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I want to know true things about myself. I also want to impress my friends by having the traits that they think are cool, but not at the price of faking it–my brain screams that pretending to be something other than what you are isn’t virtuous.
I'm like this. Part of what makes it difficult is figuring out whether you're "faking it" or not. One of the maybe-not-entirely-pleasant side effects of reading Less Wrong is that I've become aware of many of the ways that my brain will lie to me about what I am and the many ways it will attempt to signal false traits without asking me first. This is a problem when you really hate self-aggrandizement and aggrandizing self-deception and get stuck living in a brain made entirely of both. My "stop pretending (or believing) that you're smarter/better/more knowledgeable than you are, jackass" tripwire trips a lot more often than it used to.
(in fact it's tripping on this comment, on the grounds that I'm signaling more epistemic honesty than I think I possess; and it's tripping on this parenthetical remark, for same reason; and recursively does so more when I note it in the remark. Godel, I hate you.)
Ignorance wasn't better, but it sure was more comfortable.
In the past I’ve thought of myself as being mostly consequentialist, in terms of morality, and this is a very consequentialist way to think about being a good person. And it doesn't feel like it would work.
Assuming I understand the two correctly, I find I espouse consequentialism in theory but act more like a virtue ethicist in practice. That is, I feel I should do whatever is going to have the best outcome, but I actually do whatever appears "good" on a surface level. "Good" can be replaced by whatever more-specific virtue the situation seems to call for. Introspection suggests this is because predicting the consequences of my own actions correctly is really hard, so I cheat. Cynicism suggests it's because the monkey brain wants to signal virtue more than achieve my purported intent.
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I don't try to intimidate anybody before a fight. That's nonsense. I intimidate people by hitting them.
-Mike Tyson
A similar example, from a Chris Farley movie:
Tommy: Let's think about this for a sec, Ted, why do they put a guarantee on a box? Hmm, very interesting.
Ted: I'm listening.
Tommy: Here's how I see it. A guy puts a guarantee on the box 'cause he wants you to fell all warm and toasty inside.
Ted: Yeah, makes a man feel good.
Tommy: 'Course it does. Ya think if you leave that box under your pillow at night, the Guarantee Fairy might come by and leave a quarter.
Ted: What's your point?
Tommy: The point is, how do you know the Guarantee Fairy isn't a crazy glue sniffer? "Building model airplanes" says the little fairy, but we're not buying it. Next thing you know, there's money missing off the dresser and your daughter's knocked up, I seen it a hundred times.
Ted: But why do they put a guarantee on the box then?
Tommy: Because they know all they sold ya was a guaranteed piece of shit. That's all it is. Hey, if you want me to take a dump in a box and mark it guaranteed, I will. I got spare time. But for right now, for your sake, for your daughter's sake, ya might wanna think about buying a quality item from me.