https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=1Evwgu369Jw
Thanks for sharing, powerful stuff. Reminded me of the film "Waking Life" a little.
Brene Brown has some pretty great books as well.
What is empathy?
51–60 of 88 posts
Re: What is empathy?
#52Earlier quoted context omitted.
The problem with your belief is that you are assuming that it's easy to define sexism, racism, homophobia. The reality is that what a lot of people think are ex one of those three just aren't. Very few people are any of those things in any meaningful way. In fact I would claim that your belief is exactly part of the problem in that you confuse empathy with some ethical/moral idea and end up thinking that you have the…
> The problem with your belief is that you are assuming that it's easy to define sexism, racism, homophobia. The reality is that what a lot of people think are ex one of those three just aren't. Very few people are any of those things in any meaningful way. I don't know about that. People face very real, easily definable dangers and risks from being in a marginalized group, which seems to imply there's more than just…
The point is once you have to point your finger at someone and say you are racist or you are sexist. You will most likely be wrong in ways that matter and only in ways that doesn't really matter (we are all racist, sexist etc).
And yes it's outlandish to say that in any way that matters. Sure you can say that someone who might be deeply religious. But its much harder once you get into the normal modern westerners mindset. I have seen my share of people being accused of things they weren't. That's were it's really dangerous especially the way you continue to talk about it as if you know when it's sexism or racism etc.
Again hate crimes aren't that easy to ascribe to someone either. I am pretty sure you and I would disagree on many of these matters.
I am not mixing anything at all, what I am saying is that very few people are those things in any way that matter.
I am adressing it directly. You say that if more people have empathy button you would press it because that would make the world a better place. So yes you are indeed doing exactly that.
No one is saying we shouldn't do it just that the way you speak of it scares me because you sound so certain you can differentiate.
Re: What is empathy?
#53Earlier quoted context omitted.
The problem with your belief is that you are assuming that it's easy to define sexism, racism, homophobia. The reality is that what a lot of people think are ex one of those three just aren't. Very few people are any of those things in any meaningful way. In fact I would claim that your belief is exactly part of the problem in that you confuse empathy with some ethical/moral idea and end up thinking that you have the…
> Very few people are any of those things in any meaningful way. Then how would you explain, well, most of human history? For example, look at this graph of approval of interracial marriage, which has increased quite steadily: http://news.gallup.com/poll/163697/approve-marriage-blacks-w... What changed, if not the level of racism? Or look at the various declarations of secession of the southern states in the US Civil…
Because they are racist in obvious ways that's not really interesting to me. Historically sure but today its much harder.
Re: What is empathy?
#54People always confuse sympathy with empathy. That's the reason why a lot of think that we are showing empathy when we are not. In fact, being empathetic is difficult. Very few times in our life are we truly empathetic
> People always confuse sympathy with empathy.
One side of this is just shifting of meaning over time. As this article points out, Adam Smith's Theory of Moral Sentiments (1759) gives the term "sympathy" a very central role, but his meaning is much closer to what we now call empathy.
Re: What is empathy?
#55Earlier quoted context omitted.
The problem with your belief is that you are assuming that it's easy to define sexism, racism, homophobia. The reality is that what a lot of people think are ex one of those three just aren't. Very few people are any of those things in any meaningful way. In fact I would claim that your belief is exactly part of the problem in that you confuse empathy with some ethical/moral idea and end up thinking that you have the…
It’s very easy to define sexism, racism, homophobia. I think the thing which makes it hard to spot is that we normally treat questions as boolean yes-or-no things. For example, a police department which is 10% more likely to let one race off with warnings than another race is racist (and that’s not a moral judgement: if warnings are effective everyone should get them), but it’s also an example deliberately chosen to…
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Re: What is empathy?
#56Seems this thread is full of varying definitions for various concepts. I've posted a few comments in this thread myself assuming my own definitions without really reading a dictionary first, so I'll leave my definitions here for anyone who might be interested:
Affective empathy: experiencing some level of suffering or discomfort when visually seeing someone else suffering. This is just a reflex for most of us that scales with how obvious and immediate the other person's pain appears to be. Seeing someone get hit by a car or cry will cause this feeling whereas seeing a depressed person will not as they do not obviously appear to be suffering.
Cognitive empathy: thinking about someone else's circumstances and thus feeling some level of shared suffering. This form of empathy does not require the suffering to be right in front of you for you to feel something and does require cognitive effort (i.e. is not a reflex). We would use this to empathize with someone who is depressed.
Sympathy (as in to feel sympathy for someone): feeling empathy but not taking much time or energy to do anything to help the sufferer and more likely coming up with some rationalization to help yourself deal with your own feelings (i.e. they'll be fine, there is nothing i can do). I guess we also have a concept of "fake sympathy" where someone lies about feeling empathy and then does nothing.
Compassion: a belief that someone is worth helping and having an intention to help them if you can, regardless of the degree to which you empathize with them.
I'm almost certain these definitions are not the "correct ones", but for the sake of me not amending all my previous comments I'll just leave this here.
Re: What is empathy?
#57Paul Graham had a lot of interesting observations about empathy in his 2003 essay "Hackers and Painters":
Like painting, most software is intended for a human audience. And so hackers, like painters, must have empathy to do really great work. You have to be able to see things from the user's point of view.
When I was a kid I was always being told to look at things from someone else's point of view. What this always meant in practice was to do what someone else wanted, instead of what I wanted. This of course gave empathy a bad name, and I made a point of not cultivating it.
Boy, was I wrong. It turns out that looking at things from other people's point of view is practically the secret of success. It doesn't necessarily mean being self-sacrificing. Far from it. Understanding how someone else sees things doesn't imply that you'll act in his interest; in some situations-- in war, for example-- you want to do exactly the opposite.
Most makers make things for a human audience. And to engage an audience you have to understand what they need. Nearly all the greatest paintings are paintings of people, for example, because people are what people are interested in.
Empathy is probably the single most important difference between a good hacker and a great one. Some hackers are quite smart, but when it comes to empathy are practically solipsists. It's hard for such people to design great software, because they can't see things from the user's point of view.
One way to tell how good people are at empathy is to watch them explain a technical question to someone without a technical background. We probably all know people who, though otherwise smart, are just comically bad at this. If someone asks them at a dinner party what a programming language is, they'll say something like ``Oh, a high-level language is what the compiler uses as input to generate object code.'' High-level language? Compiler? Object code? Someone who doesn't know what a programming language is obviously doesn't know what these things are, either.
Quoted from http://www.paulgraham.com/hp.html
Re: What is empathy?
#58Re: What is empathy?
#59Paul Graham had a lot of interesting observations about empathy in his 2003 essay "Hackers and Painters": Like painting, most software is intended for a human audience. And so hackers, like painters, must have empathy to do really great work. You have to be able to see things from the user's point of view. When I was a kid I was always being told to look at things from someone else's point of view. What this always m…
I find it interesting how many varying definitions for empathy I'm seeing in this thread. I always thought of empathy to specifically be "feeling oriented", not simply taking someone else's perspective. Not saying anyone is wrong here, seems like we have yet to fully come to a consensus on what the word empathy really means.
Re: What is empathy?
#60This is an ongoing discussion I have with many people. There is a weird idea that empathy is something that makes you good. In reality what it is is neither good nor bad. It's the ability to put yourself in the emotional state of someone else to understand things not only from their rational point of view but from the point of view of them as humans with both irrational (emotional) and rational perspectives. It can b…
> There is a weird idea that empathy is something that makes you good. It's a pretty heavy prerequisite. A lot of bad things can be traced to people not understanding other people, or refusing to understand them (dehumanization). It's sufficiently fundamental and a common problem that I'm not sure how big the cohort of emphatic-but-manipulative people is. It certainly exists, but there are other issues mixed in there…
Empathy is indeed powerful. And, if people understood each other better, I do think it would mostly be used for good. Conflict is rarely a constructive outcome, so even the self-interested would probably try to use it to broker peace.
The problem is that empathy isn't evenly applied. We can more easily gather empathy for people who are like us than for others. Asking people to be more empathetic may very well exacerbate the lopsidedness rather than reducing it. That uneven distribution of empathy makes it very difficult to make good, impartial decisions when their interests are in conflict.