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".

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XwvrzauErQ0

Don't submit stuff from this guy, he is an atrocious human being.

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

What does that make him?

"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.

OK, sure. And if you are faking it, the behavior you are repeating is to fraudulently misrepresent your work to other people, creating undisclosed risks for those who rely on it. The kind of person you become is a liar and a scammer. If you make it in the end, the price for your success is paid by those you deceived on the way.

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.

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.

You will discover that there are different aspects to what and whom a person is. How we act is a matter of volition and thus choice motivated by reasoning. Our actions are expressions of the powers we possess, that is, exercised potentials that belong to us. Thus, our actions are the expression of our moral agency; I choose to exercise certain potentials for certain reasons. The reasons we do things have moral import - they are part of the act as two apparently similar acts are different if the motives are different, making our motives partly constitutive of the moral character of an act. The exercise of our potential per se likewise has moral import - it is the motive made manifest in act.

Each act is a step in some direction. There is an expression that each decision moves us either toward heaven or toward hell. A good act is both good in motivation and in the motivated act. A good act actualizes and develops the human person acting toward a fruition and fullness of humanity-in-potency. A bad act acts against such fruition, corrupting the person through ill motive and damaging acts, or squandering potential when there is a moral possibility of exercise.

So, from a moral perspective, we can say that we are our decided acts. The acts are not just ticked off boxes on a list, but actualizations of the person. There are higher actualizations and lower actualizations.

In that sense, to speak of actions and intentions as if they were distinct is a false dichotomy. You can speak of reasoning and motives as the "inner" aspect and the manifested act as the "outer" aspect, if you want. But they constitute a single act as a matter of fact. You cannot speak intelligibly of one without reference to the other for the same reason you cannot speak of a cause or its effect without reference to the other. The nature of an act is both in motive and in execution.

And "fake it until you make it" is a misunderstanding. There is nothing fake involved. I have potentials. Initially, I do not have experience exercising them. I have little familiarity with them. So I try to exercise them. Typically, first attempts aren't very good, but I learn from the effects of my trial, and perhaps from the feedback of others, to "calibrate" my subsequent attempts. This is called practice. I repeat in order to discover and work out and strengthen the actualization of a potential. This is a not error in a moral sense. It is a kind of dialogue with nature.

In Franklin’s autobiography, he names 13 virtues and describes his “fake it until you make it” approach, as boz characterizes it.

My intention being to acquire the habitude of all these virtues, I judged it would be well not to distract my attention by attempting the whole at once, but to fix it on one of them at a time, and, when I should be master of that, then to proceed to another, and so on, till I should have gone thro’ the thirteen; and, as the previous acquisition of some might facilitate the acquisition of certain others, I arranged them with that view, as they stand above. Temperance first, as it tends to procure that coolness and clearness of head which is so necessary where constant vigilance was to be kept up, and guard maintained against the unremitting attraction of ancient habits and the force of perpetual temptations. This being acquired and established, Silence would be more easy; and my desire being to gain knowledge at the same time that I improved in virtue, and considering that in conversation it was obtained rather by the use of the ears than of the tongue, and therefore wishing to break a habit I was getting into prattling, punning, and joking, which only made me acceptable to trifling company, I gave Silence the second place. This and the next, Order, I expected would allow me more time for attending to my project and my studies. Resolution, once because habitual, would keep me firm in my endeavors to obtain all the subsequent virtues; Frugality and Industry, freeing me from my remaining debt, and producing affluence and independence, would make more easy the practice of Sincerity and Justice, etc., Conceiving, then, that, agreeably to the advice of Pythagoras in his Garden Verses, daily examination would be necessary, I contrived the following method for conducting that examination. (emphasis original)

https://www.ushistory.org/franklin/autobiography/page38.htm

He further describes how he tracked his progress.

I made a little book, in which I allotted a page for each of the virtues. I ruled each page with red ink, so as to have seven columns, one for each day of the week, marking each column with a letter for the day. I crossed these columns with thirteen red lines, marking the beginning of each line with the first letter of one of the virtues, on which line, and in its proper column, I might mark, by a little black spot, every fault I found upon examination to have been committed respecting that virtue upon that day.

See p. 39 for his table: https://www.ushistory.org/franklin/autobiography/page39.htm

I determined to give a week’s strict attention to each of the virtues successively. Thus, in the first week, my great guard was to avoid every the least offense against Temperance, leaving the other virtues to their ordinary chance, only marking every evening the faults of the day. Thus, if in the first week I could keep my first line, marked T, clear of spots, I supposed the habit of that virtue so much strengthened, and its opposite weakened, that I might venture extending my attention to include the next, and for the following week keep both lines clear of spots. Proceeding thus to the last, I could go thro’ a course complete in thirteen weeks, and four courses in a years. And like him who, having a garden to weed, does not attempt to eradicate all the bad herbs at once, which would exceed his reach and his strength, but works on one of the beds at a time, and, having accomplished the first, proceeds to a second, so I should have, I hoped, the encouraging pleasure of seeing on my pages the progress I made in virtue, by clearing successively my lines of their spots, till in the end, by a number of courses, I should be happy in viewing a clean book, after a thirteen weeks’ daily examination.

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.

I haven't seen that on Facebook but I guess it depends on context. I see the absolute worst racism of all types (antisemitism, Islamophobia, explicit white/Christian nationalism) on X though - with 10s of millions of views. It is a total cesspool and I think it is corrosive on society as a whole as it encourages tribalism as it raises voices of the most intolerant.

Two things, Meta has reduced controls for hate speech except in the areas relating to Israel and Zionism. That seems inconsistent - Meta hasn't just overall become more restrictive, it is very selective restrictions.

The HRW report I cited is not about Meta removing "advocacy for terrorism" posts, it is a human rights group after all. Here is a key quote from the report:

"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/...

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.

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.

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 the Discourse on Inequality, which says that people have good animal instincts, but their natural expression of these is inhibited by social constructs like language-based reasoning and property.

I mean thats fair game, if people take away free stuff I like, I'd get pissed off as well. Asking politely about changes is also fair game.

Moaning about it is not though.

Complaining about the quality of perfectly good food, thats a dick move.

I'm always fascinated at the thought process and frankly upbringing of someone who would publicly complain about food in such a whiny and rambling way. The lack of awareness to skip through the top posts, and note that the batshit ones are always the ones that get snarky comments.

for example[paraphrasing to protect the dipshit]: "The <meat dish, carved from the joint, on demand> was chewy. I find that all the red meat here is chewy. Is this due to the quality of the meat, or the skill of the cooking"

a bunch of people agree

Then someone pipes up and asks: "would you like the chefs to chew if for you first?"

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

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.

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.

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.

If you are going to trust someone with important responsibilities, you want them to “show their working” and convince you that that are not faking it.

The difference of course is what Alice and Bob do when the mask is off, when no one is looking.

I’ll take someone who consistently does good but without a coherent positive philosophy over someone who talks a good game and behaves badly all day every day.

When the outcome predictably is terrible, do we let them off the hook for meaning well?

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?