
The idea of empathy for all ignores the limits of human psychology - JackPoach
http://nautil.us/issue/35/boundaries/no-you-cant-feel-sorry-for-everyone
======
p4wnc6
This article makes the mistake of assuming that things like the national
debate of encryption and privacy sparked by e.g. the San Bernadino iPhone
ordeal are actually about the moral themes they are characterized by.

They are not about those moral themes. They are just status and in-group vs.
out-group games like everything else. We don't use data-driven approaches to
them for the same reason why people continue to hire underperforming assest
managers or why they hire over-priced management consultants.

With encryption, immigration, climate change, finance reform, etc. etc., you
pick a side of the debate and that identifies Who You Are and What Team You
Are On for purposes of letting other people know that you're either their
implicit ally or implicit enemy, that you would submit to them or resist them,
that you intrinsically respect their credential or that you treat their
credential with skepticism.

I was hoping this article might be about scope insensitivity and would speak
about how we have to intelligently use legislation and law enforcement to
protect human rights because, even for the best of us, it's not cognitively
feasible to feel the morality you would wish upon others.

Instead it seems like a meandering groan that we aren't more data driven --
but of course we aren't!

And even when we are "data driven" it's generally just an excuse to use
politically manipulated notions of data-based reasoning to only enhance the
degree of coalition politics, not to defeat it.

Take software for example. We claim that systematic hiring via commoditized
task examinations (like IKM or HackerRank), or the use of dumb shit process
management like Agile/Scrum, are supposed to represent a shift into
"objective" and "data-driven" evaluation. But it's unequivocally not. These
are just ways of letting middle management and political gatekeepers engineer
whatever subjective metrics they prefer, while being shielded from complaints
that they are not being objective.

If we can't even get this right for something as small as project management
or software hiring, it's beyond realistic hope that we could actually develop
a moral calculus at a national level and use data-driven principles to
actually inform the national debate over privacy vs. safety.

~~~
MarkPNeyer
> e don't use data-driven approaches to them for the same reason why people
> continue to hire underperforming assest managers or why they hire over-
> priced management consultants.

i've got a data-driven solution for evaluating potential business partners,
contractors, anything:

[https://github.com/neyer/respect](https://github.com/neyer/respect)

it's basically page rank, with a small twist.

> it's beyond realistic hope that we could actually develop a moral calculus
> at a national level and use data-driven principles to actually inform the
> national debate over privacy vs. safety.

i think the key here is record taking, with really simple metrics.

~~~
qb45
Get sufficiently many people to base meaningful decisions on that and it will
be gamed just as Google is.

------
tim333
>That means that, in principle, if we eliminate out-group hate completely, we
may also undermine in-group love. Empathy is a zero-sum game.

Oh rubbish. Look at Buddhist monk types and angry political extremist types.
They do a pretty good job of loving everything and hating most things
respectively.

I mean the article has a point that universal human empathy is not widespread
and we should design systems accordingly but that's been common knowledge for
centuries.

------
BurritoAlPastor
Confucius said, "Is there anyone who can even for a day give their full
strength to being humane? I haven’t met anyone who lacked the strength. But if
anyone has done this, I haven’t seen it."

([http://dailyanalect.tumblr.com/post/113164355376/46](http://dailyanalect.tumblr.com/post/113164355376/46))

~~~
studentrob
Sweet quote. Your site?

------
paulsutter
"Absolute universalism, in which we feel compassion for every individual on
Earth, is psychologically impossible."

The author has obviously never read science fiction. A non-human out-group
instantly allows all humans to be in one in-group.

~~~
ljw1001
You don't actually need science fiction to find a non-human out-group. There
are plenty of real species around. :)

~~~
bpchaps
Or even closer to home, just look at those with mental health issues.

------
studentrob
I don't see the point of this article.

In group and out group is just a conceptualization of competition. That's how
we improve ourselves and how we evolved. It's the basis of capitalism and so
many other things.

I have no trouble "extending equal compassion to foreign earthquake victims
and hurricane victims in our own country". I might not donate equally but
that's not a proper measure of empathy. There is no accurate measure for that.
The scientists of Nautilus will never understand that because they've been
trained to only publish things based on collected data. "world’s leading
thinkers" [1] my butt!

[1] [http://m.nautil.us/about](http://m.nautil.us/about)

------
carapat_virulat
I guess once we have thrown away universal empathy we may as well throw away
the natural numbers, the concept of a line or using categories to designate
things we have never seen. I mean what's the point of calling a table a table
if I will never be able to hold all existing tables in my head?

More seriously, infinite concepts are usually really simple to conceive for
most human minds, it's much more complicated to look at real life objects
clashing with mental objects and extract new meaningful concepts that may help
solve those inconsistencies.

>And then the pendulum swung back. People do care, newspaper editorialists and
social-media commenters granted. But they care inconsistently: grieving for
victims of Brussels’ recent attacks and ignoring Yemen’s recent bombing
victims; expressing outrage over ISIS rather than the much deadlier Boko
Haram; mourning the death of Cecil the Lion in Zimbabwe while overlooking
countless human murder victims. There are far worthier tragedies, they wrote,
than the ones that attract the most public empathy.

>[...] If we recognized that we have a limited quantity of empathy to begin
with, it would help to cure some of the acrimony and self-flagellation of
these discussions. [...] We must begin with a realistic assessment of what
those limits are, and then construct a scientific way of choosing which values
matter most to us.

For example in the above paragraph the author seems to extract that the
meaning of those criticism is that we should feel bad about ourselves. I don't
think that's the point, I agree that self-flagellation is improductive, but we
can rationally examine those kinds of inconsistent beliefs and emotions. Is
the way we look at those other people influencing how we act towards them? Do
those actions affect how they act towards us? Is there any chance of
reconciliation?

The author also seems to blindly accept the belief that personal intervention
is the only way to reduce misery, with no place for cold restructuring of
society in a way that avoid generating that misery in the first place, done in
a cold calculated way, with no need to deplete our precious, finite, empathy.

------
aoiao
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_R._Price](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_R._Price)

------
awinter-py
Empathy isn't a psychological proposition, it's an economic one (evolutionary
psychology when it works at all attempts to unify those topics).

------
brashrat
ok, sure, the idea of empathy ignores the limits of human psychology...
because it's an "idea". human psychology is not an idea, nor is are its
constituent parts ideas. so what?

if there is scarcity and competition, no doubt human psychology will kick in.
but the idea of empathy would live on anyway.

------
thomaspryor
This says that 'Absolute universalism, in which we feel compassion for every
individual on Earth, is psychologically impossible' because we need to be able
to hate on out-groups to love on in-groups. If we discover aliens might this
not hold?

~~~
kr4
It's not impossible but it requires a long sincere practice to peel off the
layers of false identities that we associate ourselves with. These are
gradually created starting right from our birth. However one way it's true
because once compassion for all beings (not just humans) becomes our nature,
we no longer remain human – we become divine.

That's the goal of all paths of Yoga (Karma/devotion/meditation/wisdom)

The above isn't something theoretical jargon – I know at least one individual
living at this moment who has reached to that state by following the
meditation path of yoga [0].

0: [http://omswami.com](http://omswami.com)

~~~
mbrock
I don't think this is an appropriate forum for religious proselytizing.

~~~
qb45
Sometimes it might be beneficial to hear voices from outside your local echo
chamber ;)

For one, I like reading about "weird" stuff, in reasonable quantities.

~~~
mbrock
As an antidote to this echo chamber effect, I invite proselytizers to discuss
their ideas in a non-proselytizing way, so that we can meet on common ground
instead of assuming vague terms like "divine" etc. If we can't get to that
point, it's just one echo chamber talking to another.

~~~
qb45
Echo chamber tourism isn't just sitting in yours and waiting for others to
come.

~~~
mbrock
Do you think that's what I do, based on my opinion that this forum is an
inappropriate place for proselytizing?

~~~
qb45
For some people religion is all they have ever known. You won't find them on
any other "ground".

------
noobie
Empathy =! Compassion.

------
bpchaps
I have a seriously hard time reading this comment while knowing what Orson
Scott Card is actually like. In the frame of who he really is, everything
about Ender's game seems like a reflection of an idea of parody or hyperbole
of the personality types in the book. That said, it's one of my favorite
books.

~~~
dang
We detached this subthread from
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11508746](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11508746)
and marked it off-topic.

~~~
bpchaps
Fair enough. I'll try to keep things more on-topic!

