Hacker News Reader

Comment by dan-robertson | Hacker News Reader

Is it hypocrisy or just changing one’s mind? I guess I’m generally thankful for people changing their minds rather than sticking steadfastly to one thing (even if that is a good thing).

View on HN

It’s more just a complete lack of empathy.

On the contrary, it would seem like Cheney was/became rather empathetic to his daughter's situation.

Caring only about one's immediate blood legacy strikes me as more opportunistic than empathetic when one is a top leader whose explicit responsibility is to work to improve the lives of all citizens.

On the other hand, this is Dick Cheney we're talking about; an empathetic human response isn't something he's otherwise demonstrated in his business or political dealings.

That's not "on the other hand", that's literally the point of the observation.

Eh, these people are human though. Different people care about different things, and these change based on personal experience.

Empathy is something you feel, rather than something you calculate.

You don't know the human. You only know a character on TV. That character is intermediated for you by many hands. Maybe the character acts in reality as you think, or maybe they are literally acting to gain your approval. We don't know anything about the people presented to us.

I would argue that this is how you become a top leader. It's really discouraging to realize that only a certain type of people even want to win a popularity contest. Even dictators are winning the "more popular than the alternatives" contest, though the alternative might just be death.

Also that might be the stated responsibility, but the implicit one is to improve the outcomes relative to perceived alternatives. Many times the alternatives area manufactured.

There's an overall trend that this example fits in where people tend to act on spectrum of outright denial, not caring or actively exacerbating/ridiculing/etc, when it comes to problems experienced by people other than themselves.

It's only when they themselves, or someone they care about, experiences something that they begin to care about it. It speaks to a selective empathy, one that is ultimately selfish, because it is only given when it starts to impact them. It is especially selfish when that lack of empathy has benefited them in the past, as well.

I feel like this is just how most people behave, for better or worse. I have a set of strongly held opinions about certain things that may or may not be considered socially acceptable and when people I actually know that I care about are experiencing particularly bad consequences as a result of secondary or tertiery effects that "derive from" from views (in the sense of legislation being passed that is in line with the views that I hold, or anything adjacent from this) as such, I sometimes loosen up - isn't this pretty reasonable, natural given that we empathize with people we know more than people we don't know?

It isn't really hypocrisy -- it's more of a moderating factor given one's connections with people one might know, assuming the desire to fit in with society and have more pro-social interactions with others.

> I have a set of strongly held opinions about certain things that may or may not be considered socially acceptable and when people I actually know that I care about are experiencing particularly bad consequences as a result of secondary or tertiery effects that "derive from" from views (in the sense of legislation being passed that is in line with the views that I hold, or anything adjacent from this) as such, I sometimes loosen up - isn't this pretty reasonable, natural given that we empathize with people we know more than people we don't know?

I'd say that it is natural to empathize more with people we know. I'd also say that it is totally unreasonable to ignore what is happening to other people when forming ones opinion on something. Maybe it is normal but I can not understand why you would think that it is in any way reasonable.

If you only care when something affects you/your immediate family, that’s selfishness, not empathy.

Empathy is when you recognize the basic humanity of others and are able to put yourself into their shoes and feel what they feel.

Even if we abandon the word "hypocrisy" for the sake of this discussion, being unable to care about an issue unless it directly effects you is just as bad, if not worse in some ways.

We're a reactive species in general. We rarely act in a proactive manner and require personal experience to change habit and thinking, especially after the age of 25 when neural pathways become harder to change.

Empathy is a thing worth considering, working on, being better at. I try.

Harder, but far from impossible. I work with the adult (26+) I/DD population in the US (individuals with developmental disabilities) and one of their biggest challenges is coping with and learning to buffer emotional reactions, while also being able to understand the emotional experiences of others. This often takes years of practice, and sometimes therapy for a neurotypical individual to master. And yet, I see progress regularly enough in the I/DD population that I often wonder what excuse the neurotypical population has when they collectively display a lack of emotional checks and balances, or empathy.

We're reactive, sure, but let's not throw that out there and use it to discount the fact that we can, without a doubt, learn to control those reactions. Social change often moves at a glacial pace because of this attitude, when the reality is that it up to us, right now, to break the cycle or change the pattern.

I think the objection is that they did not change their minds based on the merits of the situation, but because it suddenly was personally. Its hypocrisy because the relavent deciding factor was personal not general.

Yes, it most certainly is. The definition of hypocrisy is claiming to have moral standards or beliefs to which your own behavior does not conform.

I think it ceases to be hypocrisy when you make a change. It's something, but let's not completely dismiss a positive change. Is that not the entire objective of education and awareness via activism? People deserve credit for acting.

Hypocrisy was probably not the perfect word to use, and I am happy for the positive change. Having said that, it needs to be pointed out when somebody supports policies that disadvantage people right until the point when those policies start negatively affecting them. Maybe "lack of general empathy" is the right phrase, like somebody else in the thread said.

There's a necessary extra bit, which is that you seek to change other people's behaviour but not your own. It's critically important that we're able to hold moral positions inconsistent with our behaviour, otherwise moral discourse simply reflects peoples' desires about how they wish to live. Indeed, we see this without any unnecessary charges of hypocrisy (people's moral positions are really just positions of convenience).

Reply on news.ycombinator.com