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.

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 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.

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.

Rousseau was famous for saying that man is born free and is everywhere in chains. He advocated for self rule and formulation of laws by the people. Yet after 100s of years of democracy (thousands really) the corrupting influence of social norms has not really been remedied.

Inequalities still exist,corruption still happens and social institutions that were once liberating become oppressive over time.

His ideal of self governance has not been realised as most nation states have adopted a representative democracy. People don't really make the rules. They just handover the power to someone else who makes them on their behalf.

It's certainly right that Franklin believed in practicing virtue. He famously kept a log of his good and bad actions.

Yet there is another great philosopher that has had tremendous impact on American society whom the author has not mentioned. Emerson believed in transcending societal definition of virtue and vice and follow one's own inclinations. His ideas of self reliance resonated with American people and brought about a change in their thinking when they started to believe in themselves rather than looking to Europe for intellectual guidance.

I find it difficult to accept either Franklin's or Rousseau's view as they were more politically motivated—Rousseau wanted his social contract,Franklin worshiped Socrates but when it came to governence he kicked him aside to chose democracy,an idea that was popular at the time due to thinkers like Locke.

Emerson gave people true agency over their lives and inspired them to think critically and not sheepishly believe a thing to be good or bad. He was more revolutionary than Franklin (Self reliance was released around the time of civil war) and gave people courage to question institutional authority and he eventually became more impactful than Rousseau's collectivism.

> 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..

You learn to act by doing it.

The more you do it, the more automatic it is.

For example: I took ritalin on and off but with long enough phases, that I do have behavour patterns were i act like i was on ritalin (cleaning stuff etc.)

I also thought about people who drunk a lot more alcohol when they were younger: they learned how to be a certain way because they were able to act like this by drinking alcohol.

I took MDMA a lot later in life and when i was, i definitly had like a 'MDMA dance echo' in my brain after.

Bottom 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.

A friend once told me that virtue is like going to the gym. You practice daily, start with smaller weights (virtuous acts), and review how well you did on a regular basis. You ask "am I getting better at this?" rather than "am I morally perfect?"

If you aren't on the level of the moral greats, you start small and try to build up, the same way you'd start by running a 5k before running an ultramarathon.

I hope others out there find this viewpoint as helpful as I have.

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.

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

> “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?

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.

> you can always decide what to do next.

I think everybody can find examples from their life when this was not true. And not even just simple one like a reaction to a flying object towards your face, but some high level impulses, like when I was in love, I definitely couldn’t control my acts completely. Of course, I was still responsible for my acts, but they were only instincts, no real thinking was involved.

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.

> 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

This 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.

>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.

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

Vacuous, useless little piece. Sham thinking.

I didn’t see it mentioned in the comments so I guess I get to be the person to post the quote!

> “We are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful about what we pretend to be”

Excerpt From Mother Night Kurt Vonnegut

This is often quoted from Mother Night but it’s actually in the preface so I don’t know how many people actually see it within the work. Anyways, rather than self aggrandizing in the way the linked article is, the story in the book is a cautionary take. The book is about a Nazi propagandist that is secretly an American agent feeding broadcast lines to the Allied forces in subtleties in communicating his propaganda like pauses in between words and other tics.

The idea in the book is what does it matter to be a good person in private but a driver of evil in public? How much bad does it take to outweigh good and if you do bad things to effect something positive, are you absolved of those bad things anyways?

No, I think not. If you do ill to achieve good you are accountable to both. It is easy, sometimes, to imagine that some thing you’ve done has overridden and eliminated some other thing you’ve done but it isn’t really true. You’ve done both. I recognize I’m speaking in circles a little but I think it’s important to confront the idea that the things you’ve done are not undone by other things you’ve done just because you feel the ends have justified the means.

Remember that who you think you are is a private fantasy. Who you actually are is how you are experienced.

  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 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 mask becomes the face

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.

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.

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.

"...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.

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.

Interesting view from the CTO of Meta.

What does that make him?

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.

Agency is key to (personal, not economic) growth

>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.

> 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.

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.

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

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

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.

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

Somehow this link got deboosted.

As we know from Yoneda Lemma

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

More moral grandstanding and "advice" from the CTO of one of the most immoral corporations in the world. Never ceases to amaze me how highly these people think of themselves while they build and work for companies that consistently engage in morally bankrupt behavior. Talk about a complete lack of self-awareness.

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

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

> 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".

Human identity is first a question for philosophical anthropology. What does it mean to be human? What is the nature of human identity? What is the nature of individual human identity? What does it mean to be a social animal, especially a human social animal? What does it mean to be an intellectual animal? A moral animal? What is personhood? And so on.

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.

Batman Begins did it better than this blog post.

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

So… you are a bad person then, Boz?

>"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.

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.

See also Atomic Habits by James Clear: https://jamesclear.com/atomic-habits

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.

Rich people justifying liberalism through shitty wotdsmithing will never end.

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You 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.

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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.

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.