If you disagree, I would argue you have a very sad view of the world, where truth and cooperation are inferior to lies and manipulation.
If you disagree, I would argue you have a very sad view of the world, where truth and cooperation are inferior to lies and manipulation.
You're holding everyone to a very simple, very binary view with this. It's easy to look around and see many untrustworthy players in very very long running games whose success lasts most of their own lives and often even through their legacy.
That doesn't mean that "lies and manipulation" trump "truth and cooperation" in some absolute sense, though. It just means that significant long-running games are almost always very multi-faceted and the roads that run through them involve many many more factors than those.
Those of us who feel most natural being "truthful and cooperative" can find great success ourselves while obeying our sense of integrity, but we should be careful about underestimating those who play differently. They're not guaranteed to lose either.
If you put your money otherwise, that's a sad view of the world.
"If you don't put your money towards the things with the most positive impact you're a bad/sad person".
In any case, the real issue with your logic is in thinking that an individual's personal views on the morality of a situation are correlated with the actual, potentially harsh, reality of that situation. There is rarely ever such a correlation and when it happens, it is likely a coincidence.
Is Sam Altman untrustworthy? Of course, he seems like a snake. That doesn't mean he will fail. And predicting the reality of the thing (that awful people sometimes succeed in this world) does not make someone inherently wrong or negative or even cynical - it just makes them a realist.