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On the contrary, I think personal reputation is extremely important in a space like this, particularly because it helps one make a probabilistic assessment of how likely one’s interlocutor is to be telling the truth, or in this case how likely he or she is to be accidentally making a false or misleading argument without realizing it. You were fortunate that I posted links and raw numbers that could be easily used against me, but if I had made an unsourced or more unspecified claim, you’d have to either figure out a source for yourself or take my word for it. In that sense, having a written record of my own carelessness with numbers will help lower other users’ future assessment of the reliability of my claims. To that extent, personal reputation as it pertains to honesty and sound reasoning is quite useful.
To be quite clear, I actually readily agree with this, and have made the same point before. The early Marxists were clearly not just making it all up when they spoke about the ruthless exploitation of the proletariat. Contrary to the Joo-posters’ claims that Jews were the primary drivers of communism, a great many countries - America very much included - had strong indigenous leftist movements well into the 20th century, with Jewish involvement at best sporadic and incidental. It’s precisely the work of moderate, non-Marxist Progressive reformers that reined in the rapaciousness of the robber barons enough to stave off serious revolutions. (One of these days I’m going to do a deep-dive into the abortive Revolutions of 1848, to really understand exactly what sort of people spearheaded them and exactly what they were fighting for.)
Now, while my claim was less correct than it should have been due to my poor mathematical reasoning, it is also still fair to point out that Victorian England’s homicide rates were comparable to today’s, but with far worse policing and medical care. If you took the same society and added modern forensic technology, surveillance technology, and the medical care needed to turn what would have been a murder in 1850 into a mere assault, you would be looking at a very low-murder-rate society.
A quick bit of Googling and comparing modern UK homicide numbers compared to modern UK attempted homicide numbers shows that about 69% of the reported attempted homicides end up with actual homicides, which I think indicates that in this context the difference made by better medical technology is not that large. It is possible that Victorian England was a bit less homicidal than modern England, but that would not demonstrate that Victorian England was necessarily more high-trust than modern England. As for the improvement in policing between then and now, sure, but this has implications both ways. To what extent can we really call a society high-trust if the people in charge of it do not care to provide the lower classes with adequate policing? Sure, the Victorians did not have modern forensic and surveillance technology, but they were perfectly capable of flooding the slums with cops if they had wished to do it. They easily could have afforded to put enough cops in the streets to massively crack down on crime. But they did not do it. Well, we have a similar situation now in the West, don't we. Maybe things have not changed that much after all. I am still not convinced that their society was significantly higher-trust than ours, if you look at their society as a whole and not just selected elements of it.
At least in London, they did do it. The Metropolitan Police is founded in 1829 and expanded in 1839 - the low crime in Victorian London was the result of effective policing. By the time Arthur Conan Doyle was writing, his readers could assume that Lestrade had ordinary crime under sufficient control that Holmes could focus on weird stuff, and it was entirely plausible that the leader of organised crime in London was a man like Professor Moriarty and not the sort of person who ends up as a gang leader in places where crime is less well controlled.
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