Thread by @arctotherium42

Lots of different measurements of impersonal honesty: a thread. The precise rank-ordering of these different measures varies, but the general picture is clear. First one is how many people claim to complete an impossible 5-minute task in 5 minutes. .

https://x.com/ThomasTalhelm/status/1794407065278148963

This one is the fraction of people who report a lost wallet, with or without money. A consistent pattern of China doing much worse than other high-IQ countries is clear across these.

Here's the Passenger's Dilemma (if your friend killed someone speeding and you were the only witness, would you lie to protect him?). Japan does poorly here.

Here's how corrupt people perceive their own country to be.

Stripe fraud rates (India, unsurprisingly, maxes out the scale).

Scientific retractions. Note that this is a function of both (1) how able you are to do science and (2) how fraudulent your science is. East Asia (both China and Japan) stands out, but India also has a lot of fraud considering their low scientific output.

How often did diplomats take advantage of their immunity to break parking laws in NYC?

Another measure of scientific misconduct, this one of obvious fraud like flipped images or impossible numbers.

The common thread: Germanic societies are the most impersonally honest, with other (non-Soviet) Europeans and sometimes Japan behind them. The rest of the world, including high-IQ China, is deeply dishonest as a rule. Nothing surprising to anyone who knows what WEIRD means.

I posit this is due to the Western European Marriage Pattern, which forced Northwest Europeans to rely on non-kin to survive for centuries. See here: substack-proxy.glitch.me/articles/arcto…

I believe Communism, which very strongly incentivized vice and penalized virtue, is partly to blame for the fUSSR and China's bad performance. Similar incentives from welfare states in the West are in the process of doing the same here.

https://x.com/lmrwanda/status/1852699630011822361

Not only are impersonally honest societies more pleasant to live in, they're also more productive and efficient. You can hire non-strangers without fearing they'll steal and science can actually work (can trust colleagues results) rather than be an exercise in fraud/careerism.

Given how much of this is genetic, WEIRD impersonal honesty will not survive population replacement via mass nonwhite immigration. The result (already visible) will be poorer, less innovative, less pleasant, and more corrupt societies, and regression to the (low) human mean.