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.
You are how you act
131–140 of 199 posts
Re: You are how you act
#132This 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.
Re: You are how you act
#133You 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.
Re: You are how you act
#134Earlier 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…
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.
Re: You are how you act
#135Earlier 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…
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.
Re: You are how you act
#136Bottom 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.
Re: You are how you act
#137Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 det…
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.
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 “fake it till you make it” 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 isn’t positive hustle and tenacity, but just a habit of outright lying, constantly reinforcing itself.
Sometimes it’s impossible to see from the outside what is which until it breaks down.
Re: You are how you act
#138Earlier quoted context omitted.
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?
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. https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/jun/03/how-i-... 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…
Which in the end is precisely the reason why we want to understand the intentions behind the actions, right?
Re: You are how you act
#139Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
[flagged]
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."
https://www.hrw.org/report/2023/12/21/metas-broken-promises/...
Re: You are how you act
#140>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.