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Comment by anotherhacker | Hacker News Reader

This person doesn't understand what empathy is.

Empathy is a slow process of analyzing someone's emotional state so you can affect it. E.g. The Nazis were excellent empathizers. Rockets and dive bombers (Stuka) had sirens to intimate. The battle of Britain was a psychological one-and it almost worked. Prisoners were told to "remember your locker number" as they were ushered into gas chambers.

Don't confuse empathy with responsiveness, sympathy or compassion. We already have words for those.

Learn more: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZQ6Y3hoKI8U http://www.selfpsychologypsychoanalysis.org/empathy-mis.shtm...

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This person doesn't understand what empathy is.

They might get it better than you do. "Empathy" is the liberal word for the kinds of compassion that make people tolerant (for progressive values of compassion and tolerance ofc).

For talking about "empathy" this article is oddly and conspicuously broadcasting their political leaning. Why would OP choose to name the anti-abuse organization and support group that they did? Neither of which are known for their track record nor social work experts on staff. They're known solely because of the internet personalities at their helms.

You're wrong.

I can tell you didn't watch the video or read the link either.

Watch the video. Read the link. Get smarter.

That's needlessly personal and breaks the HN guidelines, as does https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10926389. Please don't comment like this here.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

https://news.ycombinator.com/newswelcome.html

Saying someone is wrong is not personal. If I say 2+2=5, someone should tell me I'm wrong.

Your comment is also off topic, breaks the guidelines you just referenced, and doesn't belong in this thread (unfortunately neither does this comment- I apologize for that).

I will no longer comment on this thread.

Saying someone is wrong is not personal.

Saying you can tell what they did and didn't do, wrt source material, is more personal.

Telling someone to "get smarter" is entirely personal.

I'm a moderator here; sorry if that wasn't clear. You're most welcome to continue commenting in the thread, but it's important to follow the values of civility and substantiveness when doing so. Instead of telling people negative things about themselves, such as that they didn't watch a video or aren't educated in psychology, edit all that personal stuff out and use the freed-up space to teach the reader specific things. That's what we're here for.

For example, I'd love to learn more about what Heinz Kohut specifically says about empathy. That sounds deeply interesting, and if your comment had contained a neutral description of that, it would have been a fine contribution.

And yes it's true that moderation comments are off-topic. They're also tedious to read and (let me assure you) to write. Unfortunately they're a necessary evil. We do have some ideas for changing HN's software to make fewer of them necessary, but it's hard to say whether that would work.

Sorry, I think you're mistaken.

Empathy is understanding and feeling someone else's feelings. Putting yourself in their shoes.

Sympathy is having compassion for that person, even if you don't feel the same way. It's understanding, but more detached.

True, you need empathy to make art or to manipulate people or to frighten others - but that's not part of the definition of the word.

Through prefrontal cortex phenomena, people can and do place themselves in others' shoes, replicating enough of their thought processes to feel similar emotions. If empathy, according to Kohut and you, no longer means that, what's the word for it?

Kohut seems to want to redefine empathy so that he can use that word to describe the proper process of psychoanalysis, which he thinks shouldn't include what's commonly called empathy.

Redefining words from their widely accepted definition and acting as if you've discovered the meaning of life does not help anything, it just leads to hostility and confusion as you see in this subthread.

> Empathy: the ability to understand and share the feelings of another.

I don't really agree. What you are describing sounds like social engineering, which certainly requires a sensitivity to empathy. Either way, your argument is about a trivial difference, and they still had good things to say on the subject.

Your agreement or disagreement is irrelevant.

Did you watch the video? Did you read the link? Obviously not.

If you had, you would have listened to Heinz Kohut talk about how empathy is misused. Empathy is an informer for action-it has nothing to do with "connecting with people"

I also take it you don't know who Heinz Kohut is. Which means you're not educated in psychology. Anyone with any kind of decent education will study Kohut just as much as Freud or Skinner.

No, i'm not educated in psychology. I don't see how that is even remotely relevant in a conversation about how to connect with people across screens and digital displays...

I think you should stop confusing words and their denotations. If one person uses a word to mean one thing, and another uses a word to mean another, perhaps similar thing, that is not in of itself "wrong". Words don't care how they are used.

"You're all using this word wrong" can only come across as comical or annoying.

>means you're not educated in psychology

Probably a good thing since it's turning out that the whole field is filled with junk science.

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