I didn't find the results about cheating and shoplifting surprising, but that tracks with my friend group at the time. That said, I was curious about whether there's a gender discrepancy in shoplifting (there's not), and found a large 2002 survey which gives 11% as the lifetime incidence of shoplifting in the U.S.
My best guess is that there's a metaverse which consists of (at a minimum) every possible computation. While not technically provable or falsifiable, it does result in predictions which mean that circumstantially we should have an excellent guess whether or not it's true.
So far, it's true. It nicely explains the fine-tuned constants and QM and the discrete nature of the apparent finest (Planck-region) levels of reality. And yes, it also predicts that we will, on average, be overwhelmingly likely to live in one of the simplest possible universes supporting intelligence (but almost certainly not the VERY simplest).
If this is the case, any actual fundamental mechanism of reality is irrelevant to the point of meaninglessness, as such a metaverse is completely described by a ...0001000...
initial row in ECA rules 30 or 45, or a correspondingly simple Turing machine, Lambda Calculus expression, tag machine, Perl script, etc.
(A post of mine approaching this argument from the tension between subjectivity and computation.)
I was thinking along these lines about a year back, and I started working on an ePub PWA (web-based) reader with some bells and whistles. The relevant whistle here is that you can highlight a word, passage, whatever, and tap a button to make the LLM-du-jour guess your intent from context and go ahead and answer it. I find it generally knows what I want maybe 85-90% of the time. It seems like such a trivial feature, but once you get used to never having even wildly opaque references go over your head, it's hard to go back.
It also makes it a lot less onerous to work your way through a book in a foreign language you're learning. I know it's usually not its wheelhouse, but Sonnet is inexplicably strong at translating passages from French and hitting the sweet spot of offering a relevant tip targeted to just the right skill level.
(It's available here if that sounds appealing to anyone else. It looks like this. You gotta supply your own epub files, of course.)