but (presumably) he was entrusted with those funds, and he proceeded to act honorably. that seems fundamentally good, right? why would it matter what externalities led to the situation?
if not stealing from others despite the opportunity =/= trustworthy, what would you consider to be the basis of trustworthiness? what metrics do you use?
Right, and based off of this a lot of scammers were former kings of good, i.e.
fundamentally good?
Fundamental good almost never ever changes, and thus you need to question your own metrics first.
just to clarify, i didn't say/mean that one trustworthy act makes
someone fundamentally good.
the act itself is fundamentally good. this was to meet your "proof of good" condition:
That changes things. Whilst I do not fully agree that not-doing-bad-when-you-could is fundamentally good in itself, I can see how you could see that it is and accept your view.
Doing good can be proof of good, not doing bad is not proof of good.
i just feel that acting honorably in all business dealings and squaring all obligations ought to mean
something. can we agree on that? if not, what are the proper metrics, in your opinion?
it's like, you're a bank and someone with a perfect history of repaying every debt asks for a loan. is their perfect history a basis for their financial trustworthiness? or should they be looked at exactly the same as any bum on the street?
Right, but you also need to factor in a differentiation between passive and active actions. Not-stealing-when-you-could = passive action, i.e. don't do
anything and the default outcome is good. Furthermore the following two things are also very often forgotten:
1) The amounts - Would you trust someone who had 10 successive proper $10 trades with $1000 over somebody who had one trade of $2k? I personally find all these singular instances of trading, or multiple instances trading where the amounts are negligible (and this depends on the person, but I'd consider anything sub - what others would consider a very high amount - not worthy of positive trust). I also act accordingly to this belief as you've seen in a strong contrast between my number of given positives vs. number of given negatives (and yes, this is completely unrelated to the number of actual deals that I've done).
2) The
proportionality effect of the given positive trust rating (amount risked vs. credibility given) - A
very important point that many seem to miss and will continue to disregard. How much credibility does your rating for a $10 trade give in the eyes of the
super-majority, not in your eyes (as a ranking DT member the eyes of many are supposed to be more important than your own eyes, i.e. bias)? It gives much more than that, and couple that with successive, what I call pajeet-level, trades of this kind and you create
unnecessary risk for a lot of members for very little gain on the (subsequent!) receivers of that positive trust.
We are going way too deep into this and sidetracking from the topic, but I believe it was fruitful (based on your elaboration, which completely changes what I was arguing against). Furthermore, I'm quite appalled by anyone who wants to use "there was this one instance where I held a lot of money and
didn't steal it, so how dare you accuse me of ever possibly scamming or being untrustworthy after". I believe this is a display of
fundamentally compromised or flawed judgement. Many other members could do so (including me), but there's a very good reason why it isn't being done!
I think this rests this part of the discussion, at least from my end. Hope it helped.
