
Against Empathy - laurex
http://www.theatlantic.com/video/index/474588/why-empathy-is-a-bad-thing?single_page=true
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luckydude
I was a hot shot kernel engineer at Sun back in the day when Sun was like Bell
Labs.

I specialized in performance which meant that if I showed up in your office
you had a problem and I was the spotlight on that problem. And if you didn't
want to focus 100% of your energy right now on that problem, I made sure that
everyone knew that.

I was not well liked.

Eventually I grew up. People are people. They have jobs, they have families,
there are all sorts of reasons that someone may not be doing well at their
job. Yes, one of them is that perhaps they suck. But I learned that any well
run company, it wasn't that they sucked, it was that they had shit going on in
their life that was more important than their job.

This guy may have a point. I don't think his point is as valuable as the idea
that maybe you should look a little harder to see why someone isn't helping as
much as you want. That's empathy to me.

~~~
meric
I think empathy is a major factor in making life intrinsically valuable.

It's like saying companies shouldn't worry about the bottom line. If you don't
worry about the bottom lime, everyone at work would be a lot more relaxed,
there will be less layoffs, longer lunch times, more perks, salary etc, making
working life more pleasant.

But the point of having a company is to have a bottom line.

~~~
karmelapple
There might be fewer layoffs, but either a lot lower or no salaries at some
point.

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true_religion
A long time ago, I read Ender's Game, and a key point of that fictional story
is that empathy is _not_ about showing compassion, just a common byproduct.
Empathy is about understanding, and in the context of software development, we
need it all the time.

Imagine coming into a new codebase, and seeing what you believe are hacks and
idiosyncracies everywhere. With empathy, you can get into the mindset of the
original coder and begin to see why X is done in a certain way, or even be
able to guess how they imagined you'd be using their framework without any
documentation to lead you along.

It's extremely useful to understand someone, their situation, and their
reasoning without them at hand to explain it for you. It's empathy... but
without the obvious compassionate outlet of excusing what they've done.

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personomas
Here's two of his arguments:

1) Don't help people, because your actions might be hurting things not
helping.

2) Since there are immoral people who do good for their own sake (i.e. remove
guilt) rather than doing good for other people, that we shouldn't have empathy
and show compassion. Bahaha, this is his generalization, and it's very wrong.

Empathy is understanding, and we need understanding, in order to help people.

Summary, don't waste your time watching this. This guy needs a reality check,
or a good read of the Holy Bible.

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brbsix
What he's getting at is "pathological altruism". You'll notice a pattern where
people act on their empathy (declaring said action objectively good) and
failing to appropriately reflect on it's consequences. Such is the case with
many government programs like war or welfare programs. If you define a program
as empathetic and virtuous, you have no null hypothesis with which to disprove
it, no metrics with which to calibrate it. In such respects, empathy can do a
lot of harm to yourself and others.

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zipotm
Empathy is Good.

