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You are how you act

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Re: You are how you act

#161

Post by StevePerkins »

Dilettante_ wrote: post #87

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.

Re: You are how you act

#162

Post by pavel_lishin »

NaomiLehman wrote: post #158
mannykannot wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

20 years at Meta... That must be tough.

Working at Facebook in 2005 was definitely defensible. I suppose every frog gets boiled, eventually.

Re: You are how you act

#164

Post by photonthug »

swiftcoder wrote: post #121
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…

> this one is much less teenager trying to sound clever On the other hand, it's very much freshman-who-misunderstood-philosophy-101-and-integrated-it-into-his-worldview-anyway...

In philosophy 101 the usual foil for Rousseau vs.. would be Hobbes, but that framing with a realist/pessimist would not be popular with the intended audience, where the goal is to lionize the nationalist, the inventors/owners, the 1%.

> Despite his own moral lapses, Franklin saw himself as uniquely qualified to instruct Americans in morality. He tried to influence American moral life through the construction of a printing network based on a chain of partnerships from the Carolinas to New England. He thereby invented the first newspaper chain. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Benjamin_Franklin#Newspaperman

To be clear Franklin's obviously a complicated historical figure, a pretty awesome guy overall, and I do like American pragmatism generally. But it matters a lot which part of the guy you'd like to hold up for admiration, and elevating a preachy hypocrite that was an early innovator in monopolies and methods of controlling the masses does seem pretty tactical and self-serving here.

Re: You are how you act

#165

Post by [deleted] »

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…

[deleted]

Re: You are how you act

#166

Post by alangou »

BurningFrog wrote: post #118
alangou wrote: post #108

Earlier 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.

There are multiple ways, all of which are useful for you to decide whether it's true or not.

First, you can trust in the wisdom of those who came before you, i.e. scripture. Second, you could trust in tradition, which may say such things. Third, you can use reason yourself. Fourth, you could rely on personal experience.

Re: You are how you act

#167

Post by freedomben »

james-bcn wrote: post #11
xenocratus wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Robert Sapolsky [1] has entered the chat... [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Determined:_A_Science_of_Life_... Note: not necessarily endorsing this, but it seemed very relevant :)

I love Sapolsky, but not this book. He was out of his depth on this topic.

Also a big Sapolsky fan, but I did really like this book. That said though, I have only a read-a-lot-of-books-from-people-like-sapolsky level of knowledge on the subject, so take my opinion with a large grain of salt.

If you can remember, I'd love to know what some of the issues were with the book!

Re: You are how you act

#168

Post by alphazard »

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 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.

Re: You are how you act

#169

Post by smith7018 »

yetihehe wrote: post #9
hippich wrote: post #2

> 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…

Meditation is also extremely useful for this. In breath-based meditation, you focus your mind on your breathing and try to eliminate thoughts. Obviously your mind gets bored and you begin to think of other things. Once you recognize that you're losing focus, you simply return to your breath. Over and over. Over time, you gain the ability to view your thoughts and emotions as easily disposable. It takes time but you can actually recognize that you're being affected by emotion, able to let go of thoughts, and be more present in the moment.

It's not hard; you just have to commit to it :)

Re: You are how you act

#170

Post by freedomben »

skolskoly wrote: post #163

Fake it til you make it is good. But, better yet, we figured out you can just keep faking it until some other sucker wants to hold the bag.

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.

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