8 ms·

> so many of the comments here that seem to lack even the most basic of human decency Reading them, so am I. There is no sign of empathy: that understanding of

> so many of the comments here that seem to lack even the most basic of human decency Reading them, so am I. There is no sign of empathy: that understanding of another individual, the ability to put oneself in someone else's shoes, that is fundamental to a healthy society and (IMO) personal integrity. I read a comment a few years ago that no-one thinks of themselves as a bad person. To yourself, you are always okay. Yet lacking as you phrase it 'human decency', or for me, 'empathy', as so clearly illustrated in those harsh, inhuman, uncaring, comments that show no concern nor understanding of the person, the human, the feeling caring uprooted emotion-bearing trouble-striving human at the center of this... I don't know. I feel like quite a few people in this post need to question themselves.

imperfect_blue 4y ago
- coldtea 4y ago
  >You yourself have no empathy for those who would make those supposedly "harsh, inhuman, uncaring, comments" That's fine. You don't have to go down infinite meta-levels of empathy. You can just treat nazis like scum, and jerks like jerks. As long as you treat other people well and with compassion, you would still be behaving far better and more positively than how those who would make those supposedly "harsh, inhuman, uncaring, comments" are.
  - luckylion 4y ago
    > As long as you treat other people well and with compassion And you just choose who you consider "people" and who you consider "scum". It's like that old joke about Linux being user-friendly, it's just very picky about who it considers a user. That position is shit, though.
    - coldtea 4y ago
      >And you just choose who you consider "people" and who you consider "scum". Yes. That's necessary too. Did you rather treat everybody as an undifferentiated fog? Compassion is not about bending over backwards for jerks. >It's like that old joke about Linux being user-friendly, it's just very picky about who it considers a user. Even that is very defensible: you can be user-friendly for different groups with different needs - and this often does not translate to being user-friendly to everybody. E.g. if you try to please admins, and developers, and power users, and professionals, you won't also be user friendly in the sense that an OS focused on consumers or a program aimed at children is. What a professional designer considers must-have and user-friendly features (to him as a user) and what someone who just shot a couple of holiday photos and wants to resize them considers user frienly, is not the same thing...
      - luckylion 4y ago
        [flagged]
        sph 4y ago
        Again a reference to the Nazis in this thread. Being empathetic (take it from someone that believes they're an hyper empath) means understanding that if I were born in the 1910s in Germany and maybe blond and blue eyed, I could have probably been a big Adolf fan, but I was not, so current me believes fascists in general should get punched in the face indiscriminately and with extreme prejudice. Having black-and-white thinking, of "I would never do that", like you seem to do, is proof itself of lack of empathy.
        luckylion 4y ago
        > Having black-and-white thinking, of "I would never do that", like you seem to do, is proof itself of lack of empathy. No, it's the opposite. I wouldn't treat anyone as an Untermensch because I'm convinced that the difference between me and them is a few throws of the dice. If you divide the world into "people worthy of empathy (by virtue of the dice showing X)" and "sub-humans to be treated like scum and vermin (by virtue of the dice showing Y)", you're completely sharing their worldview, you just randomly weren't born into their shoes and you don't agree with them on what the dice should show, but that's it. That's not to say you should tolerate Nazis, but to not feel any empathy for them, and to not treat them as humans? Yeah, good luck on that road. "Sure I tortured prisoners and waterboarded them ... but they were insurgents, and I'm a good guy, so it's all cool if I do it. Had they done the same to me though, wow, what a crime against humanity" has a super weird vibe to me. But it works, and Abu Ghraib documented neatly, how happy people can be while they torture others, if you tell them they're the good guys and that it's okay, because the others aren't really human.
- sph 4y ago
  Having empathy doesn't mean loving everybody. That's a common misconception.
coinbasetwwa 4y ago
- DiogenesKynikos 4y ago
  [flagged]
  - arminiusreturns 4y ago
  - throwcean 4y ago
    [flagged]
    - coinbasetwwa 4y ago
      Ya, after watching the bodily reactions of family members that led up to death in some cases I’d never go out on a limb to get that shot for a dollar. But the “lived experience” crowd sure don’t want to hear about mine.
  - Danieru 4y ago
    I assume OP was in a situation where he was being threatened with being fired. Or at least that sounds like the situation he is alluding to.
  - Veelox 4y ago
    I am assuming you haven't spent much time around the kind of people that didn't approve of the vaccine. Let me write out a string of thoughts that support saying empathy isn't a great core principle. At the start of the pandemic we are told it's no big deal. Then a few weeks later it's a massive deal. At first masks don't work so don't rush out and buy them. Then masks are mandatory in all public places. We then put society on hold for about a year. Finally we have an experimental drug that helps you be protected from the virus. YOU MUST TAKE THE DRUG! Don't want it? YOU MUST TAKE THE DRUG! You already had COVID and recovered? YOU MUST TAKE THE DRUG! You had a legitimate medical reaction to a previous vaccine? YOU MUST TAKE THE DRUG! That process broke the trust of a significant amount of people. Why trust the establishment when they change their minds all the time and demand demand demand? If they do all these things in the name of empathy, empathy shouldn't be the base principle.
Sakos 4y ago
I can't stand reading the conversations on HN about anything related to the well-being or suffering of other people. I try to limit myself to technical topics only, or I start to get depressed and/or angry.
- antegamisou 4y ago
  Even in technical discussions, you can observe arrogance and dismissal by commenters who are unacceptably underqualified in the subjects being discussed. This place has become a joke nowadays.
  - JKCalhoun 4y ago
    I just ignore those comments (and perhaps some my own comments are deemed under qualified by some). I prefer that strategy rather than have an environment of "gatekeepers".
    - notacoward 4y ago
      "Basic human decency" might be the only gate worth keeping. Without that, harassers and trolls have more effective freedom of speech than their targets, and I for one find that unacceptable. See also: paradox of tolerance.
      - dennis_jeeves1 4y ago
        >paradox of tolerance. Great observation.
        JKCalhoun 4y ago
        Agree.
  - Sakos 4y ago
    > This place has become a joke nowadays. I wouldn't go that far. The signal to noise ratio is worse than it used to be, but there's still nothing else like HN and there are still a lot of interesting technical conversations to observe or to be had. I continue to learn more here than anywhere else. I'll cope with putting in a bit more effort mentally filtering out the unproductive conversations.
jimkleiber 4y ago
> I read a comment a few years ago that no-one thinks of themselves as a bad person. To yourself, you are always okay. From my focus on emotions and conflict over the last 10 years, I'd say many people actually think they're bad people (or at least that they might be). I think one of the hardest things is to defend our own good intentions and I've found that as I get better at doing it for myself, I tend to also defend the good intentions of others.
- jamincan 4y ago
  I wonder if it's not a bit like the Dunning-Kruger effect. The good people around us struggle thinking that they're bad, while the bad people blithely go around thinking they're good.
  - notacoward 4y ago
    That is a really interesting thought. Thank you. Now that you mention it, I'm thinking that having a conscience means getting "false alarms" sometimes. One way some people choose to prevent that is to disable the alarm instead of fixing the actual problem. I'm sure anyone who has worked in tech for any amount of time has seen the literal form of that.
  - vintagedave 4y ago
    That's very insightful. I suspect you're very right. Thankyou for sharing the thought.
gw98 4y ago
Having worked in tech for 25 years it doesn’t surprise me. Some people I’ve worked with are barely human. A colleague a few years ago went as far as to suggest that this is how you ended up with nazis. I hope with ubiquitous communications now that we tell these people that no it’s not acceptable to behave like this! Compassion should be awarded.
- coinbasetwwa 4y ago
  “Barely human”.. that’s a pretty nazi-esque way of looking at others. Perhaps people simply have different opinions and priorities.
  - sph 4y ago
    Unnecessary reference to Nazism. I agree with your general idea, but being intolerant and unempathetic isn't something only some people in the 30s started to do. Below average empathy is pervasive and a pretty common human characteristic, like being tall or having curly hair.
  - Tao3300 4y ago
    Darned if you do, damned if you don't. You need to block fascists but need to stop short of fascist levels of intolerance or else you're the fascist. Strive not with monsters, as Nietzsche said.
  - gw98 4y ago
    I understand that there are different opinions and priorities but consider that a lot of people to be entirely lacking in any virtue and compassion restricted only by the power that they do not (currently) possess. To empower those folk is how you end up with nazis, which is the point.
- dennis_jeeves1 4y ago
  >A colleague a few years ago went as far as to suggest that this is how you ended up with nazis. Your colleague does appear to have done a lot of reflection and/or reading ( feel free to ask him to contact me if he finds the stuff on my profile of interest). Most people just think Hitler=evil as the sole contibuting factor to the holocast, but I say that it's people around him, who did not have the conscience or who ignored it, that lead to his rise. There are a fair number of potential 'hitlers' around us, but it's primarily people around those dysfunctional individuals that keep them in check.
ambientenv 4y ago
Emotional empathy may be relatively prevalent in the world (though sometimes it is more in the virtue signalling domain) but true cognitive empathy is rare and very much needed in abundance if we wish to continue to thrive as a humanity.
jonp888 4y ago
If the total lack of employment rights (no maternity or paternity leave, no sick leave, no holidays, no protection against being fired) was applied in any other developed country, it would be the number 1 political topic every day until they were brought back. Ask an American active in tech-orientated social media about it, they'll invariably say "Oh, well of course that doesn't affect people like me".
- HWR_14 4y ago
  > Ask an American active in tech-orientated social media about it, they'll invariably say "Oh, well of course that doesn't affect people like me". Until they want to go to a restaurant, but it's been shut down because the owners couldn't get it in their head that they should pay more than minimum wage and no one wants to work for that. Or the restaurant is open, with employees who cannot afford to stay home even though they are contagious, and the tech people get sick. Or their boss wants to shrink the workforce by 10-50% and so they make it undesirable to be there to avoid paying severance. And it has to be them, not people in the same position. But it's only some Americans who think like that. Too broad a brush doesn't work.
JeremyNT 4y ago
It's unsurprising when you consider the history of Silicon Valley and the Randian philosophy that underpins everything. All problems can be solved by the union of entrepreneurship and technology, and anything that stands in the way of progress is a distraction. There's an Adam Curtis documentary All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace [0] that I think is relevant. HN (and even at this point broader programmer "culture") is a "fruit of the poison tree" in a sense - the philosophy of individualism and "greed is good" runs deep. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/All_Watched_Over_by_Machines_of_Loving_Grace_(TV_series) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/All_Watched_Over_by_Machines_o...

imperfect_blue 4y ago

coldtea 4y ago
>You yourself have no empathy for those who would make those supposedly "harsh, inhuman, uncaring, comments" That's fine. You don't have to go down infinite meta-levels of empathy. You can just treat nazis like scum, and jerks like jerks. As long as you treat other people well and with compassion, you would still be behaving far better and more positively than how those who would make those supposedly "harsh, inhuman, uncaring, comments" are.
- luckylion 4y ago
  > As long as you treat other people well and with compassion And you just choose who you consider "people" and who you consider "scum". It's like that old joke about Linux being user-friendly, it's just very picky about who it considers a user. That position is shit, though.
  - coldtea 4y ago
    >And you just choose who you consider "people" and who you consider "scum". Yes. That's necessary too. Did you rather treat everybody as an undifferentiated fog? Compassion is not about bending over backwards for jerks. >It's like that old joke about Linux being user-friendly, it's just very picky about who it considers a user. Even that is very defensible: you can be user-friendly for different groups with different needs - and this often does not translate to being user-friendly to everybody. E.g. if you try to please admins, and developers, and power users, and professionals, you won't also be user friendly in the sense that an OS focused on consumers or a program aimed at children is. What a professional designer considers must-have and user-friendly features (to him as a user) and what someone who just shot a couple of holiday photos and wants to resize them considers user frienly, is not the same thing...
    - luckylion 4y ago
      [flagged]
      - sph 4y ago
        Again a reference to the Nazis in this thread. Being empathetic (take it from someone that believes they're an hyper empath) means understanding that if I were born in the 1910s in Germany and maybe blond and blue eyed, I could have probably been a big Adolf fan, but I was not, so current me believes fascists in general should get punched in the face indiscriminately and with extreme prejudice. Having black-and-white thinking, of "I would never do that", like you seem to do, is proof itself of lack of empathy.
        luckylion 4y ago
        > Having black-and-white thinking, of "I would never do that", like you seem to do, is proof itself of lack of empathy. No, it's the opposite. I wouldn't treat anyone as an Untermensch because I'm convinced that the difference between me and them is a few throws of the dice. If you divide the world into "people worthy of empathy (by virtue of the dice showing X)" and "sub-humans to be treated like scum and vermin (by virtue of the dice showing Y)", you're completely sharing their worldview, you just randomly weren't born into their shoes and you don't agree with them on what the dice should show, but that's it. That's not to say you should tolerate Nazis, but to not feel any empathy for them, and to not treat them as humans? Yeah, good luck on that road. "Sure I tortured prisoners and waterboarded them ... but they were insurgents, and I'm a good guy, so it's all cool if I do it. Had they done the same to me though, wow, what a crime against humanity" has a super weird vibe to me. But it works, and Abu Ghraib documented neatly, how happy people can be while they torture others, if you tell them they're the good guys and that it's okay, because the others aren't really human.
sph 4y ago
Having empathy doesn't mean loving everybody. That's a common misconception.

coinbasetwwa 4y ago

DiogenesKynikos 4y ago
[flagged]
- arminiusreturns 4y ago
- throwcean 4y ago
  [flagged]
  - coinbasetwwa 4y ago
    Ya, after watching the bodily reactions of family members that led up to death in some cases I’d never go out on a limb to get that shot for a dollar. But the “lived experience” crowd sure don’t want to hear about mine.
- Danieru 4y ago
  I assume OP was in a situation where he was being threatened with being fired. Or at least that sounds like the situation he is alluding to.
- Veelox 4y ago
  I am assuming you haven't spent much time around the kind of people that didn't approve of the vaccine. Let me write out a string of thoughts that support saying empathy isn't a great core principle. At the start of the pandemic we are told it's no big deal. Then a few weeks later it's a massive deal. At first masks don't work so don't rush out and buy them. Then masks are mandatory in all public places. We then put society on hold for about a year. Finally we have an experimental drug that helps you be protected from the virus. YOU MUST TAKE THE DRUG! Don't want it? YOU MUST TAKE THE DRUG! You already had COVID and recovered? YOU MUST TAKE THE DRUG! You had a legitimate medical reaction to a previous vaccine? YOU MUST TAKE THE DRUG! That process broke the trust of a significant amount of people. Why trust the establishment when they change their minds all the time and demand demand demand? If they do all these things in the name of empathy, empathy shouldn't be the base principle.

Sakos 4y ago

I can't stand reading the conversations on HN about anything related to the well-being or suffering of other people. I try to limit myself to technical topics only, or I start to get depressed and/or angry.

antegamisou 4y ago
Even in technical discussions, you can observe arrogance and dismissal by commenters who are unacceptably underqualified in the subjects being discussed. This place has become a joke nowadays.
- JKCalhoun 4y ago
  I just ignore those comments (and perhaps some my own comments are deemed under qualified by some). I prefer that strategy rather than have an environment of "gatekeepers".
  - notacoward 4y ago
    "Basic human decency" might be the only gate worth keeping. Without that, harassers and trolls have more effective freedom of speech than their targets, and I for one find that unacceptable. See also: paradox of tolerance.
    - dennis_jeeves1 4y ago
      >paradox of tolerance. Great observation.
      - JKCalhoun 4y ago
        Agree.
- Sakos 4y ago
  > This place has become a joke nowadays. I wouldn't go that far. The signal to noise ratio is worse than it used to be, but there's still nothing else like HN and there are still a lot of interesting technical conversations to observe or to be had. I continue to learn more here than anywhere else. I'll cope with putting in a bit more effort mentally filtering out the unproductive conversations.

jimkleiber 4y ago

> I read a comment a few years ago that no-one thinks of themselves as a bad person. To yourself, you are always okay. From my focus on emotions and conflict over the last 10 years, I'd say many people actually think they're bad people (or at least that they might be). I think one of the hardest things is to defend our own good intentions and I've found that as I get better at doing it for myself, I tend to also defend the good intentions of others.

jamincan 4y ago
I wonder if it's not a bit like the Dunning-Kruger effect. The good people around us struggle thinking that they're bad, while the bad people blithely go around thinking they're good.
- notacoward 4y ago
  That is a really interesting thought. Thank you. Now that you mention it, I'm thinking that having a conscience means getting "false alarms" sometimes. One way some people choose to prevent that is to disable the alarm instead of fixing the actual problem. I'm sure anyone who has worked in tech for any amount of time has seen the literal form of that.
- vintagedave 4y ago
  That's very insightful. I suspect you're very right. Thankyou for sharing the thought.

gw98 4y ago

Having worked in tech for 25 years it doesn’t surprise me. Some people I’ve worked with are barely human. A colleague a few years ago went as far as to suggest that this is how you ended up with nazis. I hope with ubiquitous communications now that we tell these people that no it’s not acceptable to behave like this! Compassion should be awarded.

coinbasetwwa 4y ago
“Barely human”.. that’s a pretty nazi-esque way of looking at others. Perhaps people simply have different opinions and priorities.
- sph 4y ago
  Unnecessary reference to Nazism. I agree with your general idea, but being intolerant and unempathetic isn't something only some people in the 30s started to do. Below average empathy is pervasive and a pretty common human characteristic, like being tall or having curly hair.
- Tao3300 4y ago
  Darned if you do, damned if you don't. You need to block fascists but need to stop short of fascist levels of intolerance or else you're the fascist. Strive not with monsters, as Nietzsche said.
- gw98 4y ago
  I understand that there are different opinions and priorities but consider that a lot of people to be entirely lacking in any virtue and compassion restricted only by the power that they do not (currently) possess. To empower those folk is how you end up with nazis, which is the point.
dennis_jeeves1 4y ago
>A colleague a few years ago went as far as to suggest that this is how you ended up with nazis. Your colleague does appear to have done a lot of reflection and/or reading ( feel free to ask him to contact me if he finds the stuff on my profile of interest). Most people just think Hitler=evil as the sole contibuting factor to the holocast, but I say that it's people around him, who did not have the conscience or who ignored it, that lead to his rise. There are a fair number of potential 'hitlers' around us, but it's primarily people around those dysfunctional individuals that keep them in check.

ambientenv 4y ago

Emotional empathy may be relatively prevalent in the world (though sometimes it is more in the virtue signalling domain) but true cognitive empathy is rare and very much needed in abundance if we wish to continue to thrive as a humanity.

jonp888 4y ago

If the total lack of employment rights (no maternity or paternity leave, no sick leave, no holidays, no protection against being fired) was applied in any other developed country, it would be the number 1 political topic every day until they were brought back. Ask an American active in tech-orientated social media about it, they'll invariably say "Oh, well of course that doesn't affect people like me".

HWR_14 4y ago
> Ask an American active in tech-orientated social media about it, they'll invariably say "Oh, well of course that doesn't affect people like me". Until they want to go to a restaurant, but it's been shut down because the owners couldn't get it in their head that they should pay more than minimum wage and no one wants to work for that. Or the restaurant is open, with employees who cannot afford to stay home even though they are contagious, and the tech people get sick. Or their boss wants to shrink the workforce by 10-50% and so they make it undesirable to be there to avoid paying severance. And it has to be them, not people in the same position. But it's only some Americans who think like that. Too broad a brush doesn't work.

JeremyNT 4y ago

It's unsurprising when you consider the history of Silicon Valley and the Randian philosophy that underpins everything. All problems can be solved by the union of entrepreneurship and technology, and anything that stands in the way of progress is a distraction. There's an Adam Curtis documentary All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace [0] that I think is relevant. HN (and even at this point broader programmer "culture") is a "fruit of the poison tree" in a sense - the philosophy of individualism and "greed is good" runs deep. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/All_Watched_Over_by_Machines_of_Loving_Grace_(TV_series) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/All_Watched_Over_by_Machines_o...