[lukeasrodgers]

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.

[shandor]

> 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 intention and ethically good action from the calculation.

[some_furry]

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 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.

[alangou]

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 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.

[BurningFrog]

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.

[hxtk]

There’s some real research into relevant topics and evidence-based models of how and why people change.

Generally, a period of ambivalence precedes change (most of the time, though there are documented cases of “quantum change” where a person undergoes a difficult change in a single moment without the usual intermediate stages and never relapses).

Ambivalence exists when a person knows in their mind reasons both for and against a change, and gives both more or less an equal mind share.

When that person begins to give an outsized share of their attention to engaging with thoughts aligned with the change, it predicts growing commitment and ultimately follow-through on the change.

The best resource I know of on this topic is “Motivational Interviewing” in its 3rd or 4th edition. It has a very extensive bibliography and the model of change it presents has proven itself an effective predictor of change in clinical practice.

Based on my understanding of that research, I’m inclined to agree with GP.

[some_furry]

That's very insightful. Could you share some references for further reading? I'd like to explore this topic a bit on my own.

[alangou]

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.

[fouc]

Another way to think of it is:

If you tend to engage in suspicious behavior, you'll probably start regarding others with suspicion. Essentially, your actions will engender your world view.

[shandor]

This is a good take, and I agree that habits can do that to people.

On the other hand, the intention behind the habit/action easily twists it in actuality to something else.

I think the “fake it till you make it” I brought up upthread a great example of this. Yeah, it might end up with the fake becoming something valuable, or you building character, or whatever.

Or, the habit that is getting built isn’t positive hustle and tenacity, but just a habit of outright lying, constantly reinforcing itself.

Sometimes it’s impossible to see from the outside what is which until it breaks down.

[theptip]

This exact problem comes up in AI alignment. It’s not enough to just look at the legible outputs.

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.

[mannykannot]

It's a fair question, but would you trust them equally in an unanticipated crisis, where doing the right thing might be costly in hard-to-predict ways?

[justbees]

If the two are indistinguishable from an outsider's perspective how would you know which one to trust?

[vacuity]

Yes, then there is no way to elevate Bob above Alice, but in practice I think the assumption of external indistinguishability is too strong, and even the suspicion that Alice is sketchy (i.e. without hard proof) is meaningful.

[mannykannot]

You can phrase the same question thus: which set of traits is more likely to lead a person to stay true to prior form in a crisis?

[some_furry]

The trouble is, you can think you're dealing with a Bob, but you're actually dealing with an Alice, even after enduring multiple crises that didn't trigger their specific type of badness.

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?

[some_furry]

This sounds like a job for cryptography!

(No, it doesn't, actually.)

[more_corn]

But that’s not how it plays out. What we see time and again is people who profess beliefs in positive philosophies and actions that don’t match. Look at any religion you like. Now look at how members of that religion actually behave. They’re people who profess a positive philosophy without the actions to match.

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.

[seec]

Exactly. I have been (forced) in catholic circles in my youth because of my mother and it's absolutely frightening how bad those people can act/talk, often openly. Similarly, I have some far-left friends who constantly advocate for things close to communism but they are (by far) the stingiest and least sharing people I know.

I think there is some sort brain gymnastic that protects them against the incoherence.

[amarant]

The counter point to this is the well-meaning idiot who causes destruction by doing things they, quite naively, believe will have positive outcomes.

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

[some_furry]

I don't know. How are the Kardashians doing?

[DenisM]

This presupposes a constantly stable and omnipresent and benevolent society. Which it is not. Society always has reprehensible things in it, sometimes systematically sometimes sporadically. Society is not omnipresent or omniscient. And things go up and down over time. And one is never exposed to the whole society.

[ratelimitsteve]

the only reason Alice's intentions matter is their ability to predict her future behavior. if we assume for the sake of argument her behavior will always be identical to bob's then not only does it not matter what her internal motivations are it's arguable that her internal motivations don't actually differ from bob's. Thinking is, after all, an action, and all of their actions are identical. Therefore it seems like your example assumes Alice's behavior both is and isn't identical to Bob's.

[some_furry]

> Thinking is, after all, an action, and all of their actions are identical. Therefore it seems like your example assumes Alice's behavior both is and isn't identical to Bob's.

By your logic, I was heterosexual for my entire young adult life when I actively worked to deceive people from realizing my actual orientation :P

People employ dishonesty for lots of reasons, and in myriad ways. Sure, in this thought experiment, perfect indistinguishability means the difference is inconsequential. But you can use crises as an oracle to observe different behaviors, and thus undermine its indistinguishability.

To keep the cryptography going, this is like an active vs passive attack. Sure, it's IND-KPA, but is it IND-CPA or IND-CCA? Perhaps not!

[ratelimitsteve]

>actions are identical

>actively worked to deceive

that's the contradiction i'm talking about. deception requires effort and planning, it's not just casually doing something. I think that as I explore this I might fundamentally be arguing that saying the same words when you believe them true vs when you believe them false are measurably different, and that the only way for someone to say something falsely in exactly the same way they do truthfully is for them to believe that they're true. You said yourself, you actively tried to deceive people.

As far as using crises to undermine indistinguishability, that was another part of my point: if actions are indistinguishable between two actors we only care about the actors' motivation as an attempt to guess how likely they are to remain indistinguishable. If a crisis causes the two actors to distinguish themselves then, once again, we've undermined the original premise of the experiment.

[lithocarpus]

If their intentions are really different their thinking is probably different.

[ratelimitsteve]

then it follows that if their thinking is the same then their intentions are the same. given that thinking is an action, and the description says their actions are the same, then their thinking must be the same and therefore their intentions the same. it's meaningless to think of someone who only does what's right but only does it for wrong reasons as someone can only arrive at right actions through right thought, to allude to buddhism. if alice's motivations are truly different then her actions must diverge from bob's at some point (or we just assume that alice's actions and motivations have no relationship which, again, renders the question meaningless).

[mihaic]

Well said, this sort of oversimplified dichotomy is used by people to get out of responsability. "We have to choose between X and Y, so I just choose X because it's better".

No wonder the author is a Facebook exec that want to be ignorant of ultimate intent, instead of reconciling them.

[speak_plainly]

It is an over simplification but Rousseau does paint this picture of humanity's natural goodness corrupted by society, or what the author calls circumstance. This idea is a cornerstone of the Discourse on Inequality and Émile.

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.

[mannykannot]

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.

[NaomiLehman]

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

[pavel_lishin]

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

[more_corn]

No it wasn’t. I remember because I faced that choice (in 2007 but close enough). It was never a product that seemed to create more good than harm.

Keep in mind that continuing to work somewhere is also a choice.

[alphazard]

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.

[some_furry]

I only have a cursory understanding of Franklin (as in, I vaguely paid enough attention in American History class in public high school to get a passing grade), and this still struck me as odd, too.

[natmaka]

Character is destiny. The content of your character is your choice. Day by day, what you choose, what you think and what you do is who you become. -- Heraclitus

[getnormality]

I have no position on the OP, but this comment has more shame than content. The couple fig leaves of quibbling over dubiously relevant points doesn't really clarify whether the OP's point is incorrect. I have no reason to take your opinion as more authoritative than the OP's when you don't even really engage with what the OP says.

*edited for nuance

[lukeasrodgers]

Here are the article's main points, as I see them:

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.

[getnormality]

Okay, so, leaving the shame thing behind us, the two gaps that I see:

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.

[augusto-moura]

I don't agree that the comment is empty, it did remind me of some philosophy classes, and it did entice my curiosity enough to search about Rousseau again. Your comment though, in poethic irony, doesn't bring anything to the table besides complaining about the top comment.