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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   35543 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of March 20, 2023

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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?

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.

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.

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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