You are how you act

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 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.

This is good stuff coming from the guy who said it's ok if people coordinate terrorist attacks on facebook as long as the company continues to grow

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.frontiersin.org/journals/psychiatry/articles/10....)

So take care of your mind, but also take care of your body. Don't be treating your body like crap and expect you can only will yourself into acting better.

I guess we know who exactly are you. By your actions, an enabler of atrocities, of democratic decline, of teen depression.

Yup, your actions sure do speak.

> “Fake it until you make it” is often dismissed as shallow, but it’s closer to Franklin’s truth. Faking it long enough is making it. The repetition of behavior, not the sincerity of belief, is what shapes character. You become the kind of person who does the things you repeatedly do.

Then you become the kind of person who fakes things?

I know ultimately I am not good nor bad, I am not an absolute. I am an agentic blob of meat, and with every decision I can choose any of the paths at my disposal, rewriting my story as I go. There is something I live by, though. My whole life I have observed in others the ideals that I came to admire or to hate, and I try to adhere to the ones I admire as often as I can, as I am pretty sure I would hate myself otherwise.

> 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..

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 and caring, even funny.

The problem for meta employees, is that most of the time you only really see arrogant dick boz.

Hey, wow, a think piece that didn't even say the word "AI".

We see this around us every day, in every way.

I just realized that you can connect the two with another maxim that we've all heard a million times:

The perfect is the enemy of the good.

This puts further weight behind the intellectual arrow that embodies Franklin's ideals.

> 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

I found myself asking: what is he trying to achieve with this post.

It all just seems a bit muddled once you consider his actions.

Just seems like self justification.

Or some direction for his employees - don’t think, do.

Oh right, this is the Facebook CTO. That’s entirely consistent with their behaviour.

  I find the Franklin model far more useful [...] because it gives you agency.

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.

I'd say the modern American self is best defined by what you believe how other's perceive you and whether you are popular or not.

I enjoyed the post. I accept that it's a bit weird coming from a Facebook exec (ad hominem, etc).

What I found particularly insightful is the point that we have a double standard. I judge myself by my intentions and others by their actions. I'd seen this before, but never tied to historical thinkers.

One way to work around this is to ask yourself "what would I think if I saw a friend doing X" where X is what you intend to do. Of course, most folks are more forgiving of a friend than a stranger, but even that small amount of distance and perspective can help you make a better decision.

Dude you are building ads and doomscrolling content that is driving this country’s youth into a downward spiral.

Stop with this “building” BS.

You want a platform you can control, away from Google and Apple - you are not satisfied with slurping up people’s data and turning them into products (pretend glasses and VR crap are just that).

The galls of these SF bozos is just appalling.

It’s sad that we have shipped all our important technology to China where they really are building and instead we have a bunch of clowns pretend ‘building’ crap and are pure marketing geniuses. Nothing else.

The title reminds me of the quote that goes.. : "You are not what you think you are, but what you think, you are".

"...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.

Well that's a completely artificial either-or straw man.

It is possible to make progress while trying to do good. Lots of people do that.

Vacuous, useless little piece. Sham thinking.

I 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".

The last psychiatrist talked about narcissism alot and his advice is that if you are a narcissist, the best thing you can do is to 'fake' being a good person. Just do and say the things you think a genuinely caring and sympathetic person would do and say. It won't change you deep down, but it will spare the people in the world around you.

Somehow this link got deboosted.

The mask becomes the face

>You are how you act

"Four Silicon Valley executives have been recruited into a specialist tech-focused unit of the US Army Reserves in a bid to “bridge the commercial-military tech gap” and make the armed forces “more lethal”."

" Andrew ‘Boz’ Bosworth, the CTO of Meta – will “work on targeted projects to help guide rapid and scalable tech solutions to complex problems”." [0]

0, https://www.computerweekly.com/news/366626673/Silicon-Valley...

He is actively making the world worst for all of us, so sorry not sorry for not having any sympathy at all.

What do you think about the possibility that you are merely existing to be symbolic?

Agency is key to (personal, not economic) growth

This is the shallowest kind of pseudo-intellectualism, why is this even on HN?

Remember the Franklin thinking is used by several people to do "good deed math", meaning they do good to justify other crappy attitudes they have elsewhere

Spoken like a true psychopath: uninhibited by strong, conflicting emotions, because there are none.

Open article.

"The modern American self..."

Close the article.

>"The repetition of behavior, not the sincerity of belief, is what shapes character"

To perform behavior X repeatedly and consciously for a long time, you have to have a belief (whether it is good or bad). Hence it is the sincerity of belief which shapes character.

Like when you wash yourself every now and then: you repeat that because you have a belief that keeping yourself clean is useful. Without that belief, you won't waste your time on that. Behavior is just an expression of a belief.

As Patrick Bateman said: "But 'inside' doesn‘t matter."

> 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.

More like "you are what you think".

Umm No. You are what others perceive you as. Infact, there is hardly anything else other than that.

If ever there was a group that could benefit from this advice, it is the famously spectrum-associated programmers.

There's something to be said for honesty. There's a heart in there, to express, theoretically. Advantages might be enjoyed thereby.

If you want to see this in action in the US, wait until someone says that they hate driving. Then ask them what they have done to drive less. 99% of the time you’ll see accountability go out the window.

I expect better from the people who lurk at https://news.ycombinator.com/newest and upvote stuff which help decide what reaches the home page. It's sad to see a shallow, pseudo-intellectual piece like this voted to the top. This has been a long time issue in /newest. I lurk there and upvote the good stuff to help it reach home page. But the shallow hot takes and ragebait rise quickly while the real gems like thoughtful posts made from hard work and genuine hacker spirit barely get any votes and rarely reach home page.

Is this the result of tech bros refusing to study the humanities?

Constantly rediscovering old proverbs?

“This is the only story of mine whose moral I know,” writes Kurt Vonnegut at the beginning of his 1962 novel Mother Night. “I don't think it's a marvelous moral; I simply happen to know what it is: We are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful about what we pretend to be.” -Kurt Vonnegut

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