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> Empathy is, in a word, selfish. In his bracing and persuasive 2016 book Against Empathy, Paul Bloom writes, “Empathy is a spotlight focusing on certain people

> Empathy is, in a word, selfish. In his bracing and persuasive 2016 book Against Empathy, Paul Bloom writes, “Empathy is a spotlight focusing on certain people in the here and now… Empathy is biased… It is shortsighted.” Author understands empathy as a micro emotional transaction enacted on a personal scale. The empathic domain is actually "all things", and should include "all positions and considerations". In short, the author should work through a few feelings that are biasing their perspective on this matter.

bitL 8y ago
It frankly sounds like a sociopath's description of empathy. Somebody missing the necessary parts in their brain to be naturally empathetic, describing it based on perceivable symptoms, assuming there is some risk/reward ratio with game theory going on underneath.
- coldtea 8y ago
  Well, considering we evolved from amino acids based on all kinds of risk/reward filters of evolution, that's probably what's underneath.
  - Joe-Z 8y ago
    At the lowest level of every computer there's only zeroes and ones. Still you don't try to explain a neural network in terms of zeroes and ones. Because the emergent behaviour is much more complex than that.
    - lostmsu 8y ago
      No, that's actually exactly what you do.
      - Joe-Z 8y ago
        I think we may be talking about different things here. So in the interest of clearing things up: I was using the example of a neural network as "the closest thing" (arguably still very far off) to the human mind we have in computing. If I'm explaining a newly developed software to one of my colleagues I'm talking in terms of services, requests and protocols. Even trying to explain it on the level of an assembly language would be a nightmare. Just think about the millenia it would take me to fully articulate all states the CPU goes through when executing even a single function. And even then all you'd have is an endless list of zeroes and ones, but no explanation as to the meaning of it.
  - bitL 8y ago
    We have no idea how exactly we evolved. All mechanisms we observed so far were about local adaptations to changing environment, not about jumps in evolution, and the level of optimization needed would probably require a quantum computer (or better) to be feasible in <billion years (that's just too little time even for some stupid traveling salesman problem, not mentioning deciding if one needs a new leg and how does the motorics and neural structure need to be implemented from scratch; we can't even come close to it with Deep Reinforcement Learning on largest supercomputers). Moreover, not a single person has any clue what exactly is consciousness and how does it emerge (if even), or if the whole Universe has any special consciousness layer. Yet let's reduce everything to some basic chemistry because that makes us happy and "rational". We are just neanderthals when it comes to science and understanding how does the world work. I hope this civilization keeps developing and our successors would laugh at our current scientific state-of-art, comparing us to chimpanzees.
    - coldtea 8y ago
      >I hope this civilization keeps developing and our successors would laugh at our current scientific state-of-art, comparing us to chimpanzees. This pseudo-scientific rant was to imply that future science will rediscover the irreducible to matter and evolutionary mechanisms soul, sorry I mean't "universe's special consciousness layer"?
      - bitL 8y ago
        Frankly, your response sounded like informed "scientism", so popular at the end of 19th/beginning of 20th century. I simply state that we should keep minds open to different explanations maybe someday observable by scientific method instead of trying to fit phenomena beyond our grasp into mechanisms known and proven today in unrelated areas, while expressing the hope that our civilization keeps improving instead of regressing. I couldn't care less if Universe had a special consciousness layer, or information layer, or we lived in some virtual machine of some grad student in a layer above us or whatever, but I wouldn't rule it out and wouldn't make fun of it either; I would also make sure if somebody comes with such a theory, that they stand on sound grounds instead of some new ageish demonology (popular in current neuroscience ehm) or whatnot. Whether I would allocate funding to it is a completely different matter (99.999% no). If you start saying that "oh, it's just evolution", your contribution to the topic is zero, skipping any issues with that theory we can't explain yet, making it similar to a religion (which condenses certain observable facts into its rules otherwise it wouldn't survive). It's pretty normal for scientists to believe in 99% BS but if they are 1% right, we consider them super successful. None of the pioneers had any kind of holistic view of a field crunched through by theoreticians, after the initial discovery dust settled, taught at universities, so they inevitably believed all kinds of silly things from our current point of view. I hope the same would hold for our successors, having boldness to explore, instead of blindly taking existing knowledge without any doubts and punishing everyone who deviates from whatever narrative.
naasking 8y ago
> In short, the author should work through a few feelings that are biasing their perspective on this matter. You're confusing "empathy the emotion" with "empathic reasoning", which is a form of generalized empathy. Clearly the article is about the emotion which has all the downsides listed.
- bigbadgoose 8y ago
  Thank you for the detail :)
coldtea 8y ago
>The empathic domain is actually "all things", and should include "all positions and considerations". That's what "oughta". It's not what it is, though, (or, if you prefer, what it usually is), and that's what the author talks about.

bitL 8y ago

It frankly sounds like a sociopath's description of empathy. Somebody missing the necessary parts in their brain to be naturally empathetic, describing it based on perceivable symptoms, assuming there is some risk/reward ratio with game theory going on underneath.

coldtea 8y ago
Well, considering we evolved from amino acids based on all kinds of risk/reward filters of evolution, that's probably what's underneath.
- Joe-Z 8y ago
  At the lowest level of every computer there's only zeroes and ones. Still you don't try to explain a neural network in terms of zeroes and ones. Because the emergent behaviour is much more complex than that.
  - lostmsu 8y ago
    No, that's actually exactly what you do.
    - Joe-Z 8y ago
      I think we may be talking about different things here. So in the interest of clearing things up: I was using the example of a neural network as "the closest thing" (arguably still very far off) to the human mind we have in computing. If I'm explaining a newly developed software to one of my colleagues I'm talking in terms of services, requests and protocols. Even trying to explain it on the level of an assembly language would be a nightmare. Just think about the millenia it would take me to fully articulate all states the CPU goes through when executing even a single function. And even then all you'd have is an endless list of zeroes and ones, but no explanation as to the meaning of it.
- bitL 8y ago
  We have no idea how exactly we evolved. All mechanisms we observed so far were about local adaptations to changing environment, not about jumps in evolution, and the level of optimization needed would probably require a quantum computer (or better) to be feasible in <billion years (that's just too little time even for some stupid traveling salesman problem, not mentioning deciding if one needs a new leg and how does the motorics and neural structure need to be implemented from scratch; we can't even come close to it with Deep Reinforcement Learning on largest supercomputers). Moreover, not a single person has any clue what exactly is consciousness and how does it emerge (if even), or if the whole Universe has any special consciousness layer. Yet let's reduce everything to some basic chemistry because that makes us happy and "rational". We are just neanderthals when it comes to science and understanding how does the world work. I hope this civilization keeps developing and our successors would laugh at our current scientific state-of-art, comparing us to chimpanzees.
  - coldtea 8y ago
    >I hope this civilization keeps developing and our successors would laugh at our current scientific state-of-art, comparing us to chimpanzees. This pseudo-scientific rant was to imply that future science will rediscover the irreducible to matter and evolutionary mechanisms soul, sorry I mean't "universe's special consciousness layer"?
    - bitL 8y ago
      Frankly, your response sounded like informed "scientism", so popular at the end of 19th/beginning of 20th century. I simply state that we should keep minds open to different explanations maybe someday observable by scientific method instead of trying to fit phenomena beyond our grasp into mechanisms known and proven today in unrelated areas, while expressing the hope that our civilization keeps improving instead of regressing. I couldn't care less if Universe had a special consciousness layer, or information layer, or we lived in some virtual machine of some grad student in a layer above us or whatever, but I wouldn't rule it out and wouldn't make fun of it either; I would also make sure if somebody comes with such a theory, that they stand on sound grounds instead of some new ageish demonology (popular in current neuroscience ehm) or whatnot. Whether I would allocate funding to it is a completely different matter (99.999% no). If you start saying that "oh, it's just evolution", your contribution to the topic is zero, skipping any issues with that theory we can't explain yet, making it similar to a religion (which condenses certain observable facts into its rules otherwise it wouldn't survive). It's pretty normal for scientists to believe in 99% BS but if they are 1% right, we consider them super successful. None of the pioneers had any kind of holistic view of a field crunched through by theoreticians, after the initial discovery dust settled, taught at universities, so they inevitably believed all kinds of silly things from our current point of view. I hope the same would hold for our successors, having boldness to explore, instead of blindly taking existing knowledge without any doubts and punishing everyone who deviates from whatever narrative.

naasking 8y ago

> In short, the author should work through a few feelings that are biasing their perspective on this matter. You're confusing "empathy the emotion" with "empathic reasoning", which is a form of generalized empathy. Clearly the article is about the emotion which has all the downsides listed.

bigbadgoose 8y ago
Thank you for the detail :)

coldtea 8y ago

>The empathic domain is actually "all things", and should include "all positions and considerations". That's what "oughta". It's not what it is, though, (or, if you prefer, what it usually is), and that's what the author talks about.