess”, but that’s a boorish way of putting it, but I don’t know what else to write.

Personally, some of my honesty is a kind of fixation. I dislike engaging in cheap or socially sanctioned dishonesty, like smiling in photographs, always saying “good” when people ask how I am doing. Sometimes, I’ll try to find creative ways to avoid default behaviour — like if somebody tells a joke, and I don’t find it funny, I wont laugh but I’ll roll my eyes, smile, or touch my face to help them save face.

That would land me in the inflexible/conscientious/orderly/autistic manifold of personality, though I will clarify that the only thing I hate more than no commitments is bad commitments.

So

Honesty is an emergent, not latent trait, that is influenced by how orderly, domination-oriented, and competent a person is; and is also likely influenced by environmental factors like external incentives and path dependence.