Nobody has a personality anymore: we are products with labels

This parallels the debate about free will and determinism. If you were in the determinist camp, believing that all that one does was predetermined by prior environmental causes, could you still hold people responsible for their actions?

Hobart makes a convincing argument that you can: "Fatalism says that my morrow is determined no matter how I struggle. This is of course a superstition. Determinism says that my morrow is determined through my struggle. There is this significance in my mental effort, that it is deciding the event." [1]

i.e., he is a "compatibilist", thinking that you can believe in free will and determinism too.

If you find Hobart persuasive, time-blindness or no, it does make sense to reproach someone for being habitually unpunctual.

[1] https://philarchive.org/archive/HOBFWA

Reposted to address: labels on clusters of belief such as "free will" and "determinism"

tlb or pg has a pithy saying that I can't find now goes smth like

"we should avoid labels [on people] not because they are useless (they aren't) but they are hard to get right. Adding the cost of being wrong to that makes them not worth it"

There's some connection to the "build skill or taste?" dilemma threaded earlier

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44469163

You can make proper use of labels-- that requires taste. To build skill, you try to find new labels that can go viral ;)

E.g you combine them like Hobart :)

The problem is conflating one's identity with the label allows a person to project all of their problems onto the rest of the world.

By "being" the label, one has little to no agency over it. Without agency, there is no responsibility, nor incentive to change. Without responsibility or incentive to change, there is no problem for the individual; rather the problem is everyone else.

This isn't just something that a person can do to themselves- it's something society can do to people. The phrase "bigotry of low expectations" describes a behavior of assuming that a label identifies a person, and that they have no personal agency to overcome it. The behavioral shift of everyone around that person molds the image the person has of themselves to a limited, restricted version of what they're actually capable of.

> If you were in the determinist camp, believing that all that one does was predetermined by prior environmental causes, could you still hold people responsible for their actions?

This is a good example of where over-thinking a topic in abstract terms causes some people to lose sight of the big picture.

Take a step back and think about what you’re saying: If nobody could be held accountable for their own actions, does the concept of accountability disappear? It’s a farcical claim.

But you’re right, this is essentially what is being argued: By invoking therapy speak and formal sounding labels, the person wants you to kindly box up any accountability or consequences under the label and direct them at the abstract notion of the labeled condition, instead of the person responsible.

This is why I experienced so many people getting worse at punctuality after learned the phrase “time blindness”: They used the therapy speak to transform themselves into the victim, at which point the pressure to improve their situation diminished because they believe victims couldn’t be blamed. The temptation becomes strong to label everything negative this way as it’s a nice escape hatch to externalize accountability.

Why have you typed out the full word for everything in your cmmnt except for “something” and people’s names?

I guess pg is Paul Graham. Who is tlb?

A tik

https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=pastYear&page=0&prefix=tru...

'Trevor L. Blackwell', co-founder of YC

Pls help

>escape hatch to externalize accountability.

It's harder to escape from "has bad taste" than from "irresponsible" :)

>Bad taste leads to crime

Useful reminder (originally Stendhal's, that Lead poisoning is always indirect)?

OT warnings

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lead(II)_acetate#Sweetener

https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC3027955/

> If you were in the determinist camp, believing that all that one does was predetermined by prior environmental causes, could you still hold people responsible for their actions?

I've been thinking about an escape hatch here:

Imagine that all philosophical notions of free will were incoherent. In that case non-philosophers' use of "free will" would either be a) inherited from this philosophical incoherence, or b) pretentious/ambiguous nomenclature that reduces to a more practical, well-defined term-- e.g., self-determination, freedom from tyranny, etc.

In reality, it seems like in the vast majority of non-philosophers mean "free will" as a short-hand for one of the more practical, workaday terms. The only edge case I can think of is the use of "free will" in the history of Christian theology, but I very rarely see that come up in non-academic situations.

If my supposition is right, then we can practically swap out nearly all instances of "free will" for the relevant non-philosophical, well-specified lay terms. And the continue to hold people responsible for their actions based on the centuries of case-law, common law, social history and medical knowledge that led up to our modern era. Perhaps more importantly, we can incrementally level up our understanding of responsibility/justice based on modern research into human behavior, while completely avoid digressions into philosophical determinism.

In fact, I'd speculate that college philosophy "free will 101" classes are a kind of unwitting bait and switch. I bet if you did a survey, most prospective students would be expecting a class that sharpens their teeth on one of the workaday synonyms, most often something like "self-actualization." But that has about as much to do with "free will" that as "coffee bean calligraphy" has to do with Javascript. (Alternatively: it would be a fun prank to do a "free will 101" class that teaches students to stand up for what they believe in, resist tyranny, etc. :)

Edit: clarification

> could you still hold people responsible for their actions?

Surely this is trivially "yes". If their actions are deterministic, then your responses to their actions must also be deterministic, including holding them responsible (punishment, firing, etc).

You can force agency, ironically, by applying subjective labels that require irrational amounts of hard work to shake off (not just a change of perspective, tho a permanent one also requires undue amounts of schlep)

Like "unwell"*, "uncool" or "has bad taste"

In the barbaric old days, like you mean, there was racism (no longer objective)... Nowadays you can deny my suggested labels are cruel, plausibly, even in court!

*"Sick" is now a term of endearment, alas

Even stronger if you believe things are deterministic there is no reason not to hold them accountable. You don't try to argue with a broken clock for it to become more punctual, you just trash it.

In a deterministic universe, the future is still affected by (and can be improved by) shaming people for behaving poorly, even when they have a predisposition towards such behaviour. Think of it like integral windup in a PID controller. The feedback provides an error signal that accumulates to (in most cases) move the person's outputs in a direction that will reduce the poor behaviour. Eventually their brain will start predicting the negative feedback and alter its outputs to produce more acceptable behaviours.

Whether this is best described as "learning", or as "internalised <whatever>", or as "trauma", is left to the reader.

Wouldn't it then absolve me of my personal responsibility to reprimand the person?It's not me choosing to hold people responsible, it's just something that happens (or doesn't, depending on what was determined)

Reminds me of this 1996 essay, "Sorry, But Your Soul Just Died": http://www.psy.vanderbilt.edu/courses/psy115w/Fall02/TomWolf...

TL;DR: It argues that what comes after "God is dead" (Nietzsche) is "the soul is dead" (or less poetically, "the self is dead"), i.e. we become convinced we have no agency, but mere biological and environmental automatons with the concomitant lack of moral accountability.

(Credit to earljwagner's 2023 post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37950313)

The dilemma of determinism has the other side - if free will is indeed truly free, i.e. it may introduce causes that themselves do not have causes, the accountability is lost as well, for there is no continuity.

I am interested in this topic, but I do sometimes find the compatiblism argument difficult to distill down to its essence without still leaving a sense of unfulfillment.

From my understanding, compatibilism boils down to accepting that everything may be pre-determined, but people are still free to make choices as long as they are uncoerced.

The argument from that quote above is a little bit subtler and aligns with my thinking. I don't believe we have free will in any sense, either everything is pre-determined, or it is random, and I can't even think of a definition of free will that would make sense (just like the compatiblism one does not to me). But clearly there is a feedback loop going on, and so it is inherently in the species best interest to hold people accountable for their actions, because the act of holding them accountable forms part of the inputs that lead people to make choices. Not doing this is not a great survivability trait overall. Doing so, we survive a bit more.

But I'm not sure that is strictly necessary to call oneself a compatibilist.

Thank you for the link. Amazing article, and 29 years old at that.

If you have a mechanistic view of humans, you know that punishment can cause changes in behavior, so you would use punishment to cause the changes that you would like to see. Punishment is fully compatible with determinism.