Authenticity is what we lack in the modern world and he is totally fine with that.
If you fake being a better person than you are within, then by time you will be given by others more trust, more love, more opportunities. The sands of time will start to erase the old personality and implement the new, which is more reflective of the better environment you're finding yourself in. The good parts of the old you stay, while the bad parts are washed away.
This can be implemented on an industrial scale with military indoctrination, where they can take absolute scum and turn them into honorable soldiers and officers.
A good and a bad doesn't make a neutral.
The only link is the person -- that their acts inform their thoughts and habits, which informs future acts. In this case "good deed math" is likely a post-hoc rationalisation, predicted by the Franklin model but not exactly encouraged.
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.
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
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.
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
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.
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.
That’s crazy because the most explicit antisemitism I see now days is on Facebook. And I mean real antisemitism.
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.
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.
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 thoughts that lead to those emotions. Over time those thoughts are replaced entirely and the emotional reaction is changed.
Humanity has produced a great deal of knowledge on how to live well. Modern society is just too distracted to learn about it.
That being said, I think some positive change can be produced with diligence and care, even if the methods and details are hazy even to the person enacting them.
I do not want to know how they turned this into a double blind study.
She's sometimes telling me how it was bad at work because someone disagreed with the treatment of some 22 year old that got shot in the stomach and I'm like dying inside.
That really hit home. Thanks for the link.
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.
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.
"The modern American self..."
Close the article.
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
Constantly being surprised at discovery of old things?
"What has been will be again, what has been done will be done again; there is nothing new under the sun" -Ecclesiastes.
"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.
Yup, your actions sure do speak.
Don't submit stuff from this guy, he is an atrocious human being.
s/pulls us away from/reveals
Both Rousseau’s and Franklin’s views have utility. One requires one to express one’s inherent goodness. The other defines whether one is good by whether they do good acts. These both promote good acts.
Taking inherent nature from Rousseau but ascribing bad acts to that inherent nature just means no one is truly responsible for their actions. If they are good they do good. If they are bad it is because they are bad. Anyone believing they are just “a bad person” has no reason to even try to be good except to avoid consequences. It’s a bigger cop out than “society made me” while simultaneously puritanical in ignoring the role of outside influence like society.
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".
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.
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 intention and ethically good action from the calculation.
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 matter to you. At least, it might not at a glance? If you don't think about it too long? Or deal with them for too long?
...
Yeah, I think I did hurt my back with that reach.
(No, it doesn't, actually.)
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 too hard, y'know?
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.
No wonder the author is a Facebook exec that want to be ignorant of ultimate intent, instead of reconciling them.
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.
The irony here (given who the author works for) is not lost on me.
*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.
1. If someone thinks the human self is essentially good and society makes it bad, they could still be concerned with how people can behave well in society. So the fact that Rousseau wrote about that in The Social Contract doesn't seem to contradict OP.
2. If it's possible to unite intent and action in a model of a good person, there could still be philosophies that are incompatible by virtue of how they overemphasize one or the other. So again, I don't see how this contradicts the OP.
I agree that the OP is probably full of hot air, but it's a common gloss on Rousseau I think. And definitely supported by large swathes of the Discourse on Inequality, which says that people have good instincts but their natural expression of these is inhibited by social constructs like language-based reasoning and property.
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.
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.
https://www.trustedreviews.com/news/meta-smartwatch-leaked-a...
That abomination should have been killed from the start.
the lack of attention to user experience in any of the RL based products
The utterly stupid "blockchain compatibility" policy, which was too late, to fucking stupid and poorly executed.
The inability to run any project in RL that delivered any kind of value
(horizon's many many many iterations is an affront to any kind of good governance)
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.
It is possible to make progress while trying to do good. Lots of people do that.
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.
I find the Franklin model far more useful [...] because it gives you agency.
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.
Then you become the kind of person who fakes things?
hippich•2h ago
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..
xenocratus•2h ago
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Determined:_A_Science_of_Life_...
Note: not necessarily endorsing this, but it seemed very relevant :)
fusslo•2h ago
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NNnIGh9g6fA&list=PLMwddpZ_3n...
james-bcn•2h ago
yetihehe•2h ago
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 your impulses and that needs to be trained, you may not succeed first several times, but please keep trying.
dns_snek•1h ago
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.
shandor•1h ago
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 advocating for that, just something that your comment made me think.
yetihehe•1h ago
thahajemni•2h ago
tonmoy•2h ago
mapontosevenths•2h ago
Thats the rub though, it is only the thing we like to believe, not the objective truth.
The libet experiment, and others like it, show us that free will is only a useful fiction, but we must live as though it is not. Which goes a long way towards explaining the seeming contradiction described here.
We must believe the things that it is useful to believe, rather than the things which are true.
jebarker•1h ago
This implies you can choose how to live though
mapontosevenths•1h ago
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 deception thay can lead to madness if you think too much about it.
jebarker•30m ago
Maybe what you mean is that we do pretend we can choose because that’s how we’ve evolved?