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I've been accused of having "pathological empathy" before [1], and to this day I refuse to accept that empathy is a weakness. Being able to fairly easily put m

I've been accused of having "pathological empathy" before [1], and to this day I refuse to accept that empathy is a weakness. Being able to fairly easily put myself in someone else's shoes is pretty much the only thing I actually like about myself. I feel like part of what defines us as a species is learning how to understand people who do not deserve us to understand them. In 2023 my iPhone was stolen (story is parent to the linked comment). They eventually caught the kid who stole the phone, and I refused to press charges. Pretty much everyone thought I was dumb for doing that, but I didn't see it that way; I didn't see any good coming from throwing a 17 year old kid into jail, and I remember how stupid I was when I was 17. I doubt he's going to have some Les Misérables moment and turn his life around, but I would hope that if I were caught for something stupid when I was 17 someone else would have extended me the same benefit of the doubt. I don't regret it. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38906469 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38906469

ChrisMarshallNY 2y ago
I encounter stuff like that, almost every day. It's really important for me to feel empathy for others. It is not the same as weakness. I was always told that it's really important to understand our enemies, and that often includes admitting that they are human, and have human motives. That's not the same as being weak. I've also been told "If you want to understand rats, talk to an exterminator."
nuancebydefault 2y ago
I guess i would have done the same. Do they throw 17 yos in jail, where you live? If so, do they do that over stealing a phone? If so... maybe it would be more moral in stepping into a political career and try to change some laws?
- ChrisMarshallNY 2y ago
  I knew someone that spent about 18 years in Maximum Security adult prison, from 17, because he burgled the house of an important person. One of the smartest people I ever knew. Probably had an IQ of 140. He was an HVAC tech, and had trouble staying employed. It totally wrecked his life, and he ended badly. Yes, we do that stuff in the US.
  - bell-cot 2y ago
    Was his "trouble staying employed" because HVAC bored him out of his mind, or attention span issues, or other factors? The world has plenty of people who are really smart, yet are really not "good employee" material.
    - ChrisMarshallNY 2y ago
      He was angry. I mean, really angry. He was also very big and intimidating. That didn't help. Most of the anger came from prison, and from being screwed over, to be thrown in there. That can make it difficult to get along with others, and those who don't play well with others, have trouble staying employed. But it's also possible to transcend that kind of thing. I see it regularly. It just takes a lot of work. Painful, humbling, work.
      - tombert 2y ago
        I can't even imagine how much prison would fuck me up. Between potential sexual abuse, being around a lot of violent people, the general disregard Americans have for prisoners and convicted felons and their well-being, and the "doing what you have to to survive" mentality that seems to scar incarcerated people, it would be hard for it not to change you as a person. I really hate how the US handles prisons, and I really hate the "lock them up and throw away the key" mentality we have here. I hope it's obvious, that's not something I agree with.
      - bell-cot 2y ago
        > He was also very big and intimidating. I'll bet that was unhelpful at age 17, when our <cough/> justice system was deciding his fate.
      - scotty79 2y ago
        But he did burgle a house, so obviously he had some pre-existing behavioral issues, right? And those are probably not gone. > Most of the anger came from prison, and from being screwed over, to be thrown in there. That clearly illustrates that he didn't progress at all in his understanding of life. I'd be afraid to live within few kilometers of him let alone having him work at my company if I had one
- tombert 2y ago
  Tons of factors in the US for this stuff; which state you're in, how they stole the phone (e.g. violent vs. just grabbing it off a table when the owner isn't looking), prior history, if they're tried as a child vs adult, and (let's be honest) if they can afford a good lawyer. It definitely wouldn't be "weird" to throw a 17 year old in jail for stealing an iPhone, particularly in my case it would likely have been tried as a "mugging" and I suspect classified in the "violent" category (even though I was unharmed). I'd be lying if I said I wasn't tempted to throw the book at this kid, it did kind of cause a bit of frustration and trauma that I still haven't completely worked through, but I still think I made the right choice, even if everyone else in my life disagrees.
- geodel 2y ago
  Sure. Though politician more likely to win would be one who's hardliner on crime and propose tough laws not compassionate ones.
- soulofmischief 2y ago
  A friend of mine got life in prison with no parole at 17. I myself got 6 months jail time at 17 after being subject to a highly illegal and corrupt legal racket in a small town, when a meth-dealing police officer planted weed on me at the scene of an accident. I was also homeless. Good times.
  - AlgorithmicTime 2y ago
    [dead]
bumby 2y ago
>I've been accused of having "pathological empathy" before [1], and to this day I refuse to accept that empathy is a weakness. To put it in a different context, the psychologist Paul Bloom wrote an interesting book titled "Against Empathy." He makes a distinction between "emotional empathy" and "cognitive empathy". He is an advocate of the latter, while acknowledging that the former can lead to many sub-optimal outcomes.
- tombert 2y ago
  I'm not terribly concerned with optimizing, honestly. I try and make decisions that I'm unlikely to regret, at least not for long term. Hurting someone, or not helping someone that I should have helped, are things that I end up really regretting, and those are the things that keep me up at night. I don't lose a lot of sleep for doing something that I genuinely thought was right. If someone takes advantage of my empathetic nature and exploits me, I'm not exactly slap-happy about it, but I can go to bed knowing that I did the right thing, and that person is just an asshole. Pretty much every single bad thing I've done that I lose sleep over has come as a direct result of me trying to "override" my natural empathy. I'm done doing that.
  - bumby 2y ago
    An economists perspective would be that your utility function can be whatever you want. According to what you said above, you would be minimizing regret, which is an optimization goal (although it sounds overly dry in that context). Blooms point is that when we take on the emotions of someone else, it has the ability to override our rational decision making and that rational decisions tend to lead to objectively better outcomes.
    - tombert 2y ago
      There's probably some truth to this, and I suppose you can define "objectively better" as "maximizing your optimization goal" or "minimizing the bad stuff" or something, quantifying that however you want. That said, I'm not 100% convinced that my "rational brain" actually is better at making decisions that minimize regret than just relying on emotions. My rational brain is very good at rationalizing shit to where I can convince myself that something that's very obviously bad is "actually ok when you think about it like this...", and then I regret it afterwards. At least for me, that doesn't really happen when I just rely heavily on my emotional brain.
alganet 2y ago
> I refuse to accept that empathy is a weakness. It is not. But also, empathy is not the same thing as kindness. Empathy, as you mentioned, is the ability to put oneself in someone else's shoes. To imagine what is like to be other. Fraudsters, cheaters, psycopaths. All of these are great empaths. They understand others in a deep level. But they're not kind, they are ruthless. > I feel like part of what defines us as a species is learning how to understand people who do not deserve us to understand them. Here you are talking about kindness. I think similarly. I also believe this is correlated with creativity and collaboration skills. To me, there is something about the inner act of kind understanding that seems to be a _prerequisite_ for advanced communication. Totally out of my ass, I'm no psychologist. > I would hope that if I were caught for something stupid when I was 17 someone else would have extended me the same benefit of the doubt Not only you understood that, but you were able to communicate something to the kid that is remarkably uncommunicable. The kind act is also a kind message, you _meant it_ as a message somehow. Not all empaths want or can do that.
- tombert 2y ago
  I don't think I disagree with anything you said (though I'm hesitant to call myself creative). I guess when I say "empathy", I also mean "feeling someone's pain", in addition to the "someone else's shoes". I think being able to understand someone's situation, and see how they're actually hurting, and how you'd hurt if someone did that to you, is the part of empathy/kindness that is a key ingredient in being a "decent human". I'm not perfect at it, obviously, I've acted selfishly plenty of times and I regret the times that I have, but it's the closest thing I have to a "moral code". In regards to this kid, I just remember how angry I was at everything when I was 17. I hated going to school, I hated most of my teachers, I hated most of my classmates, I hated girls who wouldn't date me, and I hated guys who wouldn't be my friend. I was an idiot. It's a tough age for anyone, and I think a lot of people (particularly those in charge the US penal codes) forget that fact.
  - alganet 2y ago
    I meant creativity in a broader sense. Like "using stone tools", not "painting and dancing" (but not excluding it!). Kind empathy has been demonstrated in some rats (a highly intelligent animal): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nyolz2Qf1ms https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nyolz2Qf1ms Note the researchers mentioning a "social contagion" that encourages empathy (another one of your kind crying, you cry). The goal of the experiment is to detect an even deeper kind of empathy (the savior rat is also in high stress and must overcome its instincts to save his fellow rat). The thing you did for the kid required much more sophistication than that. Some of that sophistication comes from or manifests as empathy, in the sense that they're correlated. I'm also saying it in a broader sense than only biological in rats. But that's the part that science has no data yet, so that's why I say it comes from my conjecturing ass.
apprentice7 2y ago
I really resonate with this sentiment and want to share a similar story. Where I live, supermarkets have a reception where you can leave your belongings while you're shopping. The employee in charge gives you a numbered card that matches the drawer in which they stored your things (all of this is handled by the employee) and off you go. No keys or anything, only a drawer with a card. A few months ago I left my backpack at a one of these. 20 minutes later, as I was about to leave, I went to return the card in order to retrieve my stuff and to my surprise they gave me someone else's backpack. I kindly asked what happened and after the manager had gone to check the CCTV footage they told me they gave my backpack to another customer. The problem? The numbered card didn't match the drawer and no one had realised. And there I was with the stranger's backpack and no way to contact him. I agreed to wait until this man came back to return my stuff so we could switch backpacks (he had to; his work ID was on his backpack). I went home, told my family what happened, and they asked me what I told the supermarket staff. "Nothing, I'm just gonna wait" I said, and they rambled on about how I should have yelled at them and made a scene and maybe even made them fire the employee that grabbed my backpack. I didn't do any of that because I precisely didn't want them to fire the poor minimum wage worker. Besides, I understood all of this happened because the system of numbered card/open drawer is completely broken. It wasn't relly the employee's fault; although it was his mistake not checking the numbers not matching. Yelling wouldn't have fixed anything. I got my backpack back the next morning. No one was fired. The supermarket manager didn't even apologize for the inconvenience though, but ok. Be kind.
- tombert 2y ago
  I think you did the right thing. Mistakes happen, and very little good would come out of demanding that this person gets fired as a result of one (though the employee probably did deserve a bit of embarrassment). The manager probably should have apologized, but it's not the end of the world. I will admit that I get a bit paranoid with those bag-check things at the stores here. At the stores in my neighborhood, they know me well enough to where they almost never even check my card, it would be super easy for me to grab someone else's bag. I've never done it, I don't want to do it, but I could...that's why I usually don't go directly before or after work, because I don't want my bag with an expensive Macbook to get stolen.
trod1234 2y ago
Those with a lot of introspection can do this, and it can be a benefit to yourself and others when used correctly. In my opinion, you were dumb for doing that, but I can't say I haven't done something similar. Given my experience, I wouldn't do this again. My experience involved a crazed homeowner in their 40s shooting at me standing on the public sidewalk for taking pictures of the neighborhood for a realtor, this was around 2009. They thought I worked for their mortgage lender who was foreclosing. The wood fence took most of the damage, but there were kids playing in the paved cul-de-sac right behind where I was standing. No serious injuries, thankfully, and the police confiscated the firearm. I didn't press charges, because I empathized as my family had people who lost their entire retirements in the fallout from the market and that was real fresh. I would press charges today having had that experience (and others). Very few people change themselves unless they are forced to through isolated introspection or negative circumstance. Being young, or stupid, or a victim, isn't a defensible justification. Its letting them off the hook for their actions without consequence.
- ChrisMarshallNY 2y ago
  I would press charges, too. Shooting is a lot different from stealing. I might not let people off the hook, because I think it might change them, but it might change someone else who saw it happen, or, maybe, a family member that depends on them. This goes doubly true, these days, with everything being live-streamed. I get a little nauseous, though, at some of the staged crap, out there.
  - trod1234 2y ago
    It is different from stealing, but crimes can escalate quickly and without warning. What people don't realize is when these type of things happen, if you haven't experienced it before, its surreal, and it can take a moment to realize, recognize and react. Even after the fact, with close calls there's a lot of processing and grappling with your own mortality. All you really see in the moment is a white, old rundown wood fence that suddenly becomes a cloud of flying splinters and wood chips. It is very different from how its portrayed in the media. I'm now a big believer that proper firearm safety and handling training should be mandatory for everyone by 18. You recognize the sounds, you see the effect, you can react much quicker with the experience imparted by training than without. I totally agree about the staged stuff. Anything like that muddies the reality.
zmgsabst 2y ago
This depends on the kid, doesn’t it? > I didn't see any good coming from throwing a 17 year old kid into jail, and I remember how stupid I was when I was 17. For example, being forced to confront the consequences of their actions at 17 when the punishment is lesser and likely to include diversion or similar might have prevented them from committing a similar crime when older and receiving a harsher penalty — which in your empathy, you ensured would happen by refusing to punish them. Their practice and willingness to use force, as described in your referenced comment, indicates this isn’t their first time committing such a crime. By normalizing that crime wouldn’t be punished, you created a worse situation. You can see similar unfolding at scale in major US cities, where crime (particularly theft) skyrocketed — and intensified, eg the recent subway burnings in NYC. Without enforcing norms, they break down. A good heuristic for me is “what happens when everybody behaves that way?” In this case, it leads to society degrading.
- tombert 2y ago
  Being tried as a child when you’re 17 is by no means a “given”. It’s entirely possible, even likely, that this would go to grownup court and they’d be given the full consequences. “Force” is a pretty strong word, it was barely a shove. Just enough to give themselves a head start running away. I do not in any way agree that I created a “worse” situation than a child being sent to prison. I think it is extremely naive to think that sending someone to an American prison will create anything but a worse felon. This isn’t Norway, American prisons are purely punitive. I don’t know which stats you’re referring to, but I highly doubt that “yuppies not pressing charges against children stealing two year old iPhones” is a significant cause of a crime uptake.
  - zmgsabst 2y ago
    > “Force” is a pretty strong word, it was barely a shove. Just enough to give themselves a head start running away. People call it “toxic empathy” not because empathy is inherently wrong, but because it leads to people such as yourself minimizing the use of force in a crime (which you admit this was) while showing selective empathy only for the perpetrator and not their future victims. > Being tried as a child when you’re 17 is by no means a “given”. > I do not in any way agree that I created a “worse” situation than a child being sent to prison. These both sounds like you’re rationalizing an emotive decision, post hoc. > I think it is extremely naive to think that sending someone to an American prison will create anything but a worse felon. This isn’t Norway, American prisons are purely punitive. They likely would’ve negotiated a plea for a misdemeanor and treatment on a first offense, in the US. Even first time lower felonies result in supervised probation and mandatory treatment, eg, the recommended outcome for drug felonies. Again, you seem to be focusing entirely on your feelings — without an honest account of either the likely outcome of prosecution, the criminal’s future (having normalized violent robberies), or their future victims. This is why it’s called “toxic empathy”: because you’re soothing your own feelings without engaging in rational analysis nor true empathy, eg, by understanding that sometimes criminals turn their lives around because they’re punished or that future victims deserve your care also.

ChrisMarshallNY 2y ago

I encounter stuff like that, almost every day. It's really important for me to feel empathy for others. It is not the same as weakness. I was always told that it's really important to understand our enemies, and that often includes admitting that they are human, and have human motives. That's not the same as being weak. I've also been told "If you want to understand rats, talk to an exterminator."

nuancebydefault 2y ago

I guess i would have done the same. Do they throw 17 yos in jail, where you live? If so, do they do that over stealing a phone? If so... maybe it would be more moral in stepping into a political career and try to change some laws?

ChrisMarshallNY 2y ago
I knew someone that spent about 18 years in Maximum Security adult prison, from 17, because he burgled the house of an important person. One of the smartest people I ever knew. Probably had an IQ of 140. He was an HVAC tech, and had trouble staying employed. It totally wrecked his life, and he ended badly. Yes, we do that stuff in the US.
- bell-cot 2y ago
  Was his "trouble staying employed" because HVAC bored him out of his mind, or attention span issues, or other factors? The world has plenty of people who are really smart, yet are really not "good employee" material.
  - ChrisMarshallNY 2y ago
    He was angry. I mean, really angry. He was also very big and intimidating. That didn't help. Most of the anger came from prison, and from being screwed over, to be thrown in there. That can make it difficult to get along with others, and those who don't play well with others, have trouble staying employed. But it's also possible to transcend that kind of thing. I see it regularly. It just takes a lot of work. Painful, humbling, work.
    - tombert 2y ago
      I can't even imagine how much prison would fuck me up. Between potential sexual abuse, being around a lot of violent people, the general disregard Americans have for prisoners and convicted felons and their well-being, and the "doing what you have to to survive" mentality that seems to scar incarcerated people, it would be hard for it not to change you as a person. I really hate how the US handles prisons, and I really hate the "lock them up and throw away the key" mentality we have here. I hope it's obvious, that's not something I agree with.
    - bell-cot 2y ago
      > He was also very big and intimidating. I'll bet that was unhelpful at age 17, when our <cough/> justice system was deciding his fate.
    - scotty79 2y ago
      But he did burgle a house, so obviously he had some pre-existing behavioral issues, right? And those are probably not gone. > Most of the anger came from prison, and from being screwed over, to be thrown in there. That clearly illustrates that he didn't progress at all in his understanding of life. I'd be afraid to live within few kilometers of him let alone having him work at my company if I had one
tombert 2y ago
Tons of factors in the US for this stuff; which state you're in, how they stole the phone (e.g. violent vs. just grabbing it off a table when the owner isn't looking), prior history, if they're tried as a child vs adult, and (let's be honest) if they can afford a good lawyer. It definitely wouldn't be "weird" to throw a 17 year old in jail for stealing an iPhone, particularly in my case it would likely have been tried as a "mugging" and I suspect classified in the "violent" category (even though I was unharmed). I'd be lying if I said I wasn't tempted to throw the book at this kid, it did kind of cause a bit of frustration and trauma that I still haven't completely worked through, but I still think I made the right choice, even if everyone else in my life disagrees.
geodel 2y ago
Sure. Though politician more likely to win would be one who's hardliner on crime and propose tough laws not compassionate ones.
soulofmischief 2y ago
A friend of mine got life in prison with no parole at 17. I myself got 6 months jail time at 17 after being subject to a highly illegal and corrupt legal racket in a small town, when a meth-dealing police officer planted weed on me at the scene of an accident. I was also homeless. Good times.
- AlgorithmicTime 2y ago
  [dead]

bumby 2y ago

>I've been accused of having "pathological empathy" before [1], and to this day I refuse to accept that empathy is a weakness. To put it in a different context, the psychologist Paul Bloom wrote an interesting book titled "Against Empathy." He makes a distinction between "emotional empathy" and "cognitive empathy". He is an advocate of the latter, while acknowledging that the former can lead to many sub-optimal outcomes.

tombert 2y ago
I'm not terribly concerned with optimizing, honestly. I try and make decisions that I'm unlikely to regret, at least not for long term. Hurting someone, or not helping someone that I should have helped, are things that I end up really regretting, and those are the things that keep me up at night. I don't lose a lot of sleep for doing something that I genuinely thought was right. If someone takes advantage of my empathetic nature and exploits me, I'm not exactly slap-happy about it, but I can go to bed knowing that I did the right thing, and that person is just an asshole. Pretty much every single bad thing I've done that I lose sleep over has come as a direct result of me trying to "override" my natural empathy. I'm done doing that.
- bumby 2y ago
  An economists perspective would be that your utility function can be whatever you want. According to what you said above, you would be minimizing regret, which is an optimization goal (although it sounds overly dry in that context). Blooms point is that when we take on the emotions of someone else, it has the ability to override our rational decision making and that rational decisions tend to lead to objectively better outcomes.
  - tombert 2y ago
    There's probably some truth to this, and I suppose you can define "objectively better" as "maximizing your optimization goal" or "minimizing the bad stuff" or something, quantifying that however you want. That said, I'm not 100% convinced that my "rational brain" actually is better at making decisions that minimize regret than just relying on emotions. My rational brain is very good at rationalizing shit to where I can convince myself that something that's very obviously bad is "actually ok when you think about it like this...", and then I regret it afterwards. At least for me, that doesn't really happen when I just rely heavily on my emotional brain.

alganet 2y ago

> I refuse to accept that empathy is a weakness. It is not. But also, empathy is not the same thing as kindness. Empathy, as you mentioned, is the ability to put oneself in someone else's shoes. To imagine what is like to be other. Fraudsters, cheaters, psycopaths. All of these are great empaths. They understand others in a deep level. But they're not kind, they are ruthless. > I feel like part of what defines us as a species is learning how to understand people who do not deserve us to understand them. Here you are talking about kindness. I think similarly. I also believe this is correlated with creativity and collaboration skills. To me, there is something about the inner act of kind understanding that seems to be a _prerequisite_ for advanced communication. Totally out of my ass, I'm no psychologist. > I would hope that if I were caught for something stupid when I was 17 someone else would have extended me the same benefit of the doubt Not only you understood that, but you were able to communicate something to the kid that is remarkably uncommunicable. The kind act is also a kind message, you _meant it_ as a message somehow. Not all empaths want or can do that.

tombert 2y ago
I don't think I disagree with anything you said (though I'm hesitant to call myself creative). I guess when I say "empathy", I also mean "feeling someone's pain", in addition to the "someone else's shoes". I think being able to understand someone's situation, and see how they're actually hurting, and how you'd hurt if someone did that to you, is the part of empathy/kindness that is a key ingredient in being a "decent human". I'm not perfect at it, obviously, I've acted selfishly plenty of times and I regret the times that I have, but it's the closest thing I have to a "moral code". In regards to this kid, I just remember how angry I was at everything when I was 17. I hated going to school, I hated most of my teachers, I hated most of my classmates, I hated girls who wouldn't date me, and I hated guys who wouldn't be my friend. I was an idiot. It's a tough age for anyone, and I think a lot of people (particularly those in charge the US penal codes) forget that fact.
- alganet 2y ago
  I meant creativity in a broader sense. Like "using stone tools", not "painting and dancing" (but not excluding it!). Kind empathy has been demonstrated in some rats (a highly intelligent animal): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nyolz2Qf1ms https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nyolz2Qf1ms Note the researchers mentioning a "social contagion" that encourages empathy (another one of your kind crying, you cry). The goal of the experiment is to detect an even deeper kind of empathy (the savior rat is also in high stress and must overcome its instincts to save his fellow rat). The thing you did for the kid required much more sophistication than that. Some of that sophistication comes from or manifests as empathy, in the sense that they're correlated. I'm also saying it in a broader sense than only biological in rats. But that's the part that science has no data yet, so that's why I say it comes from my conjecturing ass.

apprentice7 2y ago

I really resonate with this sentiment and want to share a similar story. Where I live, supermarkets have a reception where you can leave your belongings while you're shopping. The employee in charge gives you a numbered card that matches the drawer in which they stored your things (all of this is handled by the employee) and off you go. No keys or anything, only a drawer with a card. A few months ago I left my backpack at a one of these. 20 minutes later, as I was about to leave, I went to return the card in order to retrieve my stuff and to my surprise they gave me someone else's backpack. I kindly asked what happened and after the manager had gone to check the CCTV footage they told me they gave my backpack to another customer. The problem? The numbered card didn't match the drawer and no one had realised. And there I was with the stranger's backpack and no way to contact him. I agreed to wait until this man came back to return my stuff so we could switch backpacks (he had to; his work ID was on his backpack). I went home, told my family what happened, and they asked me what I told the supermarket staff. "Nothing, I'm just gonna wait" I said, and they rambled on about how I should have yelled at them and made a scene and maybe even made them fire the employee that grabbed my backpack. I didn't do any of that because I precisely didn't want them to fire the poor minimum wage worker. Besides, I understood all of this happened because the system of numbered card/open drawer is completely broken. It wasn't relly the employee's fault; although it was his mistake not checking the numbers not matching. Yelling wouldn't have fixed anything. I got my backpack back the next morning. No one was fired. The supermarket manager didn't even apologize for the inconvenience though, but ok. Be kind.

tombert 2y ago
I think you did the right thing. Mistakes happen, and very little good would come out of demanding that this person gets fired as a result of one (though the employee probably did deserve a bit of embarrassment). The manager probably should have apologized, but it's not the end of the world. I will admit that I get a bit paranoid with those bag-check things at the stores here. At the stores in my neighborhood, they know me well enough to where they almost never even check my card, it would be super easy for me to grab someone else's bag. I've never done it, I don't want to do it, but I could...that's why I usually don't go directly before or after work, because I don't want my bag with an expensive Macbook to get stolen.

trod1234 2y ago

Those with a lot of introspection can do this, and it can be a benefit to yourself and others when used correctly. In my opinion, you were dumb for doing that, but I can't say I haven't done something similar. Given my experience, I wouldn't do this again. My experience involved a crazed homeowner in their 40s shooting at me standing on the public sidewalk for taking pictures of the neighborhood for a realtor, this was around 2009. They thought I worked for their mortgage lender who was foreclosing. The wood fence took most of the damage, but there were kids playing in the paved cul-de-sac right behind where I was standing. No serious injuries, thankfully, and the police confiscated the firearm. I didn't press charges, because I empathized as my family had people who lost their entire retirements in the fallout from the market and that was real fresh. I would press charges today having had that experience (and others). Very few people change themselves unless they are forced to through isolated introspection or negative circumstance. Being young, or stupid, or a victim, isn't a defensible justification. Its letting them off the hook for their actions without consequence.

ChrisMarshallNY 2y ago
I would press charges, too. Shooting is a lot different from stealing. I might not let people off the hook, because I think it might change them, but it might change someone else who saw it happen, or, maybe, a family member that depends on them. This goes doubly true, these days, with everything being live-streamed. I get a little nauseous, though, at some of the staged crap, out there.
- trod1234 2y ago
  It is different from stealing, but crimes can escalate quickly and without warning. What people don't realize is when these type of things happen, if you haven't experienced it before, its surreal, and it can take a moment to realize, recognize and react. Even after the fact, with close calls there's a lot of processing and grappling with your own mortality. All you really see in the moment is a white, old rundown wood fence that suddenly becomes a cloud of flying splinters and wood chips. It is very different from how its portrayed in the media. I'm now a big believer that proper firearm safety and handling training should be mandatory for everyone by 18. You recognize the sounds, you see the effect, you can react much quicker with the experience imparted by training than without. I totally agree about the staged stuff. Anything like that muddies the reality.

zmgsabst 2y ago

This depends on the kid, doesn’t it? > I didn't see any good coming from throwing a 17 year old kid into jail, and I remember how stupid I was when I was 17. For example, being forced to confront the consequences of their actions at 17 when the punishment is lesser and likely to include diversion or similar might have prevented them from committing a similar crime when older and receiving a harsher penalty — which in your empathy, you ensured would happen by refusing to punish them. Their practice and willingness to use force, as described in your referenced comment, indicates this isn’t their first time committing such a crime. By normalizing that crime wouldn’t be punished, you created a worse situation. You can see similar unfolding at scale in major US cities, where crime (particularly theft) skyrocketed — and intensified, eg the recent subway burnings in NYC. Without enforcing norms, they break down. A good heuristic for me is “what happens when everybody behaves that way?” In this case, it leads to society degrading.

tombert 2y ago
Being tried as a child when you’re 17 is by no means a “given”. It’s entirely possible, even likely, that this would go to grownup court and they’d be given the full consequences. “Force” is a pretty strong word, it was barely a shove. Just enough to give themselves a head start running away. I do not in any way agree that I created a “worse” situation than a child being sent to prison. I think it is extremely naive to think that sending someone to an American prison will create anything but a worse felon. This isn’t Norway, American prisons are purely punitive. I don’t know which stats you’re referring to, but I highly doubt that “yuppies not pressing charges against children stealing two year old iPhones” is a significant cause of a crime uptake.
- zmgsabst 2y ago
  > “Force” is a pretty strong word, it was barely a shove. Just enough to give themselves a head start running away. People call it “toxic empathy” not because empathy is inherently wrong, but because it leads to people such as yourself minimizing the use of force in a crime (which you admit this was) while showing selective empathy only for the perpetrator and not their future victims. > Being tried as a child when you’re 17 is by no means a “given”. > I do not in any way agree that I created a “worse” situation than a child being sent to prison. These both sounds like you’re rationalizing an emotive decision, post hoc. > I think it is extremely naive to think that sending someone to an American prison will create anything but a worse felon. This isn’t Norway, American prisons are purely punitive. They likely would’ve negotiated a plea for a misdemeanor and treatment on a first offense, in the US. Even first time lower felonies result in supervised probation and mandatory treatment, eg, the recommended outcome for drug felonies. Again, you seem to be focusing entirely on your feelings — without an honest account of either the likely outcome of prosecution, the criminal’s future (having normalized violent robberies), or their future victims. This is why it’s called “toxic empathy”: because you’re soothing your own feelings without engaging in rational analysis nor true empathy, eg, by understanding that sometimes criminals turn their lives around because they’re punished or that future victims deserve your care also.