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Salemicus comments on Rationality Quotes March 2014 - Less Wrong
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On the contrary, honesty, conscientiousness, being law-abiding, etc. have powerful reputational effects. This is easily seen by the converse; look, for example, at the effect a criminal record has on chance of getting a job.
This quote only gets any mileage by equivocating on the meaning of fair. What the quote is really saying is: "If you expect the world to fulfil even modest dreams just because you try not to be a jerk, expect disappointment." But said like that, if loses all its seemingly deep wisdom. In fact, of course, if you personally fulfilled even some modest dream of a large proportion of the people on earth, you would be wealthy beyond the dreams of lucre.
Most of the comment is great, but
this part seems like a Just World Fallacy. You can start a chain of cause and effect that will make billions of people a bit happier, and yet someone else may take the reward.
But I agree that on average making a lot of people happy is a good way to get wealthy.
I see the quote as warning against a certain kind of naivety. I'm known as a trustworthy person and it's brought me many advantages - people have happily loaned me large sums of money, for example, and I've been employed in high-trust-requiring positions. But I have cooperated in Prisoner's Dilemma-type situations when I really should have realized the other guy was going to defect. In one case, he'd told me he was a narcissist and a Slytherin, and I still thought he'd keep our agreement. I lost a lot.
It always struck me that "fair" is one of the most misused words we have. What we mean when we say "fairness" is a sense that socially-constructed games have fixed rules leading to predictable outcomes, when some notion of a social contract or other ethical framework is exercised. If you enter a game with no rules, what would it even mean to expect a fair reward for fair play?