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.
> 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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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?
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...
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.
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.
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).
> 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!
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.
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 Émile.
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.”
Émile, 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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".
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:
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.
> 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.
> 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.
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."
> 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."
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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..
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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?
> 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.
"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)
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!
> “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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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".
>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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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".
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.
> 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.
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.
"...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.
"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]
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
"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.
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.
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.
> 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.
>"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.
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)
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.
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.
Is this the result of tech bros refusing to study the humanities?
Constantly rediscovering old proverbs?
“This is the only story of mine whose moral I know,” writes Kurt Vonnegut at the beginning of his 1962 novel Mother Night. “I don't think it's a marvelous moral; I simply happen to know what it is: We are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful about what we pretend to be.” -Kurt Vonnegut
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.
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.
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.
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.
20 years at Meta... That must be tough.
Working at Facebook in 2005 was definitely defensible. I suppose every frog gets boiled, eventually.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
That's very insightful. Could you share some references for further reading? I'd like to explore this topic a bit on my own.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
If the two are indistinguishable from an outsider's perspective how would you know which one to trust?
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.
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?
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?
Which in the end is precisely the reason why we want to understand the intentions behind the actions, right?
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...
This sounds like a job for cryptography!
(No, it doesn't, actually.)
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.
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?
I don't know. How are the Kardashians doing?
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.
If their intentions are really different their thinking is probably different.
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).
> 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!
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.
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 Émile.
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.”
Émile, 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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
This is good stuff coming from the guy who said it's ok if people coordinate terrorist attacks on facebook as long as the company continues to grow
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.
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".
In the immortal words of Homer Simpson:
“If he’s so smart why’s he dead?”
Can’t get much simpler ethics than that
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.
> 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.
> 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.
> 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.
True, they shouldn't ban jihadists, but forward the intel to the army so drone operators can dispatch them once and for all.
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/...
What is inconsistent between banning hate speech and banning advocacy for terrorism?
> 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/...
Not that I disbelieve you but accusations like this work much better if you can link to a source (even archive.org)
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
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.
On the plus side, Boz is liked by basically nobody (certainly very few who have had the misfortune to work for him)
Just read "Careless People"
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
>>> and how great your turds look
I do not want to know how they turned this into a double blind study.
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.
> 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.
"It is hard for an empty sack to stand upright."
- Benjamin Franklin
Gut mind connection
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.
> 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.
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.
So this text is not "teenager trying to sound clever"? I just thought that this is the best summary of it.
> 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...
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.
Were they wrong?
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)
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.
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.
Hmm. I got the same impression from this article, despite having never heard of the guy before.
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.
> 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..
> 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.
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 :)
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
> 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.
> but we must live as though it is not
This implies you can choose how to live though
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.
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?
> 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.
"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)
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 :)
Also a semester of lectures on Evolutionary Psychology
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NNnIGh9g6fA&list=PLMwddpZ_3n...
I love Sapolsky, but not this book. He was out of his depth on this topic.
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!
> “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?
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.
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.
Hey, wow, a think piece that didn't even say the word "AI".
good piece, I've immediately pasted everything to Sonnet 4.5 to get additional reasoning about it.
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.
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.
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.
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".
>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.
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.
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.
> 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
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.
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.
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.
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.
The title reminds me of the quote that goes.. : "You are not what you think you are, but what you think, you are".
Vacuous, useless little piece. Sham thinking.
Interesting view from the CTO of Meta.
What does that make him?
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.
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.
In that case, my choice to interpret myself as having agency was made, by itself, in the actual absence of agency. Neat!
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.
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.
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.
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".
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.
The mask becomes the face
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
"...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.
"You are how you act"...and unfortunately for people like him how they act is well documented.
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.
Agency is key to (personal, not economic) growth
>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.
What do you think about the possibility that you are merely existing to be symbolic?
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.
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
"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.
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.
just because some people pervert the concept doesn't invalidate the concept.
A good and a bad doesn't make a neutral.
As we know from Yoneda Lemma
Somehow this link got deboosted.
This is the shallowest kind of pseudo-intellectualism, why is this even on HN?
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.
As Patrick Bateman said: "But 'inside' doesn‘t matter."
So… you are a bad person then, Boz?
Batman Begins did it better than this blog post.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XwvrzauErQ0
Umm No. You are what others perceive you as. Infact, there is hardly anything else other than that.
Spoken like a true psychopath: uninhibited by strong, conflicting emotions, because there are none.
> 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.
More like "you are what you think".
No, literally the opposite of that. That's the model which is being refuted.
>"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.
If ever there was a group that could benefit from this advice, it is the famously spectrum-associated programmers.
There's something to be said for honesty. There's a heart in there, to express, theoretically. Advantages might be enjoyed thereby.
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.
Open article.
"The modern American self..."
Close the article.
I guess we know who exactly are you. By your actions, an enabler of atrocities, of democratic decline, of teen depression.
Yup, your actions sure do speak.
Rich people justifying liberalism through shitty wotdsmithing will never end.
Is this the result of tech bros refusing to study the humanities?
Constantly rediscovering old proverbs?
“This is the only story of mine whose moral I know,” writes Kurt Vonnegut at the beginning of his 1962 novel Mother Night. “I don't think it's a marvelous moral; I simply happen to know what it is: We are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful about what we pretend to be.” -Kurt Vonnegut
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.
Are you claiming those two quotes are somehow the same? Or just trying to sound snarky, and therefore smart?
Neither of those options.
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.
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.