3 ms·

Instead of asking people why they're asking you "to be more empathetic", maybe you should ask yourself why you're prompting such a request?

by nilirl 1y ago

balamatom 1y ago
That's a tautology and already answered in TFA. You're prompting the request because you are not being sufficiently obedient.
- nilirl 1y ago
  That's setting up a straw man. By framing an argument against semantics or social obedience, you're ignoring self-implicating behavior; you're intentionally ignoring people's needs. Why not ask "What am I doing wrong?" instead of "Hmm ... what is the nature of empathy? How may a linguist view the word? What is it's function? Ah! Is there an interesting generalization I can find here? Wow, let us dig deeper, this is no time to consider how I treat other people."
  - Rendello 1y ago
    I think that's a good point. I think the author says a lot of good things about empathy in the article, the nature of which goes deeper than "how may a linguist view the word?", but if they're being prompted with "be more empathetic" often, perhaps their behaviour really should be modified.
  - balamatom 1y ago
    >Why not ask "What am I doing wrong?" Because that's the first step to getting your needs ignored. And in conversations where "empathy" is brought up you're usually exactly one step from getting your needs ignored. If you're doing something wrong, and I decide to do something about it, minimum decency dictates I make sure you understand what it is. Bringing into it some vague abstract notion that everyone with half a critical mind turns out to have a whole personal exegesis about, but I only know about it from everyone else? Now there's a clear signal that nobody in the room actually cares how people are treated.
    - palmotea 1y ago
      > Because that's the first step to getting your needs ignored. And in conversations where "empathy" is brought up you're usually exactly one step from getting your needs ignored. When someone's being asked to have more empathy, they're probably in the middle of ignoring someone else's needs right then.
      - balamatom 1y ago
        >When someone's being asked to have more empathy, they're probably in the middle of ignoring someone else's needs right then. Yes, correct. That's exactly how abusers expect us to think things work. The difference is whether the person asking you to be more X cares if you have agreed-upon criteria of what that even looks like. Given how many people ostensibly driven by positive motivations seem to be rubbed the wrong way by "empathy", well...
    - nilirl 1y ago
      Ah, I see, so when someone yells at me "Please don't stab me", it's actually, I, who is at risk of being stabbed.
      - balamatom 1y ago
        Please don't be like that. I don't condone you trying to stab anyone, but if you do anyway - I think it's quite obvious how that'll put you at a higher risk of getting stabbed yourself. Empathy!
  - balamatom 1y ago
    >"Hmm ... what is the nature of empathy? How may a linguist view the word? What is it's function? Ah! Is there an interesting generalization I can find here? Wow, let us dig deeper" The funny part is that if you care about a semantic argument I know you will care about how you treat other people, too. It's the person who strongly insists to not discuss what words mean, who 9 times out of 10 turns out to be dangerous.
yesfitz 1y ago
This is addressed in the post: > "Usually, 'be more empathetic' was a veiled request for me to modify my behavior or thinking towards someone (e.g. they thought I was rude to someone and wanted me to apologize and change my behavior)." And you actually illustrate the entire point of the post. Imagine that someone's upset with you and tells you to be more "gropulent". Many people have said this to you, but gropulence doesn't come naturally to you, and the term is bandied about in a wide variety of situations, making it hard to pick up context clues. There are people who call themselves "gropules" who can't explain how they use gropulence to support the claims that they make about others, and they sound an awful lot like psychics, who we all know are frauds. How would you start learning to be gropulent? I hope you'd be as curious and thorough as the author of TFA.
- nilirl 1y ago
  'be more empathetic' is not a veiled request, it is openly declared. The author subverts the ask for behavior change by a) calling it veiled and b) not treating it as the main argument against which they're trying to make a point. Like the author, you're constructing a similar straw man argument: selecting a specific use of the word and making that the main point to argue against. 'be more empathetic' is an argument to behave differently with the people around you. Not think differently; behave differently.
  - yesfitz 1y ago
    Can you tell me which specific use of the word "empathy" I am arguing against? Because I don't think I'm arguing against any definition at all. I think I'm arguing that telling someone to behave a way that they don't understand is unhelpful. That could be "empathetic", "thankful", or "gropulent". ** Taking the author at their word, they don't understand the request. When they ask for clarification, they don't receive it. In that way, it is veiled, similarly to my "gropulent" analogy. In other words, the author is being asked to behave differently, but not given guidance on how to behave differently. Which is why they wrote this piece about what empathy is. I think the author would have gotten a lot further by asking how rather than why, but the author admits that they thought that requests to be empathetic were requests "to be fake and lie". (i.e. They misunderstood what "empathy" meant.)
fellowniusmonk 1y ago
"Do I lack a theory of mind for others?" Or call it empathy, whatever.

Instead of asking people why they're asking you "to be more empathetic", maybe you should ask yourself why you're prompting such a request?

by nilirl 1y ago

Instead of asking people why they're asking you "to be more empathetic", maybe you should ask yourself why you're prompting such a request?

balamatom 1y ago

That's a tautology and already answered in TFA. You're prompting the request because you are not being sufficiently obedient.

nilirl 1y ago
That's setting up a straw man. By framing an argument against semantics or social obedience, you're ignoring self-implicating behavior; you're intentionally ignoring people's needs. Why not ask "What am I doing wrong?" instead of "Hmm ... what is the nature of empathy? How may a linguist view the word? What is it's function? Ah! Is there an interesting generalization I can find here? Wow, let us dig deeper, this is no time to consider how I treat other people."
- Rendello 1y ago
  I think that's a good point. I think the author says a lot of good things about empathy in the article, the nature of which goes deeper than "how may a linguist view the word?", but if they're being prompted with "be more empathetic" often, perhaps their behaviour really should be modified.
- balamatom 1y ago
  >Why not ask "What am I doing wrong?" Because that's the first step to getting your needs ignored. And in conversations where "empathy" is brought up you're usually exactly one step from getting your needs ignored. If you're doing something wrong, and I decide to do something about it, minimum decency dictates I make sure you understand what it is. Bringing into it some vague abstract notion that everyone with half a critical mind turns out to have a whole personal exegesis about, but I only know about it from everyone else? Now there's a clear signal that nobody in the room actually cares how people are treated.
  - palmotea 1y ago
    > Because that's the first step to getting your needs ignored. And in conversations where "empathy" is brought up you're usually exactly one step from getting your needs ignored. When someone's being asked to have more empathy, they're probably in the middle of ignoring someone else's needs right then.
    - balamatom 1y ago
      >When someone's being asked to have more empathy, they're probably in the middle of ignoring someone else's needs right then. Yes, correct. That's exactly how abusers expect us to think things work. The difference is whether the person asking you to be more X cares if you have agreed-upon criteria of what that even looks like. Given how many people ostensibly driven by positive motivations seem to be rubbed the wrong way by "empathy", well...
  - nilirl 1y ago
    Ah, I see, so when someone yells at me "Please don't stab me", it's actually, I, who is at risk of being stabbed.
    - balamatom 1y ago
      Please don't be like that. I don't condone you trying to stab anyone, but if you do anyway - I think it's quite obvious how that'll put you at a higher risk of getting stabbed yourself. Empathy!
- balamatom 1y ago
  >"Hmm ... what is the nature of empathy? How may a linguist view the word? What is it's function? Ah! Is there an interesting generalization I can find here? Wow, let us dig deeper" The funny part is that if you care about a semantic argument I know you will care about how you treat other people, too. It's the person who strongly insists to not discuss what words mean, who 9 times out of 10 turns out to be dangerous.

yesfitz 1y ago

This is addressed in the post: > "Usually, 'be more empathetic' was a veiled request for me to modify my behavior or thinking towards someone (e.g. they thought I was rude to someone and wanted me to apologize and change my behavior)." And you actually illustrate the entire point of the post. Imagine that someone's upset with you and tells you to be more "gropulent". Many people have said this to you, but gropulence doesn't come naturally to you, and the term is bandied about in a wide variety of situations, making it hard to pick up context clues. There are people who call themselves "gropules" who can't explain how they use gropulence to support the claims that they make about others, and they sound an awful lot like psychics, who we all know are frauds. How would you start learning to be gropulent? I hope you'd be as curious and thorough as the author of TFA.

nilirl 1y ago
'be more empathetic' is not a veiled request, it is openly declared. The author subverts the ask for behavior change by a) calling it veiled and b) not treating it as the main argument against which they're trying to make a point. Like the author, you're constructing a similar straw man argument: selecting a specific use of the word and making that the main point to argue against. 'be more empathetic' is an argument to behave differently with the people around you. Not think differently; behave differently.
- yesfitz 1y ago
  Can you tell me which specific use of the word "empathy" I am arguing against? Because I don't think I'm arguing against any definition at all. I think I'm arguing that telling someone to behave a way that they don't understand is unhelpful. That could be "empathetic", "thankful", or "gropulent". ** Taking the author at their word, they don't understand the request. When they ask for clarification, they don't receive it. In that way, it is veiled, similarly to my "gropulent" analogy. In other words, the author is being asked to behave differently, but not given guidance on how to behave differently. Which is why they wrote this piece about what empathy is. I think the author would have gotten a lot further by asking how rather than why, but the author admits that they thought that requests to be empathetic were requests "to be fake and lie". (i.e. They misunderstood what "empathy" meant.)

fellowniusmonk 1y ago

"Do I lack a theory of mind for others?" Or call it empathy, whatever.