[ThrustVectoring]

Yeah, this is a simplified model. Screwing folks over and protecting yourself from retaliation is hard work that requires a specific set of skills - if you don't have the skill-set to engage in sociopathic behavior, trying anyways is a great way to ruin your life.

>In practice, unscrupulous people try and follow a middle road where they're honest and responsible enough to hold down respectable jobs, but try to lie, cheat, and play the system wherever they can get away with it. They're still risking being caught and they'd have an easier time if they focused on playing it straight and developing valuable skills.

The unscrupulous role requires balancing two competing needs - to meet your needs through unscrupulous behavior, and to make it difficult for others to punish you for it. This tradeoff is why these folks follow a middle road: it grants them access to places where they can get more stuff for their exposure risk. If your strategy is to have an abusive relationship where you systematically extract resources while classically conditioning your partner to not fight back, you get much better access to targets if you're a respectable-looking lawyer.

And overall, this is more of a continuum of strategies than a binary choice. How much exposure are you willing to endure per unit of payoff? How much effort are you willing to put in to convince people to not push back? How much work do you put into vetting people before letting them into your affairs? How willing are you to cut ties versus putting in work to repair relationships? All these questions will shape what sorts of personal and professional relationships you have, what sort of skills you build, how much personal success you have, and how you affect the people you interact with.

(As an aside, I'm pretty much on board with what you're saying. If you're not good at the skills required to be unethical - and if you've wound up in engineering and reading HN, I pretty much guarantee you're way better at other stuff - then obvious honesty and scrupulosity is your best strategy.)