December Days 2022 #7: Consistent
Dec. 7th, 2022 11:11 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
silveradept[What's December Days this year? Taking a crowdsourced list of adjectives and seeing if I can turn them into saying good things about myself. Or at least good things to talk about.]
Scientists of most disciplines would say that most natural phenomenon are consistent, even if humans do not yet have the ability to describe the patterns. They would likely also say that humans and their actions are generally consistent, even if the equations only work on large numbers of people, or the consistency can only be observed after the fact, once the result is known and the pattern can be extrapolated. None of this necessarily imparts any sort of moral judgment or value to consistency and following the pattern, as that kind of work is generally reserved for ethicists, theologians, philosophers, and the people who have to deal with the effects and consequences of actions and behaviors.
Consistent can be a double-edged sword, equally an accusation of stasis or a grudging admission of admiration for refusing to change more toward the interlocutor's position instead of the positive quality of being sound of logic or in agreement and harmony with oneself. If I cannot achieve perfection, then, at least on the surface, I can achieve consistency.
In a world of big and small changes, being consistent sometimes means accepting a change, sometimes means refusing a change, and sometimes means advocating for or against changes. These actions, taken by themselves, don't always appear, on the surface, to be logical, compatible, or accordant. When people talk about consistent, though, they generally mean it at a level that is deeper than the surface, that a person is consistent in their core, and if behaviors and actions are evaluated in light of understanding the core beliefs, then the pattern (and deviations from the pattern) emerges. Consistentcy is an expectation of interaction, whether with robots or humans, and those who do not have a pattern, or whose pattern cannot be determined, are generally classified as dangerous.
At the same time, there has to be a way for someone to change, to move away from previous beliefs, assumptions, and axioms if they have been convincingly shown as harmful. Consistency of belief and action when neither belief nor action serves a useful or moral purpose, or produces unacceptable consequences for actions, is unintelligent. A person who has been consistent all through their life has successfully performed the Ship of Theseus substitution, gradually replacing the things that no longer serve or are no longer part of the belief system with new planks and new ideas, until they are taking actions that their previous self would be unable to conceive of, much less execute.
I do wonder how much of my belief in my own consistency is much like my belief in my own morality. If I have a fundamental need to see myself as consistent and moral, then it's just as likely that I'm going to edit out the times in my life where I am inconsistent or immoral, or try to retroactively justify actions as consistent and moral when they are not. Trying to keep in my head the practice of judging actions on their consequences more than their intentions is difficult, because my upbringing and culture is steeped in the idea of morality and consistency deriving primarily from intention, with the correspondent concepts of sin (and its gradations thereof), forgiveness (which requires the action of a deity or of those who are invested with the authority of the deity,) and grace (the part where sinful and imperfect humans nonetheless still get to have good things because of the boundless love for us from the deity.) Context is aggressively collapsed to "only people with evil intentions do evil acts," which often derails a conversation about consequences and reparations into "but I couldn't possibly have done a bad thing, I'm not a bad person!" That same context collapse can also prevent a person from recognizing they have a pattern of behavior that falls short of their ideals and working on undoing that pattern or refining it into something less harmful.
Am I consistent? I have several years of archived writing and linking for you to judge on that. The style has changed over time, certainly, but the positions should be within orbit of each other. People are what they do much more than what they say. There are more than enough resources for everyone to go around, and those that hoard need to have their hoards given to people and places where they can be used, instead of kept as status symbols or score chits. The budget for war and policing could be used more productively for social programs and other services. One's religious beliefs should not be enshrined in law, and those that seek to enshrine their beliefs in law should be prohibited from doing so. (Even the good stuff. But the good stuff usually also has some pretty solid secular justifications to use.) Do not taunt, annoy, or aggravate the Happy Fun Librarian, or their staff, or their co-workers. Children and teenagters have a place in the library, even if that means there will be noise in the library. Don't like? Don't read. The back button is your friend. And, apparently, I tend to operate from a place of feeling shame about my shortcomings and seek external validation by chasing perfection. (Which also acts as defense mechanism against other people making fun of me and trying to induce shame by giving them no place to sink in their hooks. It works well enough when you're getting grades and have "objective" numbers, but it fails miserably everywhere else, because everywhere else has sufficiently determined people that will find some way to hurt you.)
I collect, I synthesize, I try to extract the useful things and apply them to my own knowledge stores and my own behaviors. And, based on the other adjectives and the fact that I'm not posting to an empty journal, being consistently the person I am is good enough to make friends and hold on to them. Consistency leads to being sympathetic. Enough so that people decided they wanted to help me get the courage to plan and execute the plan to get out of the relationship where someone was taking advantage of my consistent traits for herself. Thanks for that.
- consistent (comparative more consistent, superlative most consistent)
- Of a regularly occurring, dependable nature. [from late 16th c. in the obsolete sense ‘consisting of’]
- Compatible, accordant.
- (logic) Of a set of statements: such that no contradiction logically follows from them.
Scientists of most disciplines would say that most natural phenomenon are consistent, even if humans do not yet have the ability to describe the patterns. They would likely also say that humans and their actions are generally consistent, even if the equations only work on large numbers of people, or the consistency can only be observed after the fact, once the result is known and the pattern can be extrapolated. None of this necessarily imparts any sort of moral judgment or value to consistency and following the pattern, as that kind of work is generally reserved for ethicists, theologians, philosophers, and the people who have to deal with the effects and consequences of actions and behaviors.
Consistent can be a double-edged sword, equally an accusation of stasis or a grudging admission of admiration for refusing to change more toward the interlocutor's position instead of the positive quality of being sound of logic or in agreement and harmony with oneself. If I cannot achieve perfection, then, at least on the surface, I can achieve consistency.
In a world of big and small changes, being consistent sometimes means accepting a change, sometimes means refusing a change, and sometimes means advocating for or against changes. These actions, taken by themselves, don't always appear, on the surface, to be logical, compatible, or accordant. When people talk about consistent, though, they generally mean it at a level that is deeper than the surface, that a person is consistent in their core, and if behaviors and actions are evaluated in light of understanding the core beliefs, then the pattern (and deviations from the pattern) emerges. Consistentcy is an expectation of interaction, whether with robots or humans, and those who do not have a pattern, or whose pattern cannot be determined, are generally classified as dangerous.
At the same time, there has to be a way for someone to change, to move away from previous beliefs, assumptions, and axioms if they have been convincingly shown as harmful. Consistency of belief and action when neither belief nor action serves a useful or moral purpose, or produces unacceptable consequences for actions, is unintelligent. A person who has been consistent all through their life has successfully performed the Ship of Theseus substitution, gradually replacing the things that no longer serve or are no longer part of the belief system with new planks and new ideas, until they are taking actions that their previous self would be unable to conceive of, much less execute.
I do wonder how much of my belief in my own consistency is much like my belief in my own morality. If I have a fundamental need to see myself as consistent and moral, then it's just as likely that I'm going to edit out the times in my life where I am inconsistent or immoral, or try to retroactively justify actions as consistent and moral when they are not. Trying to keep in my head the practice of judging actions on their consequences more than their intentions is difficult, because my upbringing and culture is steeped in the idea of morality and consistency deriving primarily from intention, with the correspondent concepts of sin (and its gradations thereof), forgiveness (which requires the action of a deity or of those who are invested with the authority of the deity,) and grace (the part where sinful and imperfect humans nonetheless still get to have good things because of the boundless love for us from the deity.) Context is aggressively collapsed to "only people with evil intentions do evil acts," which often derails a conversation about consequences and reparations into "but I couldn't possibly have done a bad thing, I'm not a bad person!" That same context collapse can also prevent a person from recognizing they have a pattern of behavior that falls short of their ideals and working on undoing that pattern or refining it into something less harmful.
Am I consistent? I have several years of archived writing and linking for you to judge on that. The style has changed over time, certainly, but the positions should be within orbit of each other. People are what they do much more than what they say. There are more than enough resources for everyone to go around, and those that hoard need to have their hoards given to people and places where they can be used, instead of kept as status symbols or score chits. The budget for war and policing could be used more productively for social programs and other services. One's religious beliefs should not be enshrined in law, and those that seek to enshrine their beliefs in law should be prohibited from doing so. (Even the good stuff. But the good stuff usually also has some pretty solid secular justifications to use.) Do not taunt, annoy, or aggravate the Happy Fun Librarian, or their staff, or their co-workers. Children and teenagters have a place in the library, even if that means there will be noise in the library. Don't like? Don't read. The back button is your friend. And, apparently, I tend to operate from a place of feeling shame about my shortcomings and seek external validation by chasing perfection. (Which also acts as defense mechanism against other people making fun of me and trying to induce shame by giving them no place to sink in their hooks. It works well enough when you're getting grades and have "objective" numbers, but it fails miserably everywhere else, because everywhere else has sufficiently determined people that will find some way to hurt you.)
I collect, I synthesize, I try to extract the useful things and apply them to my own knowledge stores and my own behaviors. And, based on the other adjectives and the fact that I'm not posting to an empty journal, being consistently the person I am is good enough to make friends and hold on to them. Consistency leads to being sympathetic. Enough so that people decided they wanted to help me get the courage to plan and execute the plan to get out of the relationship where someone was taking advantage of my consistent traits for herself. Thanks for that.
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