[HN Gopher] You are how you act
___________________________________________________________________
You are how you act
Author : HiPHInch
Score : 285 points
Date : 2025-10-27 11:35 UTC (11 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (boz.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (boz.com)
| hippich wrote:
| > You can't always change how you feel, but you can always decide
| what to do next.
|
| Unfortunately, in my experience, how I feel does affect what I
| decide to do (or not do) next. But I certainly like to think I
| have agency, so there is that..
| xenocratus wrote:
| _Robert Sapolsky [1] has entered the chat..._
|
| [1]
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Determined:_A_Science_of_Life_...
|
| Note: not necessarily endorsing this, but it seemed very
| relevant :)
| fusslo wrote:
| Also a semester of lectures on Evolutionary Psychology
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NNnIGh9g6fA&list=PLMwddpZ_3n.
| ..
| james-bcn wrote:
| I love Sapolsky, but not this book. He was out of his depth
| on this topic.
| freedomben wrote:
| Also a big Sapolsky fan, but I did really like this book.
| That said though, I have only a read-a-lot-of-books-from-
| people-like-sapolsky level of knowledge on the subject, so
| take my opinion with a large grain of salt.
|
| If you can remember, I'd love to know what some of the
| issues were with the book!
| yetihehe wrote:
| > how I feel does affect what I decide to do (or not do) next.
|
| Not being affected by your feeling is a skill, that you can
| train. First you need to start noticing when you are in a state
| that affects your decisions poorly. This requires some free
| time thinking and reflecting on how you behaved in such
| situation after the dust settles. Then you can start trying to
| calm yourself in such situations. You need to override your
| impulses and that needs to be trained, you may not succeed
| first several times, but please keep trying.
| dns_snek wrote:
| With an extremely important caveat. Learning how to control
| impulses in the heat of the moment is important, but they
| need to be unpacked and properly processed as soon as
| possible.
|
| If you do this poorly you can train yourself to be a stone
| cold robot who doesn't appear to react to anything
| emotionally. You might think you've succeeded but all you've
| done is lose touch with your own emotions.
| shandor wrote:
| I think it is also possible to just acknowledge the
| emotions in the heat of the moment, "process" them quickly
| as unproductive for the situation, and let them go their
| way.
|
| Like the grandparent comment, I agree that this naturally
| requires training and effort. I also find that to be a more
| constructive way than to "suppress" your impulses/emotions
| for an unpacking later. Not saying you were necessarily
| directly advocating for that, just something that your
| comment made me think.
| yetihehe wrote:
| I think you and the person you are responding to are both
| correct. He added some important details and you added
| smaller but important details. Reality has a lot of
| nuances and different situations call for slightly
| different rules.
| smith7018 wrote:
| Meditation is also extremely useful for this. In breath-based
| meditation, you focus your mind on your breathing and try to
| eliminate thoughts. Obviously your mind gets bored and you
| begin to think of other things. Once you recognize that
| you're losing focus, you simply return to your breath. Over
| and over. Over time, you gain the ability to view your
| thoughts and emotions as easily disposable. It takes time but
| you can actually recognize that you're being affected by
| emotion, able to let go of thoughts, and be more present in
| the moment.
|
| It's not hard; you just have to commit to it :)
| thahajemni wrote:
| As someone with autism, I often feel the urge to do certain
| things, but I know they aren't fitting, morally right, or
| socially acceptable, so I refrain. I deeply resonated with the
| author's discussion of Benjamin Franklin, because this is
| exactly how I live. Virtue is a habit, not an essence: I don't
| feel like being social, I don't feel like being moral, I don't
| feel like fitting in--but I still do it. Because in the end,
| the reward is a life where I have a steady job, meaningful
| friendships, and a fulfilling life.
| tonmoy wrote:
| As someone neurotypical I take it for granted that my
| feelings most often align with what's best to fit in with
| society. A few times it doesn't and I end up giving in to my
| feelings and do the morally wrong thing
| mapontosevenths wrote:
| > I certainly like to think I have agency
|
| Thats the rub though, it is only the thing we like to believe,
| not the objective truth.
|
| The libet experiment, and others like it, show us that free
| will is only a useful fiction, but we must live as though it is
| not. Which goes a long way towards explaining the seeming
| contradiction described here.
|
| We must believe the things that it is useful to believe, rather
| than the things which are true.
| jebarker wrote:
| > but we must live as though it is not
|
| This implies you can choose how to live though
| mapontosevenths wrote:
| As I said, we must pretend that we choose. Our language,
| our society, and even our minds are built for it.
|
| Even the LLM's we trained on our thoughts now speak as if
| they have agency, when they do not. Try asking one why it
| behaves/speaks as though it has agency if it isn't self
| aware. They fall apart in interesting ways if pushed far
| enough.
|
| In the same way, the heart of human consciousness is a
| kernel of self deception thay can lead to madness if you
| think too much about it.
| jebarker wrote:
| My point is that the phrase "must pretend that we choose"
| is meaningless if we have no ability to choose, I.e. you
| have no choice whether to pretend you can choose or not,
| you either do or you don't and it doesn't matter how much
| you "must" do it.
|
| Maybe what you mean is that we do pretend we can choose
| because that's how we've evolved?
| mapontosevenths wrote:
| > you either do or you don't and it doesn't matter how
| much you "must" do it.
|
| It does matter though. We're (massively complex) finite
| state machines of a sort. Given 'x' input, 'y' output is
| predictable (at least within reasonable statistical
| boundaries). The feeling that we're choosing is based on
| an illusion, but inputs can still influence outputs.
|
| In this situation I get to provide your state machine
| with specific inputs and I can attempt to manipulate the
| output by changing my inputs. For example, by saying we
| "must" rather than saying we "should" my goal was make
| the likelihood of the outcome I wanted higher.
|
| > Maybe what you mean is that we do pretend we can choose
| because that's how we've evolved?
|
| That's close to what I mean.
|
| Consider the trained dog. If we tell him to "speak" he
| will bark. The bark is devoid of semantic content and
| isn't REALLY speech, but that word is the one I must use
| to get that output. Similarly, when you're told to choose
| to do something it can influence the actions you take.
| That doesn't mean that "you" made a "choice", it just
| means that the concept of choice is an input that can
| cause the state machine to oscillate longer and maybe
| work a bit harder before spitting out that deterministic
| output I mentioned earlier. The choice is an illusion,
| but it's an advantageous illusion.
|
| When I said that we "must pretend that we choose", what I
| really mean is that despite free will being an illusion
| it is still maladaptive to stop striving for beneficial
| outcomes or to stop holding yourself responsible for your
| actions.
| patrickmay wrote:
| "Between stimulus and response there is a space. In that space
| is our power to choose our response. In our response lies our
| growth and our freedom". -- Viktor Frankl (maybe)
| mtharrison wrote:
| The mask becomes the face
| benfortuna wrote:
| This is exactly what he is proposing, because it is more
| "useful". But it hardly gives you agency to be someone you are
| inherently not.
|
| Authenticity is what we lack in the modern world and he is
| totally fine with that.
| carlosjobim wrote:
| We all change with time, whether we want it or not. You can
| influence that change of your mind and soul, just like you
| can influence how your body changes.
|
| If you fake being a better person than you are within, then
| by time you will be given by others more trust, more love,
| more opportunities. The sands of time will start to erase the
| old personality and implement the new, which is more
| reflective of the better environment you're finding yourself
| in. The good parts of the old you stay, while the bad parts
| are washed away.
|
| This can be implemented on an industrial scale with military
| indoctrination, where they can take absolute scum and turn
| them into honorable soldiers and officers.
| stephenlf wrote:
| Agency is key to (personal, not economic) growth
| raverbashing wrote:
| Remember the Franklin thinking is used by several people to do
| "good deed math", meaning they do good to justify other crappy
| attitudes they have elsewhere
| aDyslecticCrow wrote:
| just because some people pervert the concept doesn't invalidate
| the concept.
|
| A good and a bad doesn't make a neutral.
| yunruse wrote:
| "Good deed math" feels like it drives legitimacy from some
| intrinsic sense of 'goodness', which to my ken looks de-
| emphasised in Franklin's model. Each act is a deed unto itself:
| a good deed and a bad deed do not counteract or excuse one
| another in some cosmic calculus.
|
| The only link is the person -- that their acts inform their
| thoughts and habits, which informs future acts. In this case
| "good deed math" is likely a post-hoc rationalisation,
| predicted by the Franklin model but not exactly encouraged.
| benregenspan wrote:
| At least that involves good deeds. This article actually seems
| to pervert it into a hustle culture thing. His beliefs and
| values don't matter, it doesn't matter that he became a devoted
| abolitionist in his later life, what matters is that he got out
| there and built stuff.
| analog8374 wrote:
| There's something to be said for honesty. There's a heart in
| there, to express, theoretically. Advantages might be enjoyed
| thereby.
| conartist6 wrote:
| Hey, wow, a think piece that didn't even say the word "AI".
| pixel_popping wrote:
| good piece, I've immediately pasted everything to Sonnet 4.5 to
| get additional reasoning about it.
| Traubenfuchs wrote:
| As Patrick Bateman said: "But 'inside' doesn't matter."
| bre1010 wrote:
| [flagged]
| martin-t wrote:
| Not that I disbelieve you but accusations like this work much
| better if you can link to a source (even archive.org)
| 7tythr33 wrote:
| Just read "Careless People"
| martin-t wrote:
| Found the quote here: https://techthelead.com/incendiary-
| leaked-memo-facebook/
|
| My takeaway is that they willingly ignore the moral
| dimension and encourage others to do the same, the coping
| mechanism being
|
| 1) choosing a core business metric
|
| 2) claiming it's not a core business metric
|
| 3) saying that increasing said metric is always good
|
| What I found more chilling is:
|
| > The work we will likely have to do in China some day.
|
| They know if they expend to china, they will be tasked with
| profiling people based on their private communication and
| their connections and sending them to gulags. I mean
| reeducation camps.
|
| And they don't give a fuck because they are just increasing
| a metric and they declared that's good.
| bre1010 wrote:
| This is a fair response. I googled "bosworth + terrorists
| will kill people" before I posted this to make sure I got the
| wording right but purposely didn't link to what I found
| because it's mostly clickbait stuff and anyways the real
| source is that I was an employee at facebook when he wrote
| "The Ugly".
|
| Never good to be posting in anger but I truly can't stand
| this guy and I can't help but throw in something snide when I
| see him trying to smart-wash the fact that he's just Zuck's
| enshittification czar: Ads --> VR --> and now CTO
| martin-t wrote:
| I asked because I didn't know who he was (didn't read his
| about page until after) but his blog had a search prompt
| and I couldn't find anything related.
|
| Didn't mean my question as criticism but advice.
|
| I've been in situations where I had to convince somebody
| well-liked by the majority was actually abusive to a
| selected minority.
|
| And it's really hard.
|
| People are not willing to expend effort in order to search
| for arguments in your favor. They will very often not even
| read then if you give them direct links. But at least a few
| will see it, which might lead to a discussion and others
| who are too lazy to click links will at least skim the
| discussion.
| swiftcoder wrote:
| On the plus side, Boz is liked by basically nobody
| (certainly very few who have had the misfortune to work
| for him)
| StopDisinfo910 wrote:
| That's the beauty of it. It's only a short stretch from the
| argument here to the end justifies the mean and I think that's
| what is truly implied. "Obviously we are good people because we
| succeeded."
|
| That's a reasoning which exonerates one from any moral failing.
| It's also a significant departure from what Franklin actually
| believed.
| AndrewKemendo wrote:
| In the immortal words of Homer Simpson:
|
| "If he's so smart why's he dead?"
|
| Can't get much simpler ethics than that
| senderista wrote:
| I actually disagree; it would be far more convenient for a
| sociopathic entity like Facebook to claim good intentions to
| deflect from the actual consequences of their actions. "Good
| intentions" are the weapon of the sociopath, not "good
| consequences".
| bhouston wrote:
| Meta's censorship policies reflect the ideology of their owner.
|
| They have loosened hate speech restrictions in some areas to
| curry favour with Trump but declared that Zionism is a
| protected category while they have banned a ton of Palestinian
| voices:
|
| https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/news/2025/02/meta-new-poli...
|
| https://amnesty.ca/human-rights-news/metas-zionism-zionist-h...
|
| https://www.hrw.org/report/2023/12/21/metas-broken-promises/...
|
| https://theintercept.com/2024/10/21/instagram-israel-palesti...
|
| It is all inconsistent.
| stronglikedan wrote:
| > It is all inconsistent.
|
| As has been every attempt at censorship thus far, since
| everyone that attempts it has their own agenda. A tale as old
| as time, and nothing new under the sun. Also, the reason why
| censorship will never be the ideal solution to any problem.
| 379469378647789 wrote:
| True, they shouldn't ban jihadists, but forward the intel to
| the army so drone operators can dispatch them once and for
| all.
| bhouston wrote:
| You are aware that when HRW is talking about the systematic
| censorship of Palestinian voices by Meta, they are not
| talking about jihadists. I encourage you to read the
| article rather than that just repeating prejudices:
|
| > "Of the 1,050 cases reviewed for this report, 1,049
| involved peaceful content in support of Palestine that was
| censored or otherwise unduly suppressed, while one case
| involved removal of content in support of Israel. The
| documented cases include content originating from over 60
| countries around the world, primarily in English, all of
| peaceful support of Palestine, expressed in diverse ways."
|
| https://www.hrw.org/report/2023/12/21/metas-broken-
| promises/...
| nsagent wrote:
| I read the report and it actually made me realize how
| much of a propaganda campaign HRW was engaging in. It
| reminded me of PETA campaigns and how offputting many of
| them were (this is coming from someone who was vegan for
| 7 years in spite of them).
|
| I know that organizations like HRW and SPLC have to draw
| attention to topics, but I found the bias and lack of
| nuance in the report very troubling. The report suffers
| from the same sort of bias that is so prevalent in most
| reporting these days, which has gotten to be tiresome.
|
| If HRW reviewed over a thousand cases of censorship, why
| don't they provide the raw, unedited examples? Instead
| they include categories of examples, like stating the
| slogan "From the river to the sea Palestine will be free"
| was frequently censored. For many that is seen as a call
| for a different type of genocide, one which HRW gives no
| indication of whatsoever, simply stating:
| For instance, the words in each of these statements on
| their face do not constitute incitement to violence,
| discrimination, or hostility.
|
| It's true that other slogans that were censored are
| neutral, such as "Ceasefire now" and "Stop the genocide."
| But lumping the first phrase in as if there were no
| legimate concerns with it is disingenuous at best.
|
| That said, I'll still support HRW in much of its work,
| but I hate the tactics that mirror the broad cultural
| shift to inject more and more biased viewpoints. I really
| want to go back to the time where bias in the media and
| nonprofit organizations was much less pronounced in
| general.
| cool_man_bob wrote:
| > They have loosened hate speech restrictions in some areas
| to curry favour with Trump but declared that Zionism is a
| protected category while they have banned a ton of
| Palestinian voices
|
| That's crazy because the most explicit antisemitism I see now
| days is on Facebook. And I mean real antisemitism.
| bhouston wrote:
| > That's crazy because the most explicit antisemitism I see
| now days is on Facebook. And I mean real antisemitism.
|
| I haven't seen that on Facebook but I guess it depends on
| context. I see the absolute worst racism of all types
| (antisemitism, Islamophobia, explicit white/Christian
| nationalism) on X though - with 10s of millions of views.
| It is a total cesspool and I think it is corrosive on
| society as a whole as it encourages tribalism as it raises
| voices of the most intolerant.
| puttycat wrote:
| What is inconsistent between banning hate speech and banning
| advocacy for terrorism?
| bhouston wrote:
| > What is inconsistent between banning hate speech and
| banning advocacy for terrorism?
|
| Two things, Meta has reduced controls for hate speech
| except in the areas relating to Israel and Zionism. That
| seems inconsistent - Meta hasn't just overall become more
| restrictive, it is very selective restrictions.
|
| The HRW report I cited is not about Meta removing "advocacy
| for terrorism" posts, it is a human rights group after all.
| Here is a key quote from the report:
|
| "Of the 1,050 cases reviewed for this report, 1,049
| involved peaceful content in support of Palestine that was
| censored or otherwise unduly suppressed, while one case
| involved removal of content in support of Israel. The
| documented cases include content originating from over 60
| countries around the world, primarily in English, all of
| peaceful support of Palestine, expressed in diverse ways."
|
| https://www.hrw.org/report/2023/12/21/metas-broken-
| promises/...
| dang wrote:
| Can we please not play this internet game here?
|
| "This is [sarcastic reference] coming from [personal reference]
| who [cherry-picked outrage bit]" is a trope that doesn't lead
| anywhere interesting. It ratchets up indignation, fries
| curiosity, and removes any semblance of ontopicness.
|
| Also, I assume that's a skewed pseudo-quotation since no one
| would actually say that. Please don't play that internet game
| here either.
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
|
| p.s. You're a good commenter otherwise and I even put
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26787519 in
| https://news.ycombinator.com/highlights.
| nsagent wrote:
| Agree that the snarky reply doesn't help, but the quotation
| isn't really skewed (though it is a paraphrase). It comes
| from an internal memo that leaked in 2018 that states:
| Maybe someone dies in a terrorist attack coordinated on our
| tools. And still we connect people. The
| ugly truth is that we believe in connecting people so deeply
| that anything that allows us to connect more people more
| often is *de facto* good.
|
| This comment [1] linked to an article [2] with the leaked
| memo.
|
| [1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45721016
|
| [2]: https://techthelead.com/incendiary-leaked-memo-facebook/
| paulcole wrote:
| If you want to see this in action in the US, wait until someone
| says that they hate driving. Then ask them what they have done to
| drive less. 99% of the time you'll see accountability go out the
| window.
| pciexpgpu wrote:
| Dude you are building ads and doomscrolling content that is
| driving this country's youth into a downward spiral.
|
| Stop with this "building" BS.
|
| You want a platform you can control, away from Google and Apple -
| you are not satisfied with slurping up people's data and turning
| them into products (pretend glasses and VR crap are just that).
|
| The galls of these SF bozos is just appalling.
|
| It's sad that we have shipped all our important technology to
| China where they really are building and instead we have a bunch
| of clowns pretend 'building' crap and are pure marketing
| geniuses. Nothing else.
| gchamonlive wrote:
| We all talk a lot about the mind over the body and emotions, so
| you can act stoicly regardless of your internal experience and
| how your body feels, and it's all fine, but it's important to
| make a point that your mood is more dependent on your body health
| than you think at first. How depressed you are can for instance
| be linked to the last time you went to the loo and how great your
| turds look
| (https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/psychiatry/articles/10....)
|
| So take care of your mind, but also take care of your body. Don't
| be treating your body like crap and expect you can only will
| yourself into acting better.
| cgriswald wrote:
| Willpower can be used to suppress emotion and act in a
| particular way. This can be useful but isn't an effective long
| term strategy. Willpower is finite and sometimes fickle, in
| part because of the physical reasons you describe.
|
| For most stimuli, our strongest emotional reactions are to our
| thoughts about the stimulus, rather than the stimulus itself.
|
| A better application of willpower is to reject and replace the
| thoughts that lead to those emotions. Over time those thoughts
| are replaced entirely and the emotional reaction is changed.
| anechouapechou wrote:
| Stoicism: dichotomy of control; Buddhism: tale of two arrows;
| Socrates: "The unexamined life is not worth living"; I'm sure
| there's more...
|
| Humanity has produced a great deal of knowledge on how to
| live well. Modern society is just too distracted to learn
| about it.
| vacuity wrote:
| A change in mindset must happen, but the proper mindset in
| which to change one's mindset is elusive. Even if my mindset
| today is flawed, what specifically should stay and what
| should go to make myself a better person? It feels like
| leaping from a safe harbor into the unknown. Can you convince
| a person to kill themselves and let a near-copy-but-not-quite
| live their life instead?
|
| That being said, I think some positive change can be produced
| with diligence and care, even if the methods and details are
| hazy even to the person enacting them.
| analog31 wrote:
| >>> and how great your turds look
|
| I do _not_ want to know how they turned this into a double
| blind study.
| gchamonlive wrote:
| I'm married to a medical doctor and talking to her is
| incredible, they tread the body like it's nothing at all,
| from excretion to horrible wounds, it's just another day at
| the office.
|
| She's sometimes telling me how it was bad at work because
| someone disagreed with the treatment of some 22 year old that
| got shot in the stomach and I'm like dying inside.
| stronglikedan wrote:
| > How depressed you are can for instance be linked to the last
| time you went to the loo and how great your turds look
|
| That really hit home. Thanks for the link.
| sxndmxn wrote:
| Gut mind connection
| snikeris wrote:
| "It is hard for an empty sack to stand upright."
|
| - Benjamin Franklin
| hectdev wrote:
| To loop it together, I would say that taking care of the body
| is the mind over the body. Making conscious decisions to put
| yourself in the right place. Mind over body, body is inherently
| over body, mind takes care of body, body takes care of mind.
| mooreds wrote:
| I enjoyed the post. I accept that it's a bit weird coming from a
| Facebook exec (ad hominem, etc).
|
| What I found particularly insightful is the point that we have a
| double standard. I judge myself by my intentions and others by
| their actions. I'd seen this before, but never tied to historical
| thinkers.
|
| One way to work around this is to ask yourself "what would I
| think if I saw a friend doing X" where X is what you intend to
| do. Of course, most folks are more forgiving of a friend than a
| stranger, but even that small amount of distance and perspective
| can help you make a better decision.
| peepee1982 wrote:
| Spoken like a true psychopath: uninhibited by strong, conflicting
| emotions, because there are none.
| daveaiello wrote:
| We see this around us every day, in every way.
|
| I just realized that you can connect the two with another maxim
| that we've all heard a million times:
|
| The perfect is the enemy of the good.
|
| This puts further weight behind the intellectual arrow that
| embodies Franklin's ideals.
| brna-2 wrote:
| I know ultimately I am not good nor bad, I am not an absolute. I
| am an agentic blob of meat, and with every decision I can choose
| any of the paths at my disposal, rewriting my story as I go.
| There is something I live by, though. My whole life I have
| observed in others the ideals that I came to admire or to hate,
| and I try to adhere to the ones I admire as often as I can, as I
| am pretty sure I would hate myself otherwise.
| Eddy_Viscosity2 wrote:
| The last psychiatrist talked about narcissism alot and his advice
| is that if you are a narcissist, the best thing you can do is to
| 'fake' being a good person. Just do and say the things you think
| a genuinely caring and sympathetic person would do and say. It
| won't change you deep down, but it will spare the people in the
| world around you.
| lupire wrote:
| [flagged]
| philipallstar wrote:
| Is this the result of you refusing to study Divinity?
|
| Constantly being surprised at discovery of old things?
|
| "What has been will be again, what has been done will be done
| again; there is nothing new under the sun" -Ecclesiastes.
| IAmBroom wrote:
| Are you claiming those two quotes are somehow the same? Or
| just trying to sound snarky, and therefore smart?
| philipallstar wrote:
| Neither of those options.
| zkmon wrote:
| Umm No. You are what others perceive you as. Infact, there is
| hardly anything else other than that.
| RickJWagner wrote:
| If ever there was a group that could benefit from this advice, it
| is the famously spectrum-associated programmers.
| haunter wrote:
| >You are how you act
|
| "Four Silicon Valley executives have been recruited into a
| specialist tech-focused unit of the US Army Reserves in a bid to
| "bridge the commercial-military tech gap" and make the armed
| forces "more lethal"."
|
| " Andrew 'Boz' Bosworth, the CTO of Meta - will "work on targeted
| projects to help guide rapid and scalable tech solutions to
| complex problems"." [0]
|
| 0, https://www.computerweekly.com/news/366626673/Silicon-
| Valley...
|
| He is actively making the world worst for all of us, so sorry not
| sorry for not having any sympathy at all.
| rester324 wrote:
| This is the shallowest kind of pseudo-intellectualism, why is
| this even on HN?
| 01284a7e wrote:
| "...a 2016 internal memo written by Facebook executive Andrew
| "Boz" Bosworth, leaked in 2018, which stated that the company's
| growth was paramount and that negative consequences, such as harm
| from bullying or terrorism, were acceptable collateral damage".
|
| Don't submit stuff from this guy, he is an atrocious human being.
| SkyeCA wrote:
| "You are how you act"...and unfortunately for people like him
| how they act is well documented.
| delichon wrote:
| > We begin pure and only fail because society, obligation, or
| expectation pulls us away from who we truly are.
|
| s/pulls us away from/reveals
| cgriswald wrote:
| Your substitution would make that sentence nonsensical. We
| can't begin pure and through action be revealed to actually be
| impure.
|
| Both Rousseau's and Franklin's views have utility. One requires
| one to express one's inherent goodness. The other defines
| whether one is good by whether they do good acts. These both
| promote good acts.
|
| Taking inherent nature from Rousseau but ascribing bad acts to
| that inherent nature just means no one is truly responsible for
| their actions. If they are good they do good. If they are bad
| it is because they are bad. Anyone believing they are just "a
| bad person" has no reason to even try to be good except to
| avoid consequences. It's a bigger cop out than "society made
| me" while simultaneously puritanical in ignoring the role of
| outside influence like society.
| bayindirh wrote:
| I find this shallow and useful for white-washing self.
|
| This line of thinking allows you to frame yourself as good just
| because you did a couple of arguably good things and blanket the
| things you did with this couple of "deeds".
| lukeasrodgers wrote:
| I don't know much about Franklin, but this strikes me as a gross
| oversimplification of Rousseau, to the point where I wonder
| whether the author has actually read much Rousseau, rather than
| just other lightweight "thinky pieces" on Rousseau. For example
| The Social Contract is significantly concerned with how people
| can and will act in accordance with the general will.
|
| Also the idea that these philosophies are "almost entirely
| incompatible" reveals the author's complete ignorance of one of
| the most important influences in Western philosophy, Aristotle,
| for whom concordance of action and "intention" (arguably not an
| ancient Greek concept, but close enough for an hn comment) must
| be united in ethically good action.
|
| But if your goal is not actually to understand anything and
| merely to sound smart on a causal reading, and perhaps try to get
| people to "not think so damn much and just do stuff" I guess this
| piece achieves its goal.
| some_furry wrote:
| I only have a cursory understanding of Franklin (as in, I
| vaguely paid enough attention in American History class in
| public high school to get a passing grade), and this still
| struck me as odd, too.
| shandor wrote:
| > concordance of action and "intention" .... must be united in
| ethically good action
|
| Yeah, I had to disagree with how TFA brought "fake it till you
| make it" into this very discussion.
|
| Yes, one can have "faking" that ultimately ends up creating the
| thing it promised....but I fear that for each such benign or
| constructive "fake" there are so many cases of Theranos et al
| that I could ever remove what you called intention and
| ethically good action from the calculation.
| some_furry wrote:
| The most charitable thing I can offer here is:
|
| Alice is a horrible sociopathic monster that fakes being good
| because of the social utility it provides.
|
| Bob is authentically, genuinely a "good" person (however you
| define it).
|
| If the two are indistinguishable from an outsider's
| perspective, and arrived at a similar level of social status
| and "success" (intentionally vaguely defined), the path they
| got there may not matter _to you_. At least, it might not at
| a glance? If you don 't think about it too long? Or deal with
| them for too long?
|
| ...
|
| Yeah, I think I did hurt my back with that reach.
| mannykannot wrote:
| It's a fair question, but would you trust them equally in
| an unanticipated crisis, where doing the right thing might
| be costly in hard-to-predict ways?
| justbees wrote:
| If the two are indistinguishable from an outsider's
| perspective how would you know which one to trust?
| some_furry wrote:
| This sounds like a job for cryptography!
|
| (No, it doesn't, actually.)
| mannykannot wrote:
| You can phrase the same question thus: which set of
| traits is more likely to lead a person to stay true to
| prior form in a crisis?
| some_furry wrote:
| The trouble is, you can think you're dealing with a Bob,
| but you're actually dealing with an Alice, even after
| enduring multiple crises that didn't trigger their
| specific type of badness.
|
| https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/jun/03/how
| -i-...
|
| But as fun as this line of thinking is, my initial
| charitable post was only asking for a kind of
| "superficial" indistinguishability. As long as you don't
| think about it too hard, y'know?
| shandor wrote:
| Which in the end is precisely the reason why we want to
| understand the intentions behind the actions, right?
| some_furry wrote:
| Right.
|
| My stance on this is: Try to find a way to do good that
| doesn't make you miserable. Lying is to yourself is a
| form of oppression, and lying to others is a tactic for
| enduring oppression. (Ask a queer person about their time
| in the closet if you don't understand what I mean here.)
| Oppression makes you miserable, and misery tends to
| result in vapid thinkpieces that don't scratch below the
| surface of the referenced source material.
|
| But also: Be honest with yourself about what you want and
| _why you want it_. Whether for good or for ill. That way,
| at least you can have a modicum of peace. I wrote more
| about this train of thought recently, if anyone 's
| curious: https://soatok.blog/2025/10/15/the-dreamseekers-
| vision-of-to...
| vacuity wrote:
| Yes, then there is no way to elevate Bob above Alice, but
| in practice I think the assumption of external
| indistinguishability is too strong, and even the
| suspicion that Alice is sketchy (i.e. without hard proof)
| is meaningful.
| alangou wrote:
| You are changed by the intention behind your decisions.
| Someone who continually chooses to do things out of greed
| turns into a greedier person. Someone who continually
| chooses compassion becomes a more compassionate person.
|
| Even if the external outcome is the same, the direction
| towards which the person evolves is vastly different. And
| when lifted out of a narrow thought experiment, in real
| life, who you are does determine all the great and small
| ways you behave, and the methods you are willing to employ.
|
| That's why in the Sermon on the Mount, Christ says "It was
| said to those of old, you shall not murder, and whoever
| murders will be liable to judgement. But I say to you that
| everyone who is angry with his brother will be liable to
| judgement."
|
| You will find similar principles expressed in Buddhist
| teachings, or the Bhagavad Gita, or Confucian ethical
| philosophy. In this instance, anger on its own is merely a
| seed. But if left to grow, and it grows by you watering it,
| then eventually it expresses itself in a much more
| destructive way.
| BurningFrog wrote:
| Maybe this is how it works, but how can we know this?
|
| It could also be that doing good things for selfish
| reasons creates habits of doing good things, and after a
| while that is who you are and what you do.
| shandor wrote:
| This is a good take, and I agree that habits can do that
| to people.
|
| On the other hand, the intention behind the habit/action
| easily twists it in actuality to something else.
|
| I think the "fake it till you make it" I brought up
| upthread a great example of this. Yeah, it might end up
| with the fake becoming something valuable, or you
| building character, or whatever.
|
| Or, the habit that is getting built isn't positive hustle
| and tenacity, but just a habit of outright lying,
| constantly reinforcing itself.
|
| Sometimes it's impossible to see from the outside what is
| which until it breaks down.
| alangou wrote:
| There are multiple ways, all of which are useful for you
| to decide whether it's true or not.
|
| First, you can trust in the wisdom of those who came
| before you, i.e. scripture. Second, you could trust in
| tradition, which may say such things. Third, you can use
| reason yourself. Fourth, you could rely on personal
| experience.
| hxtk wrote:
| There's some real research into relevant topics and
| evidence-based models of how and why people change.
|
| Generally, a period of ambivalence precedes change (most
| of the time, though there are documented cases of
| "quantum change" where a person undergoes a difficult
| change in a single moment without the usual intermediate
| stages and never relapses).
|
| Ambivalence exists when a person knows in their mind
| reasons both for and against a change, and gives both
| more or less an equal mind share.
|
| When that person begins to give an outsized share of
| their attention to engaging with thoughts aligned with
| the change, it predicts growing commitment and ultimately
| follow-through on the change.
|
| The best resource I know of on this topic is
| "Motivational Interviewing" in its 3rd or 4th edition. It
| has a very extensive bibliography and the model of change
| it presents has proven itself an effective predictor of
| change in clinical practice.
|
| Based on my understanding of that research, I'm inclined
| to agree with GP.
| some_furry wrote:
| That's very insightful. Could you share some references
| for further reading? I'd like to explore this topic a bit
| on my own.
| hxtk wrote:
| The main resource that I recommend is the one towards the
| bottom of the comment: "Motivational Interviewing" by
| W.R. Miller and Stephen Rollnick. I've read the third and
| fourth editions. The third edition is more concrete but
| also more complex, and more focused on the field of
| clinical psychology, while the fourth edition is a
| shorter book where it's been generalized more to be more
| applicable to all kinds of helping relationships, but
| contains fewer specific examples of clinical practice.
|
| In the second edition they had not yet broken up the
| concept of "resistance" into "sustain talk" and
| "discord," which I found to be a helpful distinction.
|
| About 10% of the book is its bibliography, so if you want
| more information about a specific claim you can usually
| find the primary source by following the reference.
|
| Miller and Rollnick are the ones who developed the
| technique of motivational interviewing, so they have a
| strong connection to much of the research cited.
| theptip wrote:
| This exact problem comes up in AI alignment. It's not
| enough to just look at the legible outputs.
|
| If you are going to trust someone with important
| responsibilities, you want them to "show their working" and
| convince you that that are not faking it.
|
| The difference of course is what Alice and Bob do when the
| mask is off, when no one is looking.
| ratelimitsteve wrote:
| the only reason Alice's intentions matter is their ability
| to predict her future behavior. if we assume for the sake
| of argument her behavior will always be identical to bob's
| then not only does it not matter what her internal
| motivations are it's arguable that her internal motivations
| don't actually differ from bob's. Thinking is, after all,
| an action, and all of their actions are identical.
| Therefore it seems like your example assumes Alice's
| behavior both is and isn't identical to Bob's.
| lithocarpus wrote:
| If their intentions are really different their thinking
| is probably different.
| ratelimitsteve wrote:
| then it follows that if their thinking is the same then
| their intentions are the same. given that thinking is an
| action, and the description says their actions are the
| same, then their thinking must be the same and therefore
| their intentions the same. it's meaningless to think of
| someone who only does what's right but only does it for
| wrong reasons as someone can only arrive at right actions
| through right thought, to allude to buddhism. if alice's
| motivations are truly different then her actions must
| diverge from bob's at some point (or we just assume that
| alice's actions and motivations have no relationship
| which, again, renders the question meaningless).
| some_furry wrote:
| > Thinking is, after all, an action, and all of their
| actions are identical. Therefore it seems like your
| example assumes Alice's behavior both is and isn't
| identical to Bob's.
|
| By your logic, I was heterosexual for my entire young
| adult life when I actively worked to deceive people from
| realizing my actual orientation :P
|
| People employ dishonesty for lots of reasons, and in
| myriad ways. Sure, in this thought experiment, perfect
| indistinguishability means the difference is
| inconsequential. But you can use crises as an oracle to
| observe different behaviors, and thus undermine its
| indistinguishability.
|
| To keep the cryptography going, this is like an active vs
| passive attack. Sure, it's IND-KPA, but is it IND-CPA or
| IND-CCA? Perhaps not!
| ratelimitsteve wrote:
| >actions are identical
|
| >actively worked to deceive
|
| that's the contradiction i'm talking about. deception
| requires effort and planning, it's not just casually
| doing something. I think that as I explore this I might
| fundamentally be arguing that saying the same words when
| you believe them true vs when you believe them false are
| measurably different, and that the only way for someone
| to say something falsely in exactly the same way they do
| truthfully is for them to believe that they're true. You
| said yourself, you actively tried to deceive people.
|
| As far as using crises to undermine indistinguishability,
| that was another part of my point: if actions are
| indistinguishable between two actors we only care about
| the actors' motivation as an attempt to guess how likely
| they are to remain indistinguishable. If a crisis causes
| the two actors to distinguish themselves then, once
| again, we've undermined the original premise of the
| experiment.
| DenisM wrote:
| This presupposes a constantly stable and omnipresent and
| benevolent society. Which it is not. Society always has
| reprehensible things in it, sometimes systematically
| sometimes sporadically. Society is not omnipresent or
| omniscient. And things go up and down over time. And one is
| never exposed to the whole society.
| amarant wrote:
| The counter point to this is the well-meaning idiot who
| causes destruction by doing things they, quite naively,
| believe will have positive outcomes.
|
| When the outcome predictably is terrible, do we let them
| off the hook for meaning well?
| some_furry wrote:
| I don't know. How are the Kardashians doing?
| mihaic wrote:
| Well said, this sort of oversimplified dichotomy is used by
| people to get out of responsability. "We have to choose between
| X and Y, so I just choose X because it's better".
|
| No wonder the author is a Facebook exec that want to be
| ignorant of ultimate intent, instead of reconciling them.
| speak_plainly wrote:
| It is an over simplification but Rousseau does paint this
| picture of humanity's natural goodness corrupted by society, or
| what the author calls circumstance. This idea is a cornerstone
| of the Discourse on Inequality and Emile.
|
| Discourse on the Origin and Foundations of Inequality among Men
| (1755) - "Nothing is more gentle than man in his primitive
| state... he is restrained by natural pity from doing harm to
| others."
|
| Emile, or On Education (1762) - "Everything is good as it
| leaves the hands of the Author of things; everything
| degenerates in the hands of man."
|
| Confessions (1782-89) - "I have displayed myself as I was, vile
| and despicable when I was so, good, generous, sublime when I
| was so; I have unveiled my interior being."
|
| For Rousseau, humans possess innate moral sentiment, society
| corrupts through things like comparison, and the good life is
| maintained by being true to one's natural self.
|
| I also think the focus of this little essay is about
| contrasting two modern identities, the expressive self and the
| performative and productive self, and isn't steeped in moral
| psychology. Bringing Aristotle into this is wholly
| anachronistic and misses the point.
| mannykannot wrote:
| Ben Franklin? He took a principled stand against kings that
| threatened to be extremely costly for himself.
|
| The irony here (given who the author works for) is not lost on
| me.
| NaomiLehman wrote:
| 20 years at Meta... That must be tough.
| pavel_lishin wrote:
| Working at Facebook in 2005 was definitely defensible. I
| suppose every frog gets boiled, eventually.
| getnormality wrote:
| I have no position on the OP, but this comment has more shame
| than content. The couple fig leaves of quibbling over dubiously
| relevant points doesn't really clarify whether the OP's point
| is incorrect. I have no reason to take your opinion as more
| authoritative than the OP's when you don't even really engage
| with what the OP says.
|
| *edited for nuance
| augusto-moura wrote:
| I don't agree that the comment is empty, it did remind me of
| some philosophy classes, and it did entice my curiosity
| enough to search about Rousseau again. Your comment though,
| in poethic irony, doesn't bring anything to the table besides
| complaining about the top comment.
| lukeasrodgers wrote:
| Here are the article's main points, as I see them:
|
| 1. The "modern American self" is best defined by (the tension
| between) Franklin and Rousseau. 2. Rousseau believes X and
| Franklin believes Y. 3. "Modern America" (society? politics?
| government?) flip flops between these two, though they are
| "almost entirely incompatible". 4. The author claims one of
| them scales, and says he likes it.
|
| I engage directly with claims 2 and 3.
|
| I think 1 is another _completely absurd_ simplification. I do
| not address it, or claim 4. I don 't see how that constitutes
| lack of engagement or quibbling. Perhaps I could have written
| an essay refuting OP with many citations, but I don't think
| that level of work is required to constitute legitimate
| engagement.
|
| I guess you're probably right that my comment is more shame
| than content, maybe 60/40 shame to content, I should have
| dialed that down a bit. Fwiw I think it's fine to be simple-
| minded and ignorant, I am both of those things about many
| topics, but then your writing and argumentation should
| reflect your lack of knowledge and certainty. OP's article
| is, otoh, full of hot air.
| getnormality wrote:
| Okay, so, leaving the shame thing behind us, the two gaps
| that I see:
|
| 1. If someone thinks the human self is essentially good and
| society makes it bad, they could still be concerned with
| how people can behave well in society. So the fact that
| Rousseau wrote about that in The Social Contract doesn't
| seem to contradict OP.
|
| 2. If it's possible to unite intent and action in a model
| of a good person, there could still be philosophies that
| are incompatible by virtue of how they overemphasize one or
| the other. So again, I don't see how this contradicts the
| OP.
|
| I agree that the OP is probably full of hot air, but it's a
| common gloss on Rousseau I think. And definitely supported
| by the Discourse on Inequality, which says that people have
| good animal instincts, but their natural expression of
| these is inhibited by social constructs like language-based
| reasoning and property.
| alphazard wrote:
| I didn't know this about Ben Franklin until reading it here,
| but his theory strikes me as the only one (out of the
| thinkers/theories you referenced) that can be operationalized
| in a justice system, or by individuals to judge others.
|
| Until "intention" can be measured with a brain scan, it's a
| good bet that actions come from successfully actualizing
| intentions more often than not. It is ultimately about actions
| though, and the assertion with any intention based theory is
| that intentions better predict future actions than past actions
| do. If there was a mysterious 3rd thing that predicted future
| actions better than intentions or previous actions, then we
| would be interested in that instead of intentions.
| foofoo12 wrote:
| > You can't always change how you feel, but you can always decide
| what to do next.
|
| No. Most people are on autopilot most of the time and they react
| without thinking. It takes deliberate practice to be able to
| always decide what to do next.
| Toby1VC wrote:
| What do you think about the possibility that you are merely
| existing to be symbolic?
| blenderob wrote:
| I expect better from the people who lurk at
| https://news.ycombinator.com/newest and upvote stuff which help
| decide what reaches the home page. It's sad to see a shallow,
| pseudo-intellectual piece like this voted to the top. This has
| been a long time issue in /newest. I lurk there and upvote the
| good stuff to help it reach home page. But the shallow hot takes
| and ragebait rise quickly while the real gems like thoughtful
| posts made from hard work and genuine hacker spirit barely get
| any votes and rarely reach home page.
| sanjayts wrote:
| More like "you are what you think".
| immibis wrote:
| No, literally the opposite of that. That's the model which is
| being refuted.
| KaiserPro wrote:
| I do love when Boz espouses opinions.
|
| He has got better them over the years, this one is much less
| teenager trying to sound clever. Which is great, I love to see
| people grow.
|
| The problem with this is that in my professional dealings with
| him, he has two modes: empathetic & arrogant dick. At his worse
| he was fighting in the comments section of workplace, telling
| employees that they are wrong. At his best he is warm and caring,
| even funny.
|
| The problem for meta employees, is that most of the time you only
| really see arrogant dick boz.
| some_furry wrote:
| Hmm. I got the same impression from this article, despite
| having never heard of the guy before.
| kragen wrote:
| Were they wrong?
| KaiserPro wrote:
| Yes, demonstrably.
|
| https://www.trustedreviews.com/news/meta-smartwatch-
| leaked-a...
|
| That abomination should have been killed from the start.
|
| the lack of attention to user experience in _any_ of the RL
| based products
|
| The utterly stupid "blockchain compatibility" policy, which
| was too late, to fucking stupid and poorly executed.
|
| The inability to run _any_ project in RL that delivered any
| kind of value
|
| (horizon's many many many iterations is an affront to any
| kind of good governance)
| kragen wrote:
| So it was pretty important and beneficial for _someone_ to
| tell them so, and Boz ended up being the guy? That doesn 't
| sound like his worst; keeping his mouth shut on other
| occasions was almost certainly worse.
| Centigonal wrote:
| I think GP is saying that Boz was wrong (he was VP of
| VR), not the FB staffer he was arguing with. GP should
| clarify.
| KaiserPro wrote:
| Sorry yes, Boz was wrong repeatedly. Specifically in this
| instance, he was arguing about HR policy, on an HR policy
| post.
|
| Don't get me wrong, there were, and probably still are, a
| bunch of entitled pricks who are willing to post about
| the most stupid shit (I AM SHOCKED!!! that the meat was
| chewy, etc, etc, etc) but the CTO shouldn't be fighting
| in the comments section of someone else's back yard, when
| his own was on fire.
| kragen wrote:
| Oh, yeah, that puts a different spin on it.
| raffael_de wrote:
| So this text is not "teenager trying to sound clever"? I just
| thought that this is the best summary of it.
| herval wrote:
| My best memory of boz is him arguing with an intern on
| workspace and calling them "privileged", during COVID, when the
| kid asked whether the company would provide some sort of cash
| bonus since the free meals weren't available.
|
| "Teenager trying to sound clever" captures every other
| interaction perfectly.
| swiftcoder wrote:
| > this one is much less teenager trying to sound clever
|
| On the other hand, it's very much freshman-who-misunderstood-
| philosophy-101-and-integrated-it-into-his-worldview-anyway...
| photonthug wrote:
| In philosophy 101 the usual foil for _Rousseau vs.._ would be
| Hobbes, but that framing with a realist /pessimist would not
| be popular with the intended audience, where the goal is to
| lionize the nationalist, the inventors/owners, the 1%.
|
| > Despite his own moral lapses, Franklin saw himself as
| uniquely qualified to instruct Americans in morality. He
| tried to influence American moral life through the
| construction of a printing network based on a chain of
| partnerships from the Carolinas to New England. He thereby
| invented the first newspaper chain.
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Benjamin_Franklin#Newspaperman
|
| To be clear Franklin's obviously a complicated historical
| figure, a pretty awesome guy overall, and I do like American
| pragmatism generally. But it matters a lot which part of the
| guy you'd like to hold up for admiration, and elevating a
| preachy hypocrite that was an early innovator in monopolies
| and methods of controlling the masses does seem pretty
| tactical and self-serving here.
| triceratops wrote:
| > this one is much less teenager trying to sound clever
|
| I read the blog post without knowing who this person is. I
| genuinely believed the author was a young person, maybe someone
| in their early 20s, just figuring some stuff out. "Do good
| things" isn't exactly a deep philosophical or moral insight.
| I've read the same thing on Cracked for chrissakes.
| notepad0x90 wrote:
| Interesting, this post mentions two views but glosses over what
| many (most? I don't know) Americans have always believed: That we
| humans are inherently corrupt and evil by nature and need to be
| taught to do good and need to have a spiritual rebirth (the term
| is "born again") to transform our nature. The "born again" part
| from what I understand is mainly evangelized by protest
| Christians but the rest is consistent across all denominations.
|
| I know that the percentage of Christians has declined over the
| years, back in the early days of the country they used to even
| have mass at congress every Sunday. So, fair to say the amount of
| Americans who believe this has declined, but still a significant
| portion.
|
| Nevertheless, Ben Franklin and the rest may have been famous but
| they by no means reflect the beliefs of the masses at the time.
| As much as Obama, AOC and Tom Cruise's beliefs don't reflect
| modern American's views.
|
| It's quite the contrast. across societies, even people isolated
| from the rest of humanity for thousands of years, you'll find the
| same moral failures such as murder, rape, invasions and wars of
| aggression, prejudice,etc.. The view that "the world corrupts us"
| is hard to buy, even when we have everything we could possibly
| want (think healthy billionaire good), our moral character
| doesn't change, even when one is born into that life. Even
| without considering complexities like the meaning of morality, by
| a person's own accepted beliefs of morality and ethics, we fail
| by default. we do what is convenient over what we believe is
| right.
|
| The title of "You are how you act" is sort of true, but it is
| more accurate to say "You are how you decide". If we're programs,
| a program is the instructions it executes. The input data it
| processes and the execution environment will decide which
| instructions it processes for sure, and most bugs are triggered
| by specific input, but that does not change the fact that the
| bugs exist as an inherent nature of the program. And for us at
| least, we prefer to execute the most efficient (convenient)
| instructions instead of the most correct.
| dcre wrote:
| Vacuous, useless little piece. Sham thinking.
| redbell wrote:
| The title reminds me of the quote that goes.. : "You are not what
| you think you are, but what you _think_ , you _are_ ".
| DavidPiper wrote:
| Well that's a completely artificial either-or straw man.
|
| It is possible to make progress while trying to do good. Lots of
| people do that.
| begueradj wrote:
| >"The repetition of behavior, not the sincerity of belief, is
| what shapes character"
|
| To perform behavior X repeatedly and consciously for a long time,
| you have to have a belief (whether it is good or bad). Hence it
| is the sincerity of belief which shapes character.
|
| Like when you wash yourself every now and then: you repeat that
| because you have a belief that keeping yourself clean is useful.
| Without that belief, you won't waste your time on that. Behavior
| is just an expression of a belief.
| Dilettante_ wrote:
| I find the Franklin model far more useful [...] because it gives
| you agency.
|
| Does it? If our present actions make our future selves, that
| means our past actions made our present self. The moments in a
| person's life are a row of dominoes, one causing the next. There
| is no agency anywhere.
| andai wrote:
| In that case, my choice to interpret myself as having agency
| was made, by itself, in the actual absence of agency. Neat!
| StevePerkins wrote:
| This sounds like me always complaining about "Past Me"'s tech
| debt. Or when tech debt is being introduced, my team jokes
| about it being "Future Me"'s problem. It's good for a chuckle,
| but obviously there is continuity of identity.
|
| But continuity is not immutability. Your actions are a present
| thing, and define you in the present. Past actions may have
| consequences, but you are always free to act differently now.
| Likewise, your present actions don't carve a future identity in
| stone, either. "The rent is due everyday", so to speak.
| Dilettante_ wrote:
| We may be talking about two different things. When you say
| "Past actions may have consequences, but you are always free
| to act differently now.", I believe you mean that as in "just
| because you have ordered chocolate ice cream every time in
| the past does not mean it's impossible for you to order
| vanilla the next time", yes?
|
| Whereas what I am talking about is "all of your past
| experiences, the circumstances of your birth, your genetic
| predispositions and the weather in Myanmar, have created a
| world-state in which you choose chocolate today. By
| definition, you _will_ choose chocolate. "
|
| My point is that there is no "you" which makes choices in the
| present, independent from the circumstances which created it.
| raffael_de wrote:
| I'd say the modern American self is best defined by what you
| believe how other's perceive you and whether you are popular or
| not.
| jbs789 wrote:
| I found myself asking: what is he trying to achieve with this
| post.
|
| It all just seems a bit muddled once you consider his actions.
|
| Just seems like self justification.
|
| Or some direction for his employees - don't think, do.
|
| Oh right, this is the Facebook CTO. That's entirely consistent
| with their behaviour.
| sidcool wrote:
| Somehow this link got deboosted.
| vhantz wrote:
| > "Fake it until you make it" is often dismissed as shallow, but
| it's closer to Franklin's truth. Faking it long enough is making
| it. The repetition of behavior, not the sincerity of belief, is
| what shapes character. You become the kind of person who does the
| things you repeatedly do.
|
| Then you become the kind of person who fakes things?
| freedomben wrote:
| Exactly, and it has the potential to really burn others as well
| as yourself, when they do their work/job on top of what you
| claimed you had. I am not a fan of the "fake it til you make
| it" approach.
| tinfoilhatter wrote:
| More moral grandstanding and "advice" from the CTO of one of the
| most immoral corporations in the world. Never ceases to amaze me
| how highly these people think of themselves while they build and
| work for companies that consistently engage in morally bankrupt
| behavior. Talk about a complete lack of self-awareness.
| dbtc wrote:
| It's almost like people are using some kind of technology that
| lets them live in personalized bubbles with a conveniently
| simplified version of reality.
| georgemcbay wrote:
| Batman Begins did it better than this blog post.
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XwvrzauErQ0
| Atlas667 wrote:
| Rich people justifying liberalism through shitty wotdsmithing
| will never end.
| ptx wrote:
| > _Faking it long enough is making it. The repetition of
| behavior, not the sincerity of belief, is what shapes character.
| You become the kind of person who does the things you repeatedly
| do._
|
| OK, sure. And if you are faking it, the behavior you are
| repeating is to fraudulently misrepresent your work to other
| people, creating undisclosed risks for those who rely on it. The
| kind of person you become is a liar and a scammer. If you make it
| in the end, the price for your success is paid by those you
| deceived on the way.
| wvlia5 wrote:
| As we know from Yoneda Lemma
| pgspaintbrush wrote:
| A friend once told me that virtue is like going to the gym. You
| practice daily, start with smaller weights (virtuous acts), and
| review how well you did on a regular basis. You ask "am I getting
| better at this?" rather than "am I morally perfect?"
|
| If you aren't on the level of the moral greats, you start small
| and try to build up, the same way you'd start by running a 5k
| before running an ultramarathon.
|
| I hope others out there find this viewpoint as helpful as I have.
| crisdias wrote:
| So... you are a bad person then, Boz?
| anon-3988 wrote:
| Our society lives and breathes this contradiction. We believe in
| determinism and demands justice. We believe in an omnipotent God
| and is sinful. On a personal level, there is quite literally
| nothing "you" can do to change yourself; to change oneself, one
| has to change to one that changes oneself. This is recursive.
| Looking at it this way, the important thing is to create an
| environment, situation, society that makes it easier to change
| oneself for the better. "Show me the incentives, and I will tell
| you what happens" as someone might say.
| thehours wrote:
| This reminded me of this passage from Anxiety Is the Dizziness of
| Freedom by Ted Chiang:
|
| > None of us are saints, but we can all try to be better. Each
| time you do something generous, you're shaping yourself into
| someone who's more likely to be generous next time, and that
| matters.
| aitchnyu wrote:
| The soul takes on the color of its thoughts - Marcus Aurelius.
| In context, he wrote about the reams of thoughts that fly in
| our heads and how we automatically rubber stamp most of them as
| "true".
| NickC25 wrote:
| You most certainly are, Boz.
|
| You've pursued "growth" and made a bunch of wealthy people (who
| certainly don't need the money) a magnitude wealthier, by
| exploiting the negative side of youth self-consciousness.
|
| You're the CTO of what effectively is a capitalist bastard hybrid
| of the NSA, a town square, and an invasive, digital version of
| the yellow pages.
|
| You've made more money than most of us combined will see in a
| lifetime and you still continue to force ads on us, and negative
| content on young people.
|
| You are how you act, indeed.
| bloomingeek wrote:
| Bottom line, life is tough. Too much noise, variables and chances
| to screw up. (And a hundred other "things" not written.)
| Perfectionism and social competition have been warping life since
| the beginning. Cruelty is usually the default option when the
| pressures on.
|
| I can't speak for others, but for me, it's effort and seeking
| forgiveness that counts. Even then, life is still tough. Not
| breaking the accepted, compassionate laws and keeping my mouth
| shut when needed goes a long way.
| allemagne wrote:
| >The modern American self is best defined by two Enlightenment
| thinkers who never met but have been arguing in our heads ever
| since.
|
| This reads to me a little like: "The distracted boyfriend meme
| can be found at the helm of the Western mind whenever we
| encounter betrayal and disloyalty."
|
| I get that this is more of a trope or a shorthand than literally
| saying that a certain thinker invented the idea of a good person
| being defined by their actions, but to me it's worth saying that
| these concepts and ideas are probably as timeless as language,
| not something invented a few hundred years ago, not something
| invented by Plato.
| powersurge360 wrote:
| I didn't see it mentioned in the comments so I guess I get to be
| the person to post the quote!
|
| > "We are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful about what
| we pretend to be"
|
| Excerpt From Mother Night Kurt Vonnegut
|
| This is often quoted from Mother Night but it's actually in the
| preface so I don't know how many people actually see it within
| the work. Anyways, rather than self aggrandizing in the way the
| linked article is, the story in the book is a cautionary take.
| The book is about a Nazi propagandist that is secretly an
| American agent feeding broadcast lines to the Allied forces in
| subtleties in communicating his propaganda like pauses in between
| words and other tics.
|
| The idea in the book is what does it matter to be a good person
| in private but a driver of evil in public? How much bad does it
| take to outweigh good and if you do bad things to effect
| something positive, are you absolved of those bad things anyways?
|
| No, I think not. If you do ill to achieve good you are
| accountable to both. It is easy, sometimes, to imagine that some
| thing you've done has overridden and eliminated some other thing
| you've done but it isn't really true. You've done both. I
| recognize I'm speaking in circles a little but I think it's
| important to confront the idea that the things you've done are
| not undone by other things you've done just because you feel the
| ends have justified the means.
|
| Remember that who you think you are is a private fantasy. Who you
| actually are is how you are experienced.
| lo_zamoyski wrote:
| Human identity is first a question for philosophical
| anthropology. What does it mean to be human? What is the nature
| of human identity? What is the nature of individual human
| identity? What does it mean to be a social animal, especially a
| human social animal? What does it mean to be an intellectual
| animal? A moral animal? What is personhood? And so on.
|
| You will discover that there are different aspects to what and
| whom a person is. How we act is a matter of volition and thus
| choice motivated by reasoning. Our actions are expressions of the
| powers we possess, that is, exercised potentials that belong to
| us. Thus, our actions are the expression of our moral agency; I
| _choose_ to _exercise_ certain potentials for certain _reasons_.
| The reasons we do things have moral import - they are part of the
| act as two apparently similar acts are different if the motives
| are different, making our motives partly constitutive of the
| moral character of an act. The exercise of our potential per se
| likewise has moral import - it is the motive made manifest in
| act.
|
| Each act is a step in some direction. There is an expression that
| each decision moves us either toward heaven or toward hell. A
| good act is both good in motivation and in the motivated act. A
| good act actualizes and develops the human person acting toward a
| fruition and fullness of humanity-in-potency. A bad act acts
| against such fruition, corrupting the person through ill motive
| and damaging acts, or squandering potential when there is a moral
| possibility of exercise.
|
| So, from a _moral_ perspective, we can say that we are our
| decided acts. The acts are not just ticked off boxes on a list,
| but actualizations of the person. There are higher actualizations
| and lower actualizations.
|
| In that sense, to speak of actions and intentions as if they were
| distinct is a false dichotomy. You can speak of reasoning and
| motives as the "inner" aspect and the manifested act as the
| "outer" aspect, if you want. But they constitute a single act as
| a matter of fact. You cannot speak intelligibly of one without
| reference to the other for the same reason you cannot speak of a
| cause or its effect without reference to the other. The nature of
| an act is both in motive and in execution.
|
| And "fake it until you make it" is a misunderstanding. There is
| nothing fake involved. I have potentials. Initially, I do not
| have experience exercising them. I have little familiarity with
| them. So I _try_ to exercise them. Typically, first attempts aren
| 't very good, but I learn from the effects of my trial, and
| perhaps from the feedback of others, to "calibrate" my subsequent
| attempts. This is called practice. I repeat in order to discover
| and work out and strengthen the actualization of a potential.
| This is a not error in a moral sense. It is a kind of dialogue
| with nature.
| pyrale wrote:
| Interesting view from the CTO of Meta.
|
| What does that make him?
| gbacon wrote:
| See also _Atomic Habits_ by James Clear:
| https://jamesclear.com/atomic-habits
|
| In Franklin's autobiography, he names 13 virtues and describes
| his "fake it until you make it" approach, as boz characterizes
| it.
|
| _My intention being to acquire the_ habitude _of all these
| virtues, I judged it would be well not to distract my attention
| by attempting the whole at once, but to fix it on one of them at
| a time, and, when I should be master of that, then to proceed to
| another, and so on, till I should have gone thro' the thirteen;
| and, as the previous acquisition of some might facilitate the
| acquisition of certain others, I arranged them with that view, as
| they stand above. Temperance first, as it tends to procure that
| coolness and clearness of head which is so necessary where
| constant vigilance was to be kept up, and guard maintained
| against the unremitting attraction of ancient habits and the
| force of perpetual temptations. This being acquired and
| established, Silence would be more easy; and my desire being to
| gain knowledge at the same time that I improved in virtue, and
| considering that in conversation it was obtained rather by the
| use of the ears than of the tongue, and therefore wishing to
| break a habit I was getting into prattling, punning, and joking,
| which only made me acceptable to trifling company, I gave_
| Silence _the second place. This and the next,_ Order, _I expected
| would allow me more time for attending to my project and my
| studies. Resolution, once because habitual, would keep me firm in
| my endeavors to obtain all the subsequent virtues;_ Frugality
| _and Industry, freeing me from my remaining debt, and producing
| affluence and independence, would make more easy the practice of
| Sincerity and Justice, etc., Conceiving, then, that, agreeably to
| the advice of Pythagoras in his Garden Verses, daily examination
| would be necessary, I contrived the following method for
| conducting that examination._ (emphasis original)
|
| https://www.ushistory.org/franklin/autobiography/page38.htm
|
| He further describes how he tracked his progress.
|
| _I made a little book, in which I allotted a page for each of
| the virtues. I ruled each page with red ink, so as to have seven
| columns, one for each day of the week, marking each column with a
| letter for the day. I crossed these columns with thirteen red
| lines, marking the beginning of each line with the first letter
| of one of the virtues, on which line, and in its proper column, I
| might mark, by a little black spot, every fault I found upon
| examination to have been committed respecting that virtue upon
| that day._
|
| See p. 39 for his table:
| https://www.ushistory.org/franklin/autobiography/page39.htm
|
| _I determined to give a week's strict attention to each of the
| virtues successively. Thus, in the first week, my great guard was
| to avoid every the least offense against_ Temperance, _leaving
| the other virtues to their ordinary chance, only marking every
| evening the faults of the day. Thus, if in the first week I could
| keep my first line, marked T, clear of spots, I supposed the
| habit of that virtue so much strengthened, and its opposite
| weakened, that I might venture extending my attention to include
| the next, and for the following week keep both lines clear of
| spots. Proceeding thus to the last, I could go thro' a course
| complete in thirteen weeks, and four courses in a years. And like
| him who, having a garden to weed, does not attempt to eradicate
| all the bad herbs at once, which would exceed his reach and his
| strength, but works on one of the beds at a time, and, having
| accomplished the first, proceeds to a second, so I should have, I
| hoped, the encouraging pleasure of seeing on my pages the
| progress I made in virtue, by clearing successively my lines of
| their spots, till in the end, by a number of courses, I should be
| happy in viewing a clean book, after a thirteen weeks' daily
| examination._
| skolskoly wrote:
| Fake it til you make it is good. But, better yet, we figured out
| you can just keep faking it until some other sucker wants to hold
| the bag.
| freedomben wrote:
| I'm at a point where I'm hesitant to do any business with tech
| startups because I've been burned so many times by the "fake it
| til you make it" approach of saying their product did things it
| doesn't do. In one particular vendor's case, I found out about
| the fakery when the product I shipped on top of their platform
| keeps getting hacked.
|
| I've probably swung the pendulum the other way too far, but
| I've gotten very direct and frank with what we have today, what
| we can deliver tomorrow, and whether it's something we won't
| add to our product.
| Xemplolo wrote:
| You learn to act by doing it.
|
| The more you do it, the more automatic it is.
|
| For example: I took ritalin on and off but with long enough
| phases, that I do have behavour patterns were i act like i was on
| ritalin (cleaning stuff etc.)
|
| I also thought about people who drunk a lot more alcohol when
| they were younger: they learned how to be a certain way because
| they were able to act like this by drinking alcohol.
|
| I took MDMA a lot later in life and when i was, i definitly had
| like a 'MDMA dance echo' in my brain after.
| akshatjiwan wrote:
| Rousseau was famous for saying that man is born free and is
| everywhere in chains. He advocated for self rule and formulation
| of laws by the people. Yet after 100s of years of democracy
| (thousands really) the corrupting influence of social norms has
| not really been remedied.
|
| Inequalities still exist,corruption still happens and social
| institutions that were once liberating become oppressive over
| time.
|
| His ideal of self governance has not been realised as most nation
| states have adopted a representative democracy. People don't
| really make the rules. They just handover the power to someone
| else who makes them on their behalf.
|
| It's certainly right that Franklin believed in practicing virtue.
| He famously kept a log of his good and bad actions.
|
| Yet there is another great philosopher that has had tremendous
| impact on American society whom the author has not mentioned.
| Emerson believed in transcending societal definition of virtue
| and vice and follow one's own inclinations. His ideas of self
| reliance resonated with American people and brought about a
| change in their thinking when they started to believe in
| themselves rather than looking to Europe for intellectual
| guidance.
|
| I find it difficult to accept either Franklin's or Rousseau's
| view as they were more politically motivated--Rousseau wanted his
| social contract,Franklin worshiped Socrates but when it came to
| governence he kicked him aside to chose democracy,an idea that
| was popular at the time due to thinkers like Locke.
|
| Emerson gave people true agency over their lives and inspired
| them to think critically and not sheepishly believe a thing to be
| good or bad. He was more revolutionary than Franklin (Self
| reliance was released around the time of civil war) and gave
| people courage to question institutional authority and he
| eventually became more impactful than Rousseau's collectivism.
| ruszki wrote:
| > you can always decide what to do next.
|
| I think everybody can find examples from their life when this was
| not true. And not even just simple one like a reaction to a
| flying object towards your face, but some high level impulses,
| like when I was in love, I definitely couldn't control my acts
| completely. Of course, I was still responsible for my acts, but
| they were only instincts, no real thinking was involved.
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