Great post.

Belief chains can be corrupted by power hungry individuals and opportunists. ... Unfortunately, with the advance of the information age, savvy manipulators have also gotten access to more information and are much smarter and better at evading detection.

This is what I keep telling people about the information traces they leave behind.

This is why I think that we do alread have a lot of Unfriendly Natural Intelligence perverting (sorry for the strong word) our complex-but-not-quite-information-age-ready values.