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Comment by User23 | Hacker News Reader

Sociopaths are great at empathy. Empathy is the ability to observe and understand others emotions without actually connecting. It’s absolutely essential to be a successful dark triad tape.

Sympathy is the “light” counterpart, where you actually emotionally resonate with the other person. Obviously this makes nasty behavior less attractive since you feel the emotional effects too.

And now you know why corporate psychobabble always goes on about user empathy.

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I totally disagree. I’ve only read one book about the topic of the dark triad, sympathy, and empathy, called Social Intelligence. Basically I’ll simplify the definitions for brevity’s sake. Sympathy is that you feel bad for someone. Empathy is actually putting yourself in their shoes and feeling what they feel and adapting to their needs and understanding them as they are. So, maybe you have the terms backwards, or maybe I do? Have you ever heard the phrase, I don’t need your sympathy? What about, I don’t need your empathy? Empathy may be a less common term than sympathy but it is clearly the superior one in my book.

I'm pretty sure your understanding is the right one. It goes even further if you venture away from science and into psychics powers - "empaths" are the psychic subset that literally feel others' emotions.

source? seems like a rather twisted definition of empathy.

The American Heritage Dictionary[1][2] and the Merriam-Webster Dictionary [3][4] are two that come to mind, but I'm sure that you can find others.

As usual m-w is much sloppier when it comes to making distinctions between similar words, due to their philosophy that common misuse redefines words[5], but even they make a pretty clear distinction between empathy and sympathy and it's clear that sympathy is the one where one actually emotes with the subject.

[1] https://www.ahdictionary.com/word/search.html?q=empathy

[2] https://www.ahdictionary.com/word/search.html?q=sympathy

[3] https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/empathy

[4] https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/sympathy

[5] And they aren't even entirely wrong, as anyone can literally tell you.

Understanding other’s feelings seems to be only part you’re focusing on, but it’s not enough to have empathy. The dictionaries you’ve linked to have each a list of skills and I don’t think each stands on its own. It’s a combinations of those. I’m sure AI already have, and cenrtainly will have it perfected in the future, an ability to “understand” feelings and emotions if I use the term “understanding” the way you do with sociopaths - the ability to analyze and act on. Certainly it can not be called empathetic.

Twisted yes

However I'd think some sociopaths can be good at logically cognitive intelligence wise understanding how a different person feels.

But being unable to actually feel real empathy, I wonder if they might mistake their logical thinking for being empathy? Which they will instead never know what it is

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