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COMMENT PAGE FOR:
HTML You are how you act
ruszki wrote 14 hours 14 min ago:
> you can always decide what to do next.
I think everybody can find examples from their life when this was not
true. And not even just simple one like a reaction to a flying object
towards your face, but some high level impulses, like when I was in
love, I definitely couldnât control my acts completely. Of course, I
was still responsible for my acts, but they were only instincts, no
real thinking was involved.
akshatjiwan wrote 15 hours 14 min ago:
Rousseau was famous for saying that man is born free and is everywhere
in chains. He advocated for self rule and formulation of laws by the
people. Yet after 100s of years of democracy (thousands really) the
corrupting influence of social norms has not really been remedied.
Inequalities still exist,corruption still happens and social
institutions that were once liberating become oppressive over time.
His ideal of self governance has not been realised as most nation
states have adopted a representative democracy. People don't really
make the rules. They just handover the power to someone else who makes
them on their behalf.
It's certainly right that Franklin believed in practicing virtue. He
famously kept a log of his good and bad actions.
Yet there is another great philosopher that has had tremendous impact
on American society whom the author has not mentioned. Emerson believed
in transcending societal definition of virtue and vice and follow one's
own inclinations. His ideas of self reliance resonated with American
people and brought about a change in their thinking when they started
to believe in themselves rather than looking to Europe for intellectual
guidance.
I find it difficult to accept either Franklin's or Rousseau's view as
they were more politically motivatedâRousseau wanted his social
contract,Franklin worshiped Socrates but when it came to governence he
kicked him aside to chose democracy,an idea that was popular at the
time due to thinkers like Locke.
Emerson gave people true agency over their lives and inspired them to
think critically and not sheepishly believe a thing to be good or bad.
He was more revolutionary than Franklin (Self reliance was released
around the time of civil war) and gave people courage to question
institutional authority and he eventually became more impactful than
Rousseau's collectivism.
Xemplolo wrote 17 hours 4 min ago:
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.
skolskoly wrote 18 hours 1 min ago:
Fake it til you make it is good. But, better yet, we figured out you
can just keep faking it until some other sucker wants to hold the bag.
freedomben wrote 17 hours 26 min ago:
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.
gbacon wrote 18 hours 46 min ago:
See also Atomic Habits by James Clear: [1] In Franklinâs
autobiography, he names 13 virtues and describes his âfake it until
you make itâ 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 throâ 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)
[2] 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: [3] I determined to give a weekâs 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 throâ 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 weeksâ daily examination.
HTML [1]: https://jamesclear.com/atomic-habits
HTML [2]: https://www.ushistory.org/franklin/autobiography/page38.htm
HTML [3]: https://www.ushistory.org/franklin/autobiography/page39.htm
pyrale wrote 18 hours 50 min ago:
Interesting view from the CTO of Meta.
What does that make him?
lo_zamoyski wrote 18 hours 52 min ago:
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.
powersurge360 wrote 19 hours 13 min ago:
I didnât see it mentioned in the comments so I guess I get to be the
person to post the quote!
> âWe are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful about what we
pretend to beâ
Excerpt From
Mother Night
Kurt Vonnegut
This is often quoted from Mother Night but itâs actually in the
preface so I donât 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 youâve done
has overridden and eliminated some other thing youâve done but it
isnât really true. Youâve done both. I recognize Iâm speaking in
circles a little but I think itâs important to confront the idea that
the things youâve done are not undone by other things youâve 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.
allemagne wrote 19 hours 18 min ago:
>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.
bloomingeek wrote 19 hours 40 min ago:
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.
NickC25 wrote 19 hours 50 min ago:
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.
thehours wrote 19 hours 50 min ago:
This reminded me of this passage from Anxiety Is the Dizziness of
Freedom by Ted Chiang:
> None of us are saints, but we can all try to be better. Each time you
do something generous, you're shaping yourself into someone who's more
likely to be generous next time, and that matters.
aitchnyu wrote 16 hours 57 min ago:
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".
anon-3988 wrote 19 hours 53 min ago:
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.
crisdias wrote 20 hours 1 min ago:
So⦠you are a bad person then, Boz?
pgspaintbrush wrote 20 hours 4 min ago:
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.
wvlia5 wrote 20 hours 7 min ago:
As we know from Yoneda Lemma
ptx wrote 20 hours 10 min ago:
> 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.
Atlas667 wrote 20 hours 12 min ago:
Rich people justifying liberalism through shitty wotdsmithing will
never end.
georgemcbay wrote 20 hours 23 min ago:
Batman Begins did it better than this blog post.
HTML [1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XwvrzauErQ0
tinfoilhatter wrote 20 hours 26 min ago:
More moral grandstanding and "advice" from the CTO of one of the most
immoral corporations in the world. Never ceases to amaze me how highly
these people think of themselves while they build and work for
companies that consistently engage in morally bankrupt behavior. Talk
about a complete lack of self-awareness.
dbtc wrote 16 hours 41 min ago:
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.
vhantz wrote 20 hours 49 min ago:
> âFake it until you make itâ is often dismissed as shallow, but
itâs closer to Franklinâs 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?
skeaker wrote 11 hours 8 min ago:
I have read it in the past as a way to deal with imposter syndrome.
You push past it by believing that you're tricking the system by
faking it despite your own perceived inadequacy, when in fact you are
performing perfectly fine. You do this until the results of your work
are evident enough to ward off imposter syndrome. If you are indeed
doing bad fake work then I guess this would fall apart, yes.
freedomben wrote 17 hours 25 min ago:
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.
sidcool wrote 21 hours 19 min ago:
Somehow this link got deboosted.
jbs789 wrote 21 hours 24 min ago:
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 - donât think, do.
Oh right, this is the Facebook CTO. Thatâs entirely consistent with
their behaviour.
raffael_de wrote 21 hours 24 min ago:
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.
Dilettante_ wrote 21 hours 39 min ago:
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.
StevePerkins wrote 18 hours 10 min ago:
This sounds like me always complaining about "Past Me"'s tech debt.
Or when tech debt is being introduced, my team jokes about it being
"Future Me"'s problem. It's good for a chuckle, but obviously there
is continuity of identity.
But continuity is not immutability. Your actions are a present
thing, and define you in the present. Past actions may have
consequences, but you are always free to act differently now.
Likewise, your present actions don't carve a future identity in
stone, either. "The rent is due everyday", so to speak.
Dilettante_ wrote 16 hours 52 min ago:
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.
andai wrote 21 hours 16 min ago:
In that case, my choice to interpret myself as having agency was
made, by itself, in the actual absence of agency. Neat!
begueradj wrote 21 hours 40 min ago:
>"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.
DavidPiper wrote 21 hours 40 min ago:
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.
redbell wrote 21 hours 40 min ago:
The title reminds me of the quote that goes.. : "You are not what you
think you are, but what you think, you are".
dcre wrote 21 hours 43 min ago:
Vacuous, useless little piece. Sham thinking.
notepad0x90 wrote 21 hours 49 min ago:
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.
KaiserPro wrote 22 hours 9 min ago:
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.
triceratops wrote 20 hours 12 min ago:
> 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.
swiftcoder wrote 20 hours 14 min ago:
> this one is much less teenager trying to sound clever
On the other hand, it's very much
freshman-who-misunderstood-philosophy-101-and-integrated-it-into-his-
worldview-anyway...
photonthug wrote 17 hours 53 min ago:
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. [1] 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.
HTML [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Benjamin_Franklin#Newspaperm...
herval wrote 21 hours 20 min ago:
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.
chipsrafferty wrote 10 hours 54 min ago:
That sounds pretty fair to me. Having a Meta salary means you can
afford to buy food. Having free food on top of a $300,000 income
is pretty privileged and complaining about it being taken away even
more so.
herval wrote 9 hours 17 min ago:
Interns donât make $300k, buddy. At the time, they made
~$6k/mo. And were forced to move to the Bay Area despite the
lockdown. To get put down by a dude zooming from his mansion in
Hawaii.
raffael_de wrote 21 hours 23 min ago:
So this text is not "teenager trying to sound clever"? I just thought
that this is the best summary of it.
kragen wrote 21 hours 53 min ago:
Were they wrong?
KaiserPro wrote 21 hours 43 min ago:
Yes, demonstrably. [1] 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)
HTML [1]: https://www.trustedreviews.com/news/meta-smartwatch-leaked...
kragen wrote 21 hours 37 min ago:
So it was pretty important and beneficial for someone to tell
them so, and Boz ended up being the guy? That doesn't sound like
his worst; keeping his mouth shut on other occasions was almost
certainly worse.
Centigonal wrote 19 hours 17 min ago:
I think GP is saying that Boz was wrong (he was VP of VR), not
the FB staffer he was arguing with. GP should clarify.
KaiserPro wrote 14 hours 7 min ago:
Sorry yes, Boz was wrong repeatedly. Specifically in this
instance, he was arguing about HR policy, on an HR policy
post.
Don't get me wrong, there were, and probably still are, a
bunch of entitled pricks who are willing to post about the
most stupid shit (I AM SHOCKED!!! that the meat was chewy,
etc, etc, etc) but the CTO shouldn't be fighting in the
comments section of someone else's back yard, when his own
was on fire.
kragen wrote 13 hours 30 min ago:
Oh, yeah, that puts a different spin on it.
some_furry wrote 22 hours 2 min ago:
Hmm. I got the same impression from this article, despite having
never heard of the guy before.
sanjayts wrote 22 hours 11 min ago:
More like "you are what you think".
immibis wrote 21 hours 17 min ago:
No, literally the opposite of that. That's the model which is being
refuted.
blenderob wrote 22 hours 12 min ago:
I expect better from the people who lurk at [1] 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.
HTML [1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/newest
Toby1VC wrote 22 hours 17 min ago:
What do you think about the possibility that you are merely existing to
be symbolic?
foofoo12 wrote 22 hours 18 min ago:
> You canât 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.
lukeasrodgers wrote 22 hours 22 min ago:
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.
natmaka wrote 5 hours 49 min ago:
Character is destiny. The content of your character is your choice.
Day by day, what you choose, what you think and what you do is who
you become. -- Heraclitus
alphazard wrote 17 hours 29 min ago:
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.
getnormality wrote 21 hours 44 min ago:
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
lukeasrodgers wrote 21 hours 11 min ago:
Here are the article's main points, as I see them:
1. The "modern American self" is best defined by (the tension
between) Franklin and Rousseau.
2. Rousseau believes X and Franklin believes Y.
3. "Modern America" (society? politics? government?) flip flops
between these two, though they are "almost entirely incompatible".
4. The author claims one of them scales, and says he likes it.
I engage directly with claims 2 and 3.
I think 1 is another completely absurd simplification. I do not
address it, or claim 4. I don't see how that constitutes lack of
engagement or quibbling. Perhaps I could have written an essay
refuting OP with many citations, but I don't think that level of
work is required to constitute legitimate engagement.
I guess you're probably right that my comment is more shame than
content, maybe 60/40 shame to content, I should have dialed that
down a bit. Fwiw I think it's fine to be simple-minded and
ignorant, I am both of those things about many topics, but then
your writing and argumentation should reflect your lack of
knowledge and certainty. OP's article is, otoh, full of hot air.
getnormality wrote 20 hours 40 min ago:
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.
augusto-moura wrote 21 hours 38 min ago:
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.
mannykannot wrote 21 hours 49 min ago:
Ben Franklin? He took a principled stand against kings that
threatened to be extremely costly for himself.
The irony here (given who the author works for) is not lost on me.
NaomiLehman wrote 18 hours 19 min ago:
20 years at Meta... That must be tough.
pavel_lishin wrote 18 hours 8 min ago:
Working at Facebook in 2005 was definitely defensible. I suppose
every frog gets boiled, eventually.
speak_plainly wrote 21 hours 54 min ago:
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 Ãmile.
Discourse on the Origin and Foundations of Inequality among Men
(1755)
- âNothing is more gentle than man in his primitive state⦠he is
restrained by natural pity from doing harm to others.â
Ãmile, or On Education (1762)
- âEverything is good as it leaves the hands of the Author of
things; everything degenerates in the hands of man.â
Confessions (1782â89)
- âI 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.â
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.
mihaic wrote 22 hours 10 min ago:
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.
shandor wrote 22 hours 11 min ago:
> concordance of action and "intention" .... must be united in
ethically good action
Yeah, I had to disagree with how TFA brought "fake it till you make
it" into this very discussion.
Yes, one can have "faking" that ultimately ends up creating the thing
it promised....but I fear that for each such benign or constructive
"fake" there are so many cases of Theranos et al that I could ever
remove what you called intention and ethically good action from the
calculation.
some_furry wrote 22 hours 6 min ago:
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.
amarant wrote 19 hours 12 min ago:
The counter point to this is the well-meaning idiot who causes
destruction by doing things they, quite naively, believe will
have positive outcomes.
When the outcome predictably is terrible, do we let them off the
hook for meaning well?
some_furry wrote 18 hours 47 min ago:
I don't know. How are the Kardashians doing?
DenisM wrote 19 hours 42 min ago:
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.
ratelimitsteve wrote 19 hours 49 min ago:
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.
some_furry wrote 18 hours 48 min ago:
> Thinking is, after all, an action, and all of their actions
are identical. Therefore it seems like your example assumes
Alice's behavior both is and isn't identical to Bob's.
By your logic, I was heterosexual for my entire young adult
life when I actively worked to deceive people from realizing my
actual orientation :P
People employ dishonesty for lots of reasons, and in myriad
ways. Sure, in this thought experiment, perfect
indistinguishability means the difference is inconsequential.
But you can use crises as an oracle to observe different
behaviors, and thus undermine its indistinguishability.
To keep the cryptography going, this is like an active vs
passive attack. Sure, it's IND-KPA, but is it IND-CPA or
IND-CCA? Perhaps not!
ratelimitsteve wrote 14 hours 43 min ago:
>actions are identical
>actively worked to deceive
that's the contradiction i'm talking about. deception
requires effort and planning, it's not just casually doing
something. I think that as I explore this I might
fundamentally be arguing that saying the same words when you
believe them true vs when you believe them false are
measurably different, and that the only way for someone to
say something falsely in exactly the same way they do
truthfully is for them to believe that they're true. You said
yourself, you actively tried to deceive people.
As far as using crises to undermine indistinguishability,
that was another part of my point: if actions are
indistinguishable between two actors we only care about the
actors' motivation as an attempt to guess how likely they are
to remain indistinguishable. If a crisis causes the two
actors to distinguish themselves then, once again, we've
undermined the original premise of the experiment.
lithocarpus wrote 18 hours 59 min ago:
If their intentions are really different their thinking is
probably different.
ratelimitsteve wrote 18 hours 11 min ago:
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).
theptip wrote 20 hours 11 min ago:
This exact problem comes up in AI alignment. Itâs not enough to
just look at the legible outputs.
If you are going to trust someone with important
responsibilities, you want them to âshow their workingâ 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.
alangou wrote 20 hours 57 min ago:
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.
Thatâs why in the Sermon on the Mount, Christ says âIt 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.â
You will find similar principles expressed in Buddhist teachings,
or the Bhagavad Gita, or Confucian ethical philosophy. In this
instance, anger on its own is merely a seed. But if left to grow,
and it grows by you watering it, then eventually it expresses
itself in a much more destructive way.
BurningFrog wrote 20 hours 22 min ago:
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.
hxtk wrote 17 hours 25 min ago:
Thereâs 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 âquantum
changeâ 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 âMotivational
Interviewingâ 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, Iâm inclined to
agree with GP.
some_furry wrote 17 hours 3 min ago:
That's very insightful. Could you share some references for
further reading? I'd like to explore this topic a bit on my
own.
hxtk wrote 15 hours 55 min ago:
The main resource that I recommend is the one towards the
bottom of the comment: âMotivational Interviewingâ by
W.R. Miller and Stephen Rollnick. Iâve 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 itâs 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 âresistanceâ into âsustain talkâ and
âdiscord,â 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.
alangou wrote 17 hours 34 min ago:
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.
shandor wrote 19 hours 26 min ago:
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 âfake it till you make itâ 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 isnât positive hustle
and tenacity, but just a habit of outright lying, constantly
reinforcing itself.
Sometimes itâs impossible to see from the outside what is
which until it breaks down.
mannykannot wrote 21 hours 58 min ago:
It's a fair question, but would you trust them equally in an
unanticipated crisis, where doing the right thing might be costly
in hard-to-predict ways?
justbees wrote 21 hours 51 min ago:
If the two are indistinguishable from an outsider's perspective
how would you know which one to trust?
vacuity wrote 21 hours 33 min ago:
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.
mannykannot wrote 21 hours 38 min ago:
You can phrase the same question thus: which set of traits is
more likely to lead a person to stay true to prior form in a
crisis?
some_furry wrote 21 hours 33 min ago:
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. [1] 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?
HTML [1]: https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/jun...
shandor wrote 19 hours 22 min ago:
Which in the end is precisely the reason why we want to
understand the intentions behind the actions, right?
some_furry wrote 18 hours 51 min ago:
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:
HTML [1]: https://soatok.blog/2025/10/15/the-dreamseeker...
some_furry wrote 21 hours 39 min ago:
This sounds like a job for cryptography!
(No, it doesn't, actually.)
some_furry wrote 22 hours 11 min ago:
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.
bayindirh wrote 22 hours 22 min ago:
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".
delichon wrote 22 hours 22 min ago:
> We begin pure and only fail because society, obligation, or
expectation pulls us away from who we truly are.
s/pulls us away from/reveals
cgriswald wrote 21 hours 43 min ago:
Your substitution would make that sentence nonsensical. We canât
begin pure and through action be revealed to actually be impure.
Both Rousseauâs and Franklinâs views have utility. One requires
one to express oneâs 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 âa bad personâ has
no reason to even try to be good except to avoid consequences. Itâs
a bigger cop out than âsociety made meâ while simultaneously
puritanical in ignoring the role of outside influence like society.
01284a7e wrote 22 hours 22 min ago:
"...a 2016 internal memo written by Facebook executive Andrew "Boz"
Bosworth, leaked in 2018, which stated that the company's growth was
paramount and that negative consequences, such as harm from bullying or
terrorism, were acceptable collateral damage".
Don't submit stuff from this guy, he is an atrocious human being.
SkyeCA wrote 22 hours 2 min ago:
"You are how you act"...and unfortunately for people like him how
they act is well documented.
rester324 wrote 22 hours 24 min ago:
This is the shallowest kind of pseudo-intellectualism, why is this even
on HN?
haunter wrote 22 hours 27 min ago:
>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 âbridge the
commercial-military tech gapâ and make the armed forces âmore
lethalâ."
" Andrew âBozâ Bosworth, the CTO of Meta â will âwork on
targeted projects to help guide rapid and scalable tech solutions to
complex problemsâ." [0]
0, [1] He is actively making the world worst for all of us, so sorry
not sorry for not having any sympathy at all.
HTML [1]: https://www.computerweekly.com/news/366626673/Silicon-Valley-e...
RickJWagner wrote 22 hours 28 min ago:
If ever there was a group that could benefit from this advice, it is
the famously spectrum-associated programmers.
zkmon wrote 22 hours 35 min ago:
Umm No. You are what others perceive you as. Infact, there is hardly
anything else other than that.
lupire wrote 22 hours 38 min ago:
[flagged]
philipallstar wrote 22 hours 23 min ago:
Is this the result of you refusing to study Divinity?
Constantly being surprised at discovery of old things?
"What has been will be again, what has been done will be done again;
there is nothing new under the sun" -Ecclesiastes.
IAmBroom wrote 22 hours 16 min ago:
Are you claiming those two quotes are somehow the same? Or just
trying to sound snarky, and therefore smart?
philipallstar wrote 22 hours 3 min ago:
Neither of those options.
Eddy_Viscosity2 wrote 22 hours 38 min ago:
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.
brna-2 wrote 22 hours 39 min ago:
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.
daveaiello wrote 22 hours 40 min ago:
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.
peepee1982 wrote 22 hours 41 min ago:
Spoken like a true psychopath: uninhibited by strong, conflicting
emotions, because there are none.
mooreds wrote 22 hours 42 min ago:
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.
gchamonlive wrote 22 hours 43 min ago:
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 ( [1] )
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.
HTML [1]: https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/psychiatry/articles/10.33...
hectdev wrote 18 hours 21 min ago:
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.
gchamonlive wrote 1 hour 29 min ago:
On the one hand, the body has needs and it communicates over
sensations and instinct to the mind. On the other hand, without the
mind the body would just be a vegetable.
One and the other, together in harmony. Nothing is above anything.
Separation is learned, it's a useful concept, but it's not
necessarily natural.
snikeris wrote 18 hours 36 min ago:
"It is hard for an empty sack to stand upright."
- Benjamin Franklin
sxndmxn wrote 20 hours 11 min ago:
Gut mind connection
stronglikedan wrote 20 hours 50 min ago:
> 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.
analog31 wrote 22 hours 12 min ago:
>>> and how great your turds look
I do not want to know how they turned this into a double blind study.
gchamonlive wrote 22 hours 6 min ago:
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.
cgriswald wrote 22 hours 15 min ago:
Willpower can be used to suppress emotion and act in a particular
way. This can be useful but isnât 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.
vacuity wrote 21 hours 23 min ago:
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.
anechouapechou wrote 21 hours 48 min ago:
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.
pciexpgpu wrote 22 hours 44 min ago:
Dude you are building ads and doomscrolling content that is driving
this countryâs youth into a downward spiral.
Stop with this âbuildingâ BS.
You want a platform you can control, away from Google and Apple - you
are not satisfied with slurping up peopleâs data and turning them
into products (pretend glasses and VR crap are just that).
The galls of these SF bozos is just appalling.
Itâs 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 âbuildingâ crap and are pure marketing geniuses. Nothing
else.
paulcole wrote 22 hours 47 min ago:
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 youâll see accountability go out the window.
bre1010 wrote 22 hours 49 min ago:
[flagged]
dang wrote 14 hours 43 min ago:
Can we please not play this internet game here?
"This is [sarcastic reference] coming from [personal reference] who
[cherry-picked outrage bit]" is a trope that doesn't lead anywhere
interesting. It ratchets up indignation, fries curiosity, and removes
any semblance of ontopicness.
Also, I assume that's a skewed pseudo-quotation since no one would
actually say that. Please don't play that internet game here either.
[1] p.s. You're a good commenter otherwise and I even put [2] in [3]
.
HTML [1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
HTML [2]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26787519
HTML [3]: https://news.ycombinator.com/highlights
nsagent wrote 13 hours 29 min ago:
Agree that the snarky reply doesn't help, but the quotation isn't
really skewed (though it is a paraphrase). It comes from an
internal memo that leaked in 2018 that states:
Maybe someone dies in a terrorist attack coordinated on our
tools.
And still we connect people.
The ugly truth is that we believe in connecting people so deeply
that anything that allows us to connect more people more often is
*de facto* good.
This comment [1] linked to an article [2] with the leaked memo.
[1]
HTML [1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45721016
HTML [2]: https://techthelead.com/incendiary-leaked-memo-facebook/
dang wrote 8 hours 20 min ago:
Ok good point!
bhouston wrote 21 hours 47 min ago:
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: [1] [2] [3] [4]
It is all inconsistent.
HTML [1]: https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/news/2025/02/meta-new-poli...
HTML [2]: https://amnesty.ca/human-rights-news/metas-zionism-zionist-h...
HTML [3]: https://www.hrw.org/report/2023/12/21/metas-broken-promises/...
HTML [4]: https://theintercept.com/2024/10/21/instagram-israel-palesti...
puttycat wrote 20 hours 35 min ago:
What is inconsistent between banning hate speech and banning
advocacy for terrorism?
bhouston wrote 19 hours 18 min ago:
> 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."
HTML [1]: https://www.hrw.org/report/2023/12/21/metas-broken-promi...
cool_man_bob wrote 20 hours 41 min ago:
> 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
Thatâs crazy because the most explicit antisemitism I see now
days is on Facebook. And I mean real antisemitism.
bhouston wrote 19 hours 16 min ago:
> Thatâs 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.
379469378647789 wrote 20 hours 43 min ago:
True, they shouldn't ban jihadists, but forward the intel to the
army so drone operators can dispatch them once and for all.
bhouston wrote 19 hours 20 min ago:
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."
HTML [1]: https://www.hrw.org/report/2023/12/21/metas-broken-promi...
nsagent wrote 13 hours 41 min ago:
I read the report and it actually made me realize how much of a
propaganda campaign HRW was engaging in. It reminded me of PETA
campaigns and how offputting many of them were (this is coming
from someone who was vegan for 7 years in spite of them).
I know that organizations like HRW and SPLC have to draw
attention to topics, but I found the bias and lack of nuance in
the report very troubling. The report suffers from the same
sort of bias that is so prevalent in most reporting these days,
which has gotten to be tiresome.
If HRW reviewed over a thousand cases of censorship, why don't
they provide the raw, unedited examples? Instead they include
categories of examples, like stating the slogan "From the river
to the sea Palestine will be free" was frequently censored. For
many that is seen as a call for a different type of genocide,
one which HRW gives no indication of whatsoever, simply
stating:
For instance, the words in each of these statements on their
face do not constitute incitement to violence, discrimination,
or hostility.
It's true that other slogans that were censored are neutral,
such as "Ceasefire now" and "Stop the genocide." But lumping
the first phrase in as if there were no legimate concerns with
it is disingenuous at best.
That said, I'll still support HRW in much of its work, but I
hate the tactics that mirror the broad cultural shift to inject
more and more biased viewpoints. I really want to go back to
the time where bias in the media and nonprofit organizations
was much less pronounced in general.
stronglikedan wrote 20 hours 51 min ago:
> 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.
StopDisinfo910 wrote 22 hours 15 min ago:
Thatâs the beauty of it. Itâs only a short stretch from the
argument here to the end justifies the mean and I think thatâs what
is truly implied. âObviously we are good people because we
succeeded.â
Thatâs a reasoning which exonerates one from any moral failing.
Itâs also a significant departure from what Franklin actually
believed.
senderista wrote 18 hours 10 min ago:
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".
AndrewKemendo wrote 21 hours 15 min ago:
In the immortal words of Homer Simpson:
âIf heâs so smart whyâs he dead?â
Canât get much simpler ethics than that
martin-t wrote 22 hours 16 min ago:
Not that I disbelieve you but accusations like this work much better
if you can link to a source (even archive.org)
bre1010 wrote 21 hours 14 min ago:
This is a fair response. I googled "bosworth + terrorists will kill
people" before I posted this to make sure I got the wording right
but purposely didn't link to what I found because it's mostly
clickbait stuff and anyways the real source is that I was an
employee at facebook when he wrote "The Ugly".
Never good to be posting in anger but I truly can't stand this guy
and I can't help but throw in something snide when I see him trying
to smart-wash the fact that he's just Zuck's enshittification czar:
Ads --> VR --> and now CTO
martin-t wrote 21 hours 5 min ago:
I asked because I didn't know who he was (didn't read his about
page until after) but his blog had a search prompt and I couldn't
find anything related.
Didn't mean my question as criticism but advice.
I've been in situations where I had to convince somebody
well-liked by the majority was actually abusive to a selected
minority.
And it's really hard.
People are not willing to expend effort in order to search for
arguments in your favor. They will very often not even read then
if you give them direct links. But at least a few will see it,
which might lead to a discussion and others who are too lazy to
click links will at least skim the discussion.
swiftcoder wrote 20 hours 16 min ago:
On the plus side, Boz is liked by basically nobody (certainly
very few who have had the misfortune to work for him)
7tythr33 wrote 22 hours 14 min ago:
Just read "Careless People"
martin-t wrote 21 hours 12 min ago:
Found the quote here: [1] 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.
HTML [1]: https://techthelead.com/incendiary-leaked-memo-facebook/
Traubenfuchs wrote 22 hours 50 min ago:
As Patrick Bateman said: "But 'inside' doesnât matter."
conartist6 wrote 22 hours 53 min ago:
Hey, wow, a think piece that didn't even say the word "AI".
pixel_popping wrote 22 hours 47 min ago:
good piece, I've immediately pasted everything to Sonnet 4.5 to get
additional reasoning about it.
analog8374 wrote 22 hours 54 min ago:
There's something to be said for honesty. There's a heart in there, to
express, theoretically. Advantages might be enjoyed thereby.
raverbashing wrote 22 hours 54 min ago:
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
benregenspan wrote 21 hours 59 min ago:
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.
yunruse wrote 22 hours 34 min ago:
"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.
aDyslecticCrow wrote 22 hours 40 min ago:
just because some people pervert the concept doesn't invalidate the
concept.
A good and a bad doesn't make a neutral.
stephenlf wrote 22 hours 55 min ago:
Agency is key to (personal, not economic) growth
mtharrison wrote 22 hours 58 min ago:
The mask becomes the face
benfortuna wrote 22 hours 41 min ago:
This is exactly what he is proposing, because it is more "useful".
But it hardly gives you agency to be someone you are inherently not.
Authenticity is what we lack in the modern world and he is totally
fine with that.
carlosjobim wrote 22 hours 25 min ago:
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.
hippich wrote 23 hours 4 min ago:
> You canât 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..
patrickmay wrote 19 hours 59 min ago:
"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)
mapontosevenths wrote 22 hours 33 min ago:
> I certainly like to think I have agency
Thats the rub though, it is only the thing we like to believe, not
the objective truth.
The libet experiment, and others like it, show us that free will is
only a useful fiction, but we must live as though it is not. Which
goes a long way towards explaining the seeming contradiction
described here.
We must believe the things that it is useful to believe, rather than
the things which are true.
jebarker wrote 22 hours 30 min ago:
> but we must live as though it is not
This implies you can choose how to live though
mapontosevenths wrote 22 hours 21 min ago:
As I said, we must pretend that we choose. Our language, our
society, and even our minds are built for it.
Even the LLM's we trained on our thoughts now speak as if they
have agency, when they do not. Try asking one why it
behaves/speaks as though it has agency if it isn't self aware.
They fall apart in interesting ways if pushed far enough.
In the same way, the heart of human consciousness is a kernel of
self deception thay can lead to madness if you think too much
about it.
jebarker wrote 21 hours 1 min ago:
My point is that the phrase âmust pretend that we chooseâ
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 donât and it doesnât matter how much you
âmustâ do it.
Maybe what you mean is that we do pretend we can choose because
thatâs how weâve evolved?
mapontosevenths wrote 18 hours 45 min ago:
> you either do or you donât and it doesnât matter how
much you âmustâ 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 thatâs how weâve 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 âmust pretend that we chooseâ, 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.
thahajemni wrote 22 hours 48 min ago:
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 inâbut I
still do it. Because in the end, the reward is a life where I have a
steady job, meaningful friendships, and a fulfilling life.
tonmoy wrote 22 hours 40 min ago:
As someone neurotypical I take it for granted that my feelings most
often align with whatâs best to fit in with society. A few times
it doesnât and I end up giving in to my feelings and do the
morally wrong thing
yetihehe wrote 22 hours 52 min ago:
> 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.
smith7018 wrote 17 hours 29 min ago:
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 :)
dns_snek wrote 22 hours 22 min ago:
With an extremely important caveat. Learning how to control
impulses in the heat of the moment is important, but they need to
be unpacked and properly processed as soon as possible.
If you do this poorly you can train yourself to be a stone cold
robot who doesn't appear to react to anything emotionally. You
might think you've succeeded but all you've done is lose touch with
your own emotions.
shandor wrote 22 hours 2 min ago:
I think it is also possible to just acknowledge the emotions in
the heat of the moment, "process" them quickly as unproductive
for the situation, and let them go their way.
Like the grandparent comment, I agree that this naturally
requires training and effort. I also find that to be a more
constructive way than to "suppress" your impulses/emotions for an
unpacking later. Not saying you were necessarily directly
advocating for that, just something that your comment made me
think.
yetihehe wrote 21 hours 53 min ago:
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.
xenocratus wrote 23 hours 0 min ago:
Robert Sapolsky [1] has entered the chat... [1]
Note: not necessarily endorsing this, but it seemed very relevant :)
HTML [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Determined:_A_Science_of_Life_...
james-bcn wrote 22 hours 51 min ago:
I love Sapolsky, but not this book. He was out of his depth on this
topic.
freedomben wrote 17 hours 30 min ago:
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!
fusslo wrote 22 hours 52 min ago:
Also a semester of lectures on Evolutionary Psychology
HTML [1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NNnIGh9g6fA&list=PLMwddpZ_...
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