101–110 of 199 posts
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.
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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.
“If he’s so smart why’s he dead?”
Can’t get much simpler ethics than that
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Not that I disbelieve you but accusations like this work much better if you can link to a source (even archive.org)
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
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Not that I disbelieve you but accusations like this work much better if you can link to a source (even archive.org)
Just read "Careless People"
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.
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
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.
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Not that I disbelieve you but accusations like this work much better if you can link to a source (even archive.org)
This is a fair response. I googled "bosworth + terrorists will kill people" before I posted this to make sure I got the wording right but purposely didn't link to what I found because it's mostly clickbait stuff and anyways the real source is that I was an employee at facebook when he wrote "The Ugly". Never good to be posting in anger but I truly can't stand this guy and I can't help but throw in something snide whe…
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.
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> 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 decept…
Maybe what you mean is that we do pretend we can choose because that’s how we’ve evolved?
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> 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…
Even if the external outcome is the same, the direction towards which the person evolves is vastly different. And when lifted out of a narrow thought experiment, in real life, who you are does determine all the great and small ways you behave, and the methods you are willing to employ.
That’s why in the Sermon on the Mount, Christ says “It was said to those of old, you shall not murder, and whoever murders will be liable to judgement. But I say to you that everyone who is angry with his brother will be liable to judgement.”
You will find similar principles expressed in Buddhist teachings, or the Bhagavad Gita, or Confucian ethical philosophy. In this instance, anger on its own is merely a seed. But if left to grow, and it grows by you watering it, then eventually it expresses itself in a much more destructive way.
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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/met…
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.
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…
That really hit home. Thanks for the link.