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I don't like when people treat empathy as an all-or-nothing, or when they say that not having empathy makes you a bad person. I am capable of empathizing with people, but only when they think the same way I do, which means I hardly have empathy at all. For example, if something makes someone upset, I can understand their thoughts/feelings if the same thing would make me upset. Otherwise, it's like I'm looking at an alien creature. It's why I've never understood why people get offended at jokes when they know that they're jokes, or why people don't find communism as upsetting as racism, and so on. And on the rare occasion I do think I've modeled someone mentally, I usually end up being wrong.
What would you call this phenomenon? Limited empathy?
You're making the all too common mistake of conflating empathy with sympathy. Empathy means the ability to understand where someone is coming from, their persective. Understand what it's like to be in their shoes. It does not mean you have to like or agree with their perspective. That is what sympathy is for, feelings of compassion and pity with someone's position or perspective, implicited agreeing with their plight.
The ability to empathise is always a good thing, at the very least for strictly utilitarian or pragmatic reasons. By understanding someone's perspective and motivations, you can predict how they will act in certain situations. You can better manipulate people. Hostage negotiators do this all the time - they negociate with criminals, empathise with them, understand them and use that information against them. The hostage negotiators don't like the hostage takers or agree with their goals.
It certainly makes you a less effective person. If we think empathy is a necessary precursor to sympathy (while being distinct phenomena), then that lack of sympathy caused by lack of empathy certainly could be one definition of 'bad'. Being able to forgive people you like is easy. It's being able to forgive people you don't like where true virtue is found.
I do understand the difference, and I do believe I'm capable of sympathy, but not empathy.
Also, on this topic, is there a meaningful difference between empathy and theory of mind? To me, they seem like the same concept and both are things that I lack, but "empathy" is the word people usually use when shaming.
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As with many things, there's a large "Who? Whom?" motivation for the types who tell you to "have some empathy."
Generally, they're telling you to have more empathy for the correct groups, where you exhibiting more empathy overall is merely incidental. You exhibiting greater empathy overall by way of exhibiting more empathy for incorrect groups, is of course Toxic and Problematic and some combination of -ist/-ism/-bic (new pronouns?) one way or another. For example, an article we previously discussed on the Motte subreddit ("Foreperson: 3 jurors unwilling to convict Resiles based on race"): Some people can have a seemingly infinite amount of empathy for perpetrators of violent crime—and yet none for the victims—depending on Who? Whom? factors.
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I agree with those who say it’s a scale. But I think in most cases either extreme can be bad. Empathy like all other emotions are meant to serve us as rational creatures, and quite often when the emotions take over, extremely bad decisions get made, and it really doesn’t matter whether it’s empathy or anger, they both serve to alert you to a problem, it’s then up to you to solve that problem.
I think the idea of Jordan Peterson is correct that there is a heavily promoted idea of a maternal relationship between the state and the people promoted in the western world, the idea of basically the state and the other arms of culture must snowplow life, must nurture every person, must tell everyone not to be too mean, etc. I think the state shouldn’t force bad situations on people, but I don’t think that means putting up baby gates and padded bumpers lest someone get hurt. I don’t like living in a padded cage. I agree that it’s infantilism to a huge degree and degrading not only to those it’s used on, but for all of society that must be made to protect the absolute weakest rather than reach upward toward something better than ourselves.
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Empathy is not a binary thing where you either have got it or you don't, but that sounds like a lack of empathy. Understanding is not endorsement. If you struggle to even understand people's emotions unless they mirror your own reactions, you may have an empathy problem.
I can recognize fear or sadness if it's obvious enough, but I can't understand why the person feels that way or what would stop them from feeling that way. I also sometimes assume that it's being feigned for malicious purposes, i.e. the people who cried in public when Hillary lost in 2016.
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Treating a spectrum as a binary is a problem. But it's also a problem to treat a minimal amount of something as an acceptable amount. ("All Americans can afford aspirin , so all American have access to healthcare"). Who doesn't even have empathy for people just like them?
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It's an instance of the overly feminized rhetoric that is taking over the distributed sense-making apparatus of the West (And some other places).
Maximizing "Empathy" is just an aspirational value among the set of many values, nothing gives it authority over good judgment, truth for its own sake, practicality, etc.
Imagine you have a set of problems that maps to a set of solutions, which has corresponding elements in a set of values and male/female coding. If all your proposed solutions are from a certain cluster and does not make use of the mapping, you know some serious bullshit is afoot. And looking at the pattern of the LACK of mapping can suggest which direction things went wrong in. In simple words, if your solution to all problems is the maximization of a female-coded value, then you are being ruled by the Tyranical Mother.
Ever wondered why so few female libertarians? Or why was fun made illegal during the 2019-sars-coronavirus-2 pandemic?
And you don't need to look far and wide for the pernicious everpresent penetration of feminized rhetoric.
Ask Reddit what should a programmer know. A majority of the answers are "people skills", "empathy", and other soft skill horseshit. Are those things really more important than design patterns and version control? Or did we just get psyop'ed into thinking that being a people pleaser is the end-all-be-all to making the world go round?
This is a good post. Thank you. We need to meme the phrase "toxic femininity" as an equal counterpart to toxic masculinity. The traits that "toxic masculinity" exists to criticize do exist, though I'd quibble with the implicit claim that they are prevalent in our culture. Toxic femininity, though..
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This could actually be unintentionally subversive and black-pilled advice in a way. That, for hiring and/or career advancement, it's better to be a people pleaser (and of the right demographics) than be competent.
Product management is much different than programming—but see for example, the TikTok video of that young female Meta product manager whose day-to-day chiefly involved "[trying] to look cute everyday," literally making coffee ☕, and "me being cuuuutte" (cue brief clip of her dancing on the office rooftop) while vocal frying left and right.
She doubled down on LinkedIn with: "I love romanticizing the daily grind that is my life, being a woman in tech, and being a recent new grad trying to figure everything out. Content creators like myself have the utmost power to influence how young people view corporate life, and working in these popular industries" before rage-quitting her social media damage control when it became too apparent the mockery was defeating the simpery.
Yes, yes—as she has shown, such a grind being a #WomanInTech.
There's a bunch of these sorts of videos going around, but I actually don't think they mean as much as the people highlighting them want them to mean. They all intentionally edit out all mention of the actual work they've done in favor of coffee, lunch, workouts, etc. But honestly, we all do most of that stuff, if maybe not quite as glamorously. We have no idea how hard she's actually working or to what extent she's actually accomplishing useful things.
Aren't they literally just advertisements for work? They get hateclicks and boosts from the "look at these millennial bitches doing NOTHING and getting paid!" crowd, which is a plus, but the true constituency is just getting more and more applications for work to choose from - after all, a lot of people would consider light work for good pay and benefits a great deal, subconsciously or consciously. And the idea that there's a workplace full of cute girls doing girl stuff and having plenty of time to chat is going to be attractive to a lot of men, too, obviously.
Her defense of the video showing her doing nothing yet getting paid, isn't consistent with this hypothesis: Were she merely an actress, making a video which in which true nature of being employed by Blizzard is distorted, she would have said so and be free of any condemation (few would call a person lazy, just because they played a lazy person), but in her defense she never posited she made the video at the behest of anyone but herself.
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People SKILLS are indeed what makes the world go round. Or at least what get people ahead. But not being a "people pleaser". Being good at technical skills makes you a good field slave, being good at people pleasing makes you a good house slave. The people skill that matters is getting people to follow you. That one is not feminine-coded.
This debate is basically half linguistic where 'feminine' subtly alters through a variety of different meanings whilst without making clear which is meant, best shown by the simple 'feminine = bad'. Is success naturally masculine? What about obstinacy? in the face of evident failure?
Feminine =//= Female. This is the core confusion. When Lieutenant Napoleon kowtows to his superiors it is 'feminine' in the sense that he's not being a brash dictator who attempts to trample over everyone and 'masculine' in the sense that this is the optimum social strategy to achieve his ends. IMO a Platonically 'masculine' man would be absolutely self-assured in all his acts, however wrong, and never go back on anything. This is not a recipe for success of any sort, political, military or anything else.
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If you are founder. If you are middle manager the ability is to suck up. Richard Marchinco's corporate style leadership is dead.
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I definitely think empathy and sympathy are basically synonymous in public consciousness, and I agree that usually when empathy is mentioned it is actually sympathy that is being called for. Really I think empathy is basically just advanced theory of mind. It's the ability to determine why someone did something the way they did it, and to connect with them through it.
I think it is one of the most vital and integral foundation blocks of the motte. It is both a necessary prerequisite for posting here and something the motte helps us build. That's why I get so annoyed when the mods jump to seeing trolls in impolitic but earnest ops.
This is kind of a shower thought finisher, but I kind of see empathy as male coded and sympathy as female coded. Something in my gut tells me that is right, but then again it might just be that I see women more regularly confuse the two because it's rare to see men mention either, so when I do see a man mention it they are more likely to have looked into it and discovered the difference.
In political discussion, it's usually neither empathy nor sympathy; it's a demand to turn one's rational brain off and do whatever the person demanding empathy claims is best for whoever they are demanding the empathy towards.
For sure, although I would expand that to pretty much any demand that people engage cognitive faculties.
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I think there's a lot of truth to this. A couple years ago, I started mentally replacing "empathy" with "submission" whenever people called for more of the former, and it was almost always the more accurate word in those contexts.
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This is what vast majority mean by 'empathy' mean, they just aren't conscious about it.
What about theory of mind?
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I'd second this. And when people accuse others of lacking empathy, what they actually mean is that the others are having empathy for the wrong thing, and they should have empathy for the right thing instead. Again, without being conscious of this. This lack of consciousness on this is a very powerful tool to use for manipulating others into submission, because it allows people who consider themselves generally decent and non-manipulative to do so.
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I would say that just about everyone has limited empathy, otherwise we'd all be effective altruists spending our life savings on bed nets in Africa. The point of ethics is more or less to tell us how we should allocate our supply of empathy among various spheres of concern, with a common approach being that in most circumstances we should care less about people increasingly distant from us, but that we should make some efforts towards generalized (in the form of charitable donations, tithes, zakat, etc.) or situational (if we see someone drowning in front of us) concern for strangers.
As we each differ in our native capacities, the best results for society will come from people with too much empathy restraining themselves and not letting homeless strangers sleep in their beds, while people with too little empathy try to sometimes assist or comfort people in obvious distress. It's quite common that a friend or family member will complain to me about something I don't think is a big deal, but I'd be a bad friend or relative if I told them what I really thought.
We all go through life slightly misaligned with the world around us, and the allure of the internet is in part from our ability to find people who think exactly like we do, without all the social frictions of real-life interactions. But unless enough of us decide to start a commune somewhere, we're better off learning how to deal with being a squeaky wheel rather than dreaming about grease.
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Schmittposting? /s
Schmitt's whole gig was that the key distinction was between friend and enemy. I can commiserate when one of my friends has a setback. If they argue in favour of something I believe in weakly or in a cringeworthy way, I can sort of empathize with them. Much less so if an enemy makes a weak argument or embarrasses himself.
Everyone has some kind of Schmittian impulse. Not too many people are sympathetic towards pedophiles or cartel drug fiends. I imagine many pedophiles or cartel drug fiends have or are experiencing pretty poor conditions. But who cares? They're enemies.
Edit: If they think like me then they'll probably be my friend, our beliefs will be similar and we'd probably get along.
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