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You are how you act

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Re: You are how you act

#71

Post by mannykannot »

some_furry wrote: post #64
shandor wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 intentio…

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 mat…

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?

Re: You are how you act

#72

Post by speak_plainly »

lukeasrodgers wrote: post #47

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…

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.

Re: You are how you act

#73

Post by yetihehe »

shandor wrote: post #68
dns_snek wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

With an extremely important caveat. Learning how to control impulses in the heat of the moment is important, but they need to be unpacked and properly processed as soon as possible. If you do this poorly you can train yourself to be a stone cold robot who doesn't appear to react to anything emotionally. You might think you've succeeded but all you've done is lose touch with your own emotions.

I think it is also possible to just acknowledge the emotions in the heat of the moment, "process" them quickly as unproductive for the situation, and let them go their way. Like the grandparent comment, I agree that this naturally requires training and effort. I also find that to be a more constructive way than to "suppress" your impulses/emotions for an unpacking later. Not saying you were necessarily directly advoc…

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.

Re: You are how you act

#74

Post by kragen »

KaiserPro wrote: post #63

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 an…

Were they wrong?

Re: You are how you act

#75

Post by justbees »

mannykannot wrote: post #71
some_furry wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 mat…

It's a fair question, but would you trust them equally in an unanticipated crisis, where doing the right thing might be costly in hard-to-predict ways?

If the two are indistinguishable from an outsider's perspective how would you know which one to trust?

Re: You are how you act

#76

Post by notepad0x90 »

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.

Re: You are how you act

#77

Post by mannykannot »

lukeasrodgers wrote: post #47

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…

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.

Re: You are how you act

#78

Post by anechouapechou »

cgriswald wrote: post #54
gchamonlive wrote: post #20

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.frontiersi…

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 tho…

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.

Re: You are how you act

#79

Post by bhouston »

bre1010 wrote: post #13

[flagged]

Meta's censorship policies reflect the ideology of their owner.

They have loosened hate speech restrictions in some areas to curry favour with Trump but declared that Zionism is a protected category while they have banned a ton of Palestinian voices:

https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/news/2025/02/meta-new-poli...

https://amnesty.ca/human-rights-news/metas-zionism-zionist-h...

https://www.hrw.org/report/2023/12/21/metas-broken-promises/...

https://theintercept.com/2024/10/21/instagram-israel-palesti...

It is all inconsistent.

Re: You are how you act

#80

Post by getnormality »

lukeasrodgers wrote: post #47

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…

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

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