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"S-Tier aptitude for deception" is also known as intelligence.


I think you'll find a consensus among clinical psychiatrists that the closest technical term for the colloquial notion of someone who puts all of their INT into LIE is Cluster B.

I see no evidence that great mathematicians or scientists or genre-defining artists or other admired abd beloved intellectual luminaries with enduring legacies or the recipients of the highest honors for any of those things skew narcissistic or with severe empathy deficits or any of that.

Brilliant people seem to be drawn from roughly the same ethical and moral distribution as the general public.


To be clear, I didn't mean to imply that all intelligent people are s-tier deceivers, but rather only that all s-tier deceivers are intelligent. Going with your metaphor, in order to put all of your INT into LIE, you need to have something in your INT pool.


the parent asked for moronity OR fraud, kind of a low bar lol


The lesson here, and from pretty much any page of any history book you care to flip to, is that sooner or later there's a bill that comes due for advancing the worst people to the highest posts.

If you're not important to someone powerful, lying, cheating, stealing, and generally doing harm for personal profit will bring you to an unpleasant end right quick.

But the longer you can keep the con going, the bigger the bill: its an unserviceable debt. So Skilling and Meriwether were able to bring down whole companies, close offices across entire cities.

This is by no means the worst case though, because if your institutions fail to kick in? There's no ceiling, its like being short a stock in a squeeze.

You keep it going long enough, its your country, or your entire civilization.

You want the institutions to kick in before that.




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