This is the shallowest kind of pseudo-intellectualism, why is this even on HN?
You are how you act
41–50 of 199 posts
Re: You are how you act
#42[flagged]
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.
Re: You are how you act
#43> 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…
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.
Re: You are how you act
#44"...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.
Re: You are how you act
#45> 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
Re: You are how you act
#46I 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".
Re: You are how you act
#47I 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.
Re: You are how you act
#48Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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 thing…
> but we must live as though it is not This implies you can choose how to live though
As I said, we must pretend that we choose. Our language, our society, and even our minds are built for it.
Even the LLM's we trained on our thoughts now speak as if they have agency, when they do not. Try asking one why it behaves/speaks as though it has agency if it isn't self aware. They fall apart in interesting ways if pushed far enough.
In the same way, the heart of human consciousness is a kernel of self deception thay can lead to madness if you think too much about it.
Re: You are how you act
#49> 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.
Re: You are how you act
#50What do you think about the possibility that you are merely existing to be symbolic?