I disagree with TimS’s reply. As I see it, people who seek power in the first place rarely do so for entirely selfless reasons. And even if they do seek power and somehow acquire it, they must still hang on to it, fending off assaults from the occasional competitor who cares about nothing but power for its own sake. In that kind of environment, only the most efficient optimizers survive.
You posit an environment where people are “even halfway good at judging honesty”, but I don’t know of any places on Earth where that is actually the case (though I do admit that they can exist).
TimS says that the best way to signal “common sense, good will, and a sense of responsibility” is to actually have those qualities, and maybe that’s true (unless your opponent is running attack ads, of course). But there’s a very high cost associated with having things like “good will” and “responsibility”. Signaling these virtues without actually having them is harder, but it’s probably worth it in the long run, as long as your goal is to acquire power and keep it.
I disagree with TimS’s reply. As I see it, people who seek power in the first place rarely do so for entirely selfless reasons. And even if they do seek power and somehow acquire it, they must still hang on to it, fending off assaults from the occasional competitor who cares about nothing but power for its own sake. In that kind of environment, only the most efficient optimizers survive.
You posit an environment where people are “even halfway good at judging honesty”, but I don’t know of any places on Earth where that is actually the case (though I do admit that they can exist).
TimS says that the best way to signal “common sense, good will, and a sense of responsibility” is to actually have those qualities, and maybe that’s true (unless your opponent is running attack ads, of course). But there’s a very high cost associated with having things like “good will” and “responsibility”. Signaling these virtues without actually having them is harder, but it’s probably worth it in the long run, as long as your goal is to acquire power and keep it.