For a long time, I viewed integrity as a virtue. For the past 15 years or so , I’ve created and strived to live by mission statements that elucidate my values. I had a strong sense of my ideal self, and a strong sense of my “actual self” and worked to live up to it as often as I could.
More recently, the concept of my “self” has started to seem less of a coherent concept, and the concept of an “ideal self” has started to seem less obvious to me. Instead, I’ve started to shift towards context-specific integrity, that is, being legible and consistent to specific groups of people, but not having a global set of principles that I live up to. This allows me to focus more on terminal values and things I care about, while still being predictable to outside people.
There’s a sense where there’s a global type of integrity which is something like “Am I actually acting in accordance with my current frame of meaning and the things I care about?” but there’s no way to put that into a single consistent set of principles.
This seems similar to how I feel—I’m much more aware of varying contexts and of the changes in salience of the models I use than I used to be, and I put less weight on self-consistency across time. And more on self-consistency at a coarser level over time and across contexts—this is what I take from the “Integrity” desire.
It’s both “am I acting in accordance with my current frame?” and “is my current frame compatible with (even if differing in many specifics, because it considers different factors in it’s model) my overall meta-frame?”. With a little bit of “am I transparent enough in my stated/communicated frames that I am not hurting someone in a way that violates my frame or meta-frame?”.
For a long time, I viewed integrity as a virtue. For the past 15 years or so , I’ve created and strived to live by mission statements that elucidate my values. I had a strong sense of my ideal self, and a strong sense of my “actual self” and worked to live up to it as often as I could.
More recently, the concept of my “self” has started to seem less of a coherent concept, and the concept of an “ideal self” has started to seem less obvious to me. Instead, I’ve started to shift towards context-specific integrity, that is, being legible and consistent to specific groups of people, but not having a global set of principles that I live up to. This allows me to focus more on terminal values and things I care about, while still being predictable to outside people.
There’s a sense where there’s a global type of integrity which is something like “Am I actually acting in accordance with my current frame of meaning and the things I care about?” but there’s no way to put that into a single consistent set of principles.
This seems similar to how I feel—I’m much more aware of varying contexts and of the changes in salience of the models I use than I used to be, and I put less weight on self-consistency across time. And more on self-consistency at a coarser level over time and across contexts—this is what I take from the “Integrity” desire.
It’s both “am I acting in accordance with my current frame?” and “is my current frame compatible with (even if differing in many specifics, because it considers different factors in it’s model) my overall meta-frame?”. With a little bit of “am I transparent enough in my stated/communicated frames that I am not hurting someone in a way that violates my frame or meta-frame?”.