The idea of empathy for all ignores the limits of human psychology
nautil.us
nautil.us
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.
i've got a data-driven solution for evaluating potential business partners, contractors, anything:
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.
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.
The author has obviously never read science fiction. A non-human out-group instantly allows all humans to be in one in-group.
Stan Lee has said he created the X-Men (and others) in part to tell a story about racism without talking about race. Instead of it being skin color, it was the (often invisible) genetic aspects that people used to define the in/out-groups.
The Watchmen, Ender's Game, and Starship Troopers all work for this one too.
Ender's Game also showed what happens - blame and recriminations - after the external threat is removed.. people go back to their old struggles, fights, etc.
No, it really isn't. Certainly they deal with many of the same themes, and if you want to say that Haldemann does a much better job then I can probably agree with that, but accusing Ender's Game of being a mere rip-off just because they address similar topics is silly.
(OSC is also a weird and outspoken homophobe; easy to see him (a) misunderstanding forever war and (b) liking it for the wrong reasons).
Look, card is clearly the better writer between the two of them. He added a lot. But if you want to put forward war fiction as a case for empathy, it's irresponsible to look at EG before FW.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ender's_Game#Creation_and_insp...
> Ender's Game was written specifically to establish the character of Ender for his role of the Speaker in Speaker for the Dead, the outline for which he had written before novelizing Ender's Game.
The continuation of enders war do go into much more societal factors.
People will unite for a common goal until this common goal is removed, and don't count on removing all bickering.
Also see below answers, LoTR also touches on the subject with the FoTR and conflicts between races even when united on a common goal.
Rather, I'd say I have a healthy respect for all living beings.
I can smack a mosquito and respect it was doing what it needed to survive, while also putting myself first in my desire to not catch dengue fever.
Life and death are natural. Empathy may not be complete unless you're willing to sacrifice yourself. Respect may or may not be limited to humans.
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!
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.
if there is scarcity and competition, no doubt human psychology will kick in. but the idea of empathy would live on anyway.
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].
You may wish to read yoga sutras on swamij.com to see for yourself the profound insights of mind and its working expounded by the author Patanjali.
For instance, Yoga sutras starts with:The goal of Yoga is to regulate the modifications (tendencies) of mind,So the seer rests in its true nature.
The true nature of our consciousness (the seer) is existence-knowledge-bliss.
Hating someone or a group/race of beings is just a negative tendancy which has been adopted, often unconsciously, due to certain experiences in life. With stillness of meditation you can invite such thoughts witness them and remove clinging of mind toward them [0]. All methodologically.
Since you give me life recommendations and profound wisdom, here's my advice offered in return: forget about all this stuff and just live your life as an ordinary human on earth.
Through this simple practice of letting go of attachment to religious hope, you can find a sweet kind of freedom and simplicity—maybe even some kind of wisdom!
Good luck!
Somebody on HN pointed out that "an ordinary" human is probably not what you think it is [0].
[0] http://www.econstor.eu/bitstream/10419/43616/1/626014360.pdf
For one, I like reading about "weird" stuff, in reasonable quantities.
I got a lot of downvotes on the last post--do people think I'm making up or exaggerating Card's homophobia? Here's a few quotes. These are his own words, publicly published; look it up if you don't believe me:
"Laws against homosexual behavior should remain on the books, not to be indiscriminately enforced against anyone who happens to be caught violating them, but to be used when necessary to send a clear message that those who flagrantly violate society’s regulation of sexual behavior cannot be permitted to remain as acceptable, equal citizens within that society."
"If we accept the argument of the hypocrites of homosexuality that their sin is not a sin, we have destroyed ourselves."
"Regardless of law, marriage has only one definition, and any government that attempts to change it is my mortal enemy. I will act to destroy that government and bring it down."
(You'll note I'm not calling for him to be censored. Disagreeing with someone's opinions is the same as saying that they should be outlawed.)
Claim: OSC wants states to keep sodomy and anti-homosexual laws on the books.
Quote in Context: The Supreme Court had declared in 1986 (Bowers vs. Hardwick) that a Georgia law prohibiting sodomy even in the privacy of one's own home was constitutional. OSC wrote an essay in 1990 (23 years ago) to a conservative Mormon audience that, at the time, would have felt no interest in decriminalizing homosexual acts. In that context, his call to "leave the laws on the books" was simply recognizing the law at the time. In the same article he called for them not to be enforced. Within that context this was the liberal and tolerant view - for which OSC was criticized in conservative Mormon circles as being "pro-gay." The law was not overturned by the Supreme Court until 2003. Now that the law has changed, OSC has no interest in criminalizing homosexual acts and would never call for such a thing, any more than he wanted such laws enforced back when they were still on the books.
Except "when necessary to send a clear message that those who flagrantly violate society's regulation of sexual behavior cannot be permitted to remain as acceptable, equal citizens within that society." What's he talking about there? Not rape, or child abuse, or public indecency; those are already illegal. He's saying that consensual gay relationships can be grudgingly tolerated as long as they're aware that what they do is shameful and wrong, and don't start thinking that they deserve the same rights as normal people. See also the next paragraph: "The goal of the polity is not to put homosexuals in jail. The goal is to discourage people from engaging in homosexual practices in the first place, and, when they nevertheless proceed in their homosexual behavior, to encourage them to do so discreetly, so as not to shake the confidence of the community..."
This is still bigotry and discrimination. Don't expect me to praise a man who punches me in the face just because he refrained from shooting me.
But all right, that was 36 years ago. (Not 23; the paragraph that you copy-pasted from Card's website is from 2003.) How do you explain the 2008 quote where he calls for the overthrow of any government that legalizes gay marriage? What context did I miss there?
I don't agree with OSC on these points but the selection of quotations you gave are designed to paint him as a hateful frothing at the mouth bigot, rather than someone who is generally reasonable and sympathetic despite their anti-homosexual religious values. I don't think this is helpful to anyone, personally.
Look - I don't agree with him. He dislikes my womanizing lifestyle as much as he dislikes the gay lifestyle. Doesn't mean he is also secretly a womanizer in addition to being gay (as you seem to want to insinuate). Most likely he is a virtuous person who simply disagrees with both of us.