Against Empathy

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.

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.

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.

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.

Empathy is Good.