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?
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Yeah, I think I did hurt my back with that reach.
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.
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.
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.
That's very insightful. Could you share some references for further reading? I'd like to explore this topic a bit on my own.
The main resource that I recommend is the one towards the bottom of the comment: “Motivational Interviewing” by W.R. Miller and Stephen Rollnick. I’ve read the third and fourth editions. The third edition is more concrete but also more complex, and more focused on the field of clinical psychology, while the fourth edition is a shorter book where it’s been generalized more to be more applicable to all kinds of helping relationships, but contains fewer specific examples of clinical practice.
In the second edition they had not yet broken up the concept of “resistance” into “sustain talk” and “discord,” which I found to be a helpful distinction.
About 10% of the book is its bibliography, so if you want more information about a specific claim you can usually find the primary source by following the reference.
Miller and Rollnick are the ones who developed the technique of motivational interviewing, so they have a strong connection to much of the research cited.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
If the two are indistinguishable from an outsider's perspective how would you know which one to trust?
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.
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?
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?
Which in the end is precisely the reason why we want to understand the intentions behind the actions, right?
Right.
My stance on this is: Try to find a way to do good that doesn't make you miserable. Lying is to yourself is a form of oppression, and lying to others is a tactic for enduring oppression. (Ask a queer person about their time in the closet if you don't understand what I mean here.) Oppression makes you miserable, and misery tends to result in vapid thinkpieces that don't scratch below the surface of the referenced source material.
But also: Be honest with yourself about what you want and why you want it. Whether for good or for ill. That way, at least you can have a modicum of peace. I wrote more about this train of thought recently, if anyone's curious: https://soatok.blog/2025/10/15/the-dreamseekers-vision-of-to...
This sounds like a job for cryptography!
(No, it doesn't, actually.)
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.
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?
I don't know. How are the Kardashians doing?
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.
> 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!
>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.
If their intentions are really different their thinking is probably different.
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).