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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
"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)
Rousseau was famous for saying that man is born free and is everywhere in chains. He advocated for self rule and formulation of laws by the people. Yet after 100s of years of democracy (thousands really) the corrupting influence of social norms has not really been remedied.
Inequalities still exist,corruption still happens and social institutions that were once liberating become oppressive over time.
His ideal of self governance has not been realised as most nation states have adopted a representative democracy. People don't really make the rules. They just handover the power to someone else who makes them on their behalf.
It's certainly right that Franklin believed in practicing virtue. He famously kept a log of his good and bad actions.
Yet there is another great philosopher that has had tremendous impact on American society whom the author has not mentioned. Emerson believed in transcending societal definition of virtue and vice and follow one's own inclinations. His ideas of self reliance resonated with American people and brought about a change in their thinking when they started to believe in themselves rather than looking to Europe for intellectual guidance.
I find it difficult to accept either Franklin's or Rousseau's view as they were more politically motivated—Rousseau wanted his social contract,Franklin worshiped Socrates but when it came to governence he kicked him aside to chose democracy,an idea that was popular at the time due to thinkers like Locke.
Emerson gave people true agency over their lives and inspired them to think critically and not sheepishly believe a thing to be good or bad. He was more revolutionary than Franklin (Self reliance was released around the time of civil war) and gave people courage to question institutional authority and he eventually became more impactful than Rousseau's collectivism.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> “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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
I think everybody can find examples from their life when this was not true. And not even just simple one like a reaction to a flying object towards your face, but some high level impulses, like when I was in love, I definitely couldn’t control my acts completely. Of course, I was still responsible for my acts, but they were only instincts, no real thinking was involved.
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.
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.
>"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.
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.
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.
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.
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".
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.
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.
"...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.
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.
"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]
> 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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
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:
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.
lukeasrodgers|4 months ago
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.
shandor|4 months ago
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.
mihaic|4 months ago
No wonder the author is a Facebook exec that want to be ignorant of ultimate intent, instead of reconciling them.
speak_plainly|4 months ago
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.
mannykannot|4 months ago
The irony here (given who the author works for) is not lost on me.
alphazard|4 months ago
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.
unknown|4 months ago
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some_furry|4 months ago
natmaka|4 months ago
unknown|4 months ago
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getnormality|4 months ago
*edited for nuance
gchamonlive|4 months ago
So take care of your mind, but also take care of your body. Don't be treating your body like crap and expect you can only will yourself into acting better.
cgriswald|4 months ago
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.
analog31|4 months ago
I do not want to know how they turned this into a double blind study.
stronglikedan|4 months ago
That really hit home. Thanks for the link.
hectdev|4 months ago
snikeris|4 months ago
- Benjamin Franklin
sxndmxn|4 months ago
KaiserPro|4 months ago
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|4 months ago
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.
herval|4 months ago
"Teenager trying to sound clever" captures every other interaction perfectly.
raffael_de|4 months ago
swiftcoder|4 months ago
On the other hand, it's very much freshman-who-misunderstood-philosophy-101-and-integrated-it-into-his-worldview-anyway...
some_furry|4 months ago
kragen|4 months ago
brna-2|4 months ago
hippich|4 months ago
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..
yetihehe|4 months ago
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.
thahajemni|4 months ago
mapontosevenths|4 months ago
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.
patrickmay|4 months ago
xenocratus|4 months ago
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Determined:_A_Science_of_Life_...
Note: not necessarily endorsing this, but it seemed very relevant :)
akshatjiwan|4 months ago
Inequalities still exist,corruption still happens and social institutions that were once liberating become oppressive over time.
His ideal of self governance has not been realised as most nation states have adopted a representative democracy. People don't really make the rules. They just handover the power to someone else who makes them on their behalf.
It's certainly right that Franklin believed in practicing virtue. He famously kept a log of his good and bad actions.
Yet there is another great philosopher that has had tremendous impact on American society whom the author has not mentioned. Emerson believed in transcending societal definition of virtue and vice and follow one's own inclinations. His ideas of self reliance resonated with American people and brought about a change in their thinking when they started to believe in themselves rather than looking to Europe for intellectual guidance.
I find it difficult to accept either Franklin's or Rousseau's view as they were more politically motivated—Rousseau wanted his social contract,Franklin worshiped Socrates but when it came to governence he kicked him aside to chose democracy,an idea that was popular at the time due to thinkers like Locke.
Emerson gave people true agency over their lives and inspired them to think critically and not sheepishly believe a thing to be good or bad. He was more revolutionary than Franklin (Self reliance was released around the time of civil war) and gave people courage to question institutional authority and he eventually became more impactful than Rousseau's collectivism.
Xemplolo|4 months ago
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.
bloomingeek|4 months ago
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.
pgspaintbrush|4 months ago
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.
pciexpgpu|4 months ago
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.
conartist6|4 months ago
pixel_popping|4 months ago
vhantz|4 months ago
Then you become the kind of person who fakes things?
skeaker|4 months ago
freedomben|4 months ago
daveaiello|4 months ago
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.
mooreds|4 months ago
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.
raverbashing|4 months ago
yunruse|4 months ago
The only link is the person -- that their acts inform their thoughts and habits, which informs future acts. In this case "good deed math" is likely a post-hoc rationalisation, predicted by the Franklin model but not exactly encouraged.
benregenspan|4 months ago
aDyslecticCrow|4 months ago
A good and a bad doesn't make a neutral.
ruszki|4 months ago
I think everybody can find examples from their life when this was not true. And not even just simple one like a reaction to a flying object towards your face, but some high level impulses, like when I was in love, I definitely couldn’t control my acts completely. Of course, I was still responsible for my acts, but they were only instincts, no real thinking was involved.
delichon|4 months ago
s/pulls us away from/reveals
cgriswald|4 months ago
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.
thehours|4 months ago
> 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|4 months ago
allemagne|4 months ago
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.
begueradj|4 months ago
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.
redbell|4 months ago
dcre|4 months ago
Dilettante_|4 months ago
StevePerkins|4 months ago
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.
andai|4 months ago
powersurge360|4 months ago
> “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.
notepad0x90|4 months ago
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.
bayindirh|4 months ago
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".
Traubenfuchs|4 months ago
mtharrison|4 months ago
benfortuna|4 months ago
Authenticity is what we lack in the modern world and he is totally fine with that.
georgemcbay|4 months ago
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XwvrzauErQ0
Eddy_Viscosity2|4 months ago
unknown|4 months ago
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anon-3988|4 months ago
01284a7e|4 months ago
Don't submit stuff from this guy, he is an atrocious human being.
SkyeCA|4 months ago
skolskoly|4 months ago
freedomben|4 months ago
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.
analog8374|4 months ago
raffael_de|4 months ago
stephenlf|4 months ago
DavidPiper|4 months ago
It is possible to make progress while trying to do good. Lots of people do that.
pyrale|4 months ago
What does that make him?
haunter|4 months ago
"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.
RickJWagner|4 months ago
unknown|4 months ago
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ptx|4 months ago
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.
Toby1VC|4 months ago
jbs789|4 months ago
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.
unknown|4 months ago
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unknown|4 months ago
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rester324|4 months ago
unknown|4 months ago
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sidcool|4 months ago
wvlia5|4 months ago
zkmon|4 months ago
peepee1982|4 months ago
tinfoilhatter|4 months ago
dbtc|4 months ago
foofoo12|4 months ago
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.
sanjayts|4 months ago
immibis|4 months ago
lo_zamoyski|4 months ago
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.
crisdias|4 months ago
lupire|4 months ago
philipallstar|4 months ago
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.
Atlas667|4 months ago
gbacon|4 months ago
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.
NickC25|4 months ago
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.
bre1010|4 months ago
dang|4 months ago
"This is [sarcastic reference] coming from [personal reference] who [cherry-picked outrage bit]" is a trope that doesn't lead anywhere interesting. It ratchets up indignation, fries curiosity, and removes any semblance of ontopicness.
Also, I assume that's a skewed pseudo-quotation since no one would actually say that. Please don't play that internet game here either.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
p.s. You're a good commenter otherwise and I even put https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26787519 in https://news.ycombinator.com/highlights.
StopDisinfo910|4 months ago
That’s a reasoning which exonerates one from any moral failing. It’s also a significant departure from what Franklin actually believed.
bhouston|4 months 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:
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.
martin-t|4 months ago
poopiokaka|4 months ago
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mola|4 months ago
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weregiraffe|4 months ago
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blenderob|4 months ago
paulcole|4 months ago