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Comment by tombert | Hacker News Reader

I've been accused of having "pathological empathy" before [1], and to this day I refuse to accept that empathy is a weakness.

Being able to fairly easily put myself in someone else's shoes is pretty much the only thing I actually like about myself. I feel like part of what defines us as a species is learning how to understand people who do not deserve us to understand them.

In 2023 my iPhone was stolen (story is parent to the linked comment). They eventually caught the kid who stole the phone, and I refused to press charges. Pretty much everyone thought I was dumb for doing that, but I didn't see it that way; I didn't see any good coming from throwing a 17 year old kid into jail, and I remember how stupid I was when I was 17.

I doubt he's going to have some Les Misérables moment and turn his life around, but I would hope that if I were caught for something stupid when I was 17 someone else would have extended me the same benefit of the doubt. I don't regret it.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38906469

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> I refuse to accept that empathy is a weakness.

It is not. But also, empathy is not the same thing as kindness.

Empathy, as you mentioned, is the ability to put oneself in someone else's shoes. To imagine what is like to be other.

Fraudsters, cheaters, psycopaths. All of these are great empaths. They understand others in a deep level. But they're not kind, they are ruthless.

> I feel like part of what defines us as a species is learning how to understand people who do not deserve us to understand them.

Here you are talking about kindness. I think similarly.

I also believe this is correlated with creativity and collaboration skills. To me, there is something about the inner act of kind understanding that seems to be a _prerequisite_ for advanced communication. Totally out of my ass, I'm no psychologist.

> I would hope that if I were caught for something stupid when I was 17 someone else would have extended me the same benefit of the doubt

Not only you understood that, but you were able to communicate something to the kid that is remarkably uncommunicable. The kind act is also a kind message, you _meant it_ as a message somehow. Not all empaths want or can do that.

I don't think I disagree with anything you said (though I'm hesitant to call myself creative).

I guess when I say "empathy", I also mean "feeling someone's pain", in addition to the "someone else's shoes".

I think being able to understand someone's situation, and see how they're actually hurting, and how you'd hurt if someone did that to you, is the part of empathy/kindness that is a key ingredient in being a "decent human". I'm not perfect at it, obviously, I've acted selfishly plenty of times and I regret the times that I have, but it's the closest thing I have to a "moral code".

In regards to this kid, I just remember how angry I was at everything when I was 17. I hated going to school, I hated most of my teachers, I hated most of my classmates, I hated girls who wouldn't date me, and I hated guys who wouldn't be my friend. I was an idiot. It's a tough age for anyone, and I think a lot of people (particularly those in charge the US penal codes) forget that fact.

I meant creativity in a broader sense. Like "using stone tools", not "painting and dancing" (but not excluding it!).

Kind empathy has been demonstrated in some rats (a highly intelligent animal): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nyolz2Qf1ms

Note the researchers mentioning a "social contagion" that encourages empathy (another one of your kind crying, you cry). The goal of the experiment is to detect an even deeper kind of empathy (the savior rat is also in high stress and must overcome its instincts to save his fellow rat).

The thing you did for the kid required much more sophistication than that. Some of that sophistication comes from or manifests as empathy, in the sense that they're correlated.

I'm also saying it in a broader sense than only biological in rats. But that's the part that science has no data yet, so that's why I say it comes from my conjecturing ass.

Empathy is I feel what you feel. Compassion is I understand what you feel, how can we help? It is usually better to aim for compassion because if a person is having a crisis you don't want to go down in flames with them, compassion gives us emotional space to be helpful rather than affected by emotions that can pull us down.

As someone who tries to be compassionate, with an SO that is highly empathetic, the former is far better. She is often emotionally debilitated by being emotionally devastated by things happening to family, friends, strangers, news stories. I think it actually skews her ability to be compassionate, because she acts in shortsighted ways to attempt to relieve her proxy emotions, instead of taking a step back and finding a better solution to the person suffering. No one that is already empathetic should attempt to increase their empathy. A little goes a long way and you should work on building compassion, understanding, patience, etc.

> Fraudsters, cheaters, psycopaths. All of these are great empaths. They understand others in a deep level.

No, psychopathy is clinically defined in part by a lack of empathy.

As I said, I'm no psychologist. I am also not a psychiatrist or neurologist.

If you are one, I'm sure there's more to it than just "lack of empathy", and I would love to hear more.

I encounter stuff like that, almost every day.

It's really important for me to feel empathy for others. It is not the same as weakness.

I was always told that it's really important to understand our enemies, and that often includes admitting that they are human, and have human motives.

That's not the same as being weak.

I've also been told "If you want to understand rats, talk to an exterminator."

>I've been accused of having "pathological empathy" before [1], and to this day I refuse to accept that empathy is a weakness.

To put it in a different context, the psychologist Paul Bloom wrote an interesting book titled "Against Empathy." He makes a distinction between "emotional empathy" and "cognitive empathy". He is an advocate of the latter, while acknowledging that the former can lead to many sub-optimal outcomes.

I'm not terribly concerned with optimizing, honestly. I try and make decisions that I'm unlikely to regret, at least not for long term. Hurting someone, or not helping someone that I should have helped, are things that I end up really regretting, and those are the things that keep me up at night.

I don't lose a lot of sleep for doing something that I genuinely thought was right. If someone takes advantage of my empathetic nature and exploits me, I'm not exactly slap-happy about it, but I can go to bed knowing that I did the right thing, and that person is just an asshole.

Pretty much every single bad thing I've done that I lose sleep over has come as a direct result of me trying to "override" my natural empathy. I'm done doing that.

An economists perspective would be that your utility function can be whatever you want. According to what you said above, you would be minimizing regret, which is an optimization goal (although it sounds overly dry in that context).

Blooms point is that when we take on the emotions of someone else, it has the ability to override our rational decision making and that rational decisions tend to lead to objectively better outcomes.

There's probably some truth to this, and I suppose you can define "objectively better" as "maximizing your optimization goal" or "minimizing the bad stuff" or something, quantifying that however you want.

That said, I'm not 100% convinced that my "rational brain" actually is better at making decisions that minimize regret than just relying on emotions. My rational brain is very good at rationalizing shit to where I can convince myself that something that's very obviously bad is "actually ok when you think about it like this...", and then I regret it afterwards.

At least for me, that doesn't really happen when I just rely heavily on my emotional brain.

I think this is all true, with an added nuance:

We typically make decisions with our emotional mind, and justify it with our rational mind after the fact. I believe Bloom is in the camp that we can override that initial emotional impulse, but there are people who disagree with him. In any event, if the end goal is emotional ("minimize regret") I'm not sure there's much to be gained by bringing the rational into it.

The biggest takeaway I had from his book is that being overly emotionally empathetic can make us biased and lose out on the bigger picture, like making one focused on the short-term wants at the cost of longer-term needs. (There are other biased aspects, like the fact that we tend to empathize more with people who are similar to us, that can lead to obvious less-than-great outcomes.)

> like making one focused on the short-term wants at the cost of longer-term needs

Yeah, that's fair.

In my previous apartment, there was a guy named Julius. I really liked him, he was very pleasant to talk to, funny, charming, and just very nice.

We were in that apartment for three years, and nothing too remarkable happened, but the last year, Julius fell into some kind of lifestyle that I'm unsure of the details of, but ended up with him constantly stoned, missing teeth, and evicted from the apartment.

He was still in my neighborhood (homeless as far as I could tell), and he would still talk to me, always really polite, but with increasingly-yellow eyes, and it made me really sad, because I wouldn't wish that fate on anyone, let alone someone who was always kind to me.

My wife and I discussed maybe giving him some money to try to get back on his feet, but we decided against it because we were confident that if we did it would likely go to drugs. We really wanted to help, but we were afraid, like you said, it would be a short-term want overshadowing a long term gain.

If I had genuinely thought that writing him a check for $1,000 would dramatically improve his life, I would have done it in a heartbeat, but I didn't, and I felt like there was a good chance it would fuel a bender that would lead to an overdose.

I would occasionally buy him lunch at the nearby Wendy's, and I offered to try and help him fix up his resume to maybe make him more employable, but nothing ever came of that.

We eventually moved from that apartment and I'm not sure what happened to Julius. I hope he's ok, but I suspect that he's probably dead now, from an overdose or alcohol poisoning. A part of me wishes I had given him some money to dig himself out, but I think I made the right choice.

I don't lose sleep over my actions on that one; there wasn't really anything I could have done much different. Sometimes sad shit just happens, and it's no one's fault.

Those with a lot of introspection can do this, and it can be a benefit to yourself and others when used correctly.

In my opinion, you were dumb for doing that, but I can't say I haven't done something similar. Given my experience, I wouldn't do this again.

My experience involved a crazed homeowner in their 40s shooting at me standing on the public sidewalk for taking pictures of the neighborhood for a realtor, this was around 2009. They thought I worked for their mortgage lender who was foreclosing.

The wood fence took most of the damage, but there were kids playing in the paved cul-de-sac right behind where I was standing. No serious injuries, thankfully, and the police confiscated the firearm. I didn't press charges, because I empathized as my family had people who lost their entire retirements in the fallout from the market and that was real fresh.

I would press charges today having had that experience (and others). Very few people change themselves unless they are forced to through isolated introspection or negative circumstance. Being young, or stupid, or a victim, isn't a defensible justification. Its letting them off the hook for their actions without consequence.

I would press charges, too. Shooting is a lot different from stealing.

I might not let people off the hook, because I think it might change them, but it might change someone else who saw it happen, or, maybe, a family member that depends on them.

This goes doubly true, these days, with everything being live-streamed.

I get a little nauseous, though, at some of the staged crap, out there.

It is different from stealing, but crimes can escalate quickly and without warning.

What people don't realize is when these type of things happen, if you haven't experienced it before, its surreal, and it can take a moment to realize, recognize and react. Even after the fact, with close calls there's a lot of processing and grappling with your own mortality.

All you really see in the moment is a white, old rundown wood fence that suddenly becomes a cloud of flying splinters and wood chips. It is very different from how its portrayed in the media.

I'm now a big believer that proper firearm safety and handling training should be mandatory for everyone by 18. You recognize the sounds, you see the effect, you can react much quicker with the experience imparted by training than without.

I totally agree about the staged stuff. Anything like that muddies the reality.

It's certainly violating and I was pretty upset to have my phone stolen, but there's always a risk of someone fucking you over for doing nearly anything. I said it in a sibling response; I don't lose sleep for doing something that I genuinely thought was right. I might be a bit more cautious now, but I cannot imagine a scenario where, if a 17 year old said he needed to call his mom, that I don't try and help somehow, though I'd probably point him to the nearest police station nowadays (it's NYC, they're everywhere).

Things would definitely be different if it were an armed robbery, however. The reason I didn't feel the need to press charges is because I genuinely don't think I was ever in any "danger". As far as I'm aware, the kid wasn't armed, outside of a light shove that was clearly not meant to hurt me, there wasn't even physical contact, so I think it was just some idiot teenager who snatched a phone.

If they had had a gun or a knife or physically assaulted me, I would probably have pressed charges, since that's a more-direct public safety issue at hand there.

I really resonate with this sentiment and want to share a similar story.

Where I live, supermarkets have a reception where you can leave your belongings while you're shopping. The employee in charge gives you a numbered card that matches the drawer in which they stored your things (all of this is handled by the employee) and off you go. No keys or anything, only a drawer with a card.

A few months ago I left my backpack at a one of these. 20 minutes later, as I was about to leave, I went to return the card in order to retrieve my stuff and to my surprise they gave me someone else's backpack.

I kindly asked what happened and after the manager had gone to check the CCTV footage they told me they gave my backpack to another customer. The problem? The numbered card didn't match the drawer and no one had realised. And there I was with the stranger's backpack and no way to contact him.

I agreed to wait until this man came back to return my stuff so we could switch backpacks (he had to; his work ID was on his backpack). I went home, told my family what happened, and they asked me what I told the supermarket staff. "Nothing, I'm just gonna wait" I said, and they rambled on about how I should have yelled at them and made a scene and maybe even made them fire the employee that grabbed my backpack.

I didn't do any of that because I precisely didn't want them to fire the poor minimum wage worker. Besides, I understood all of this happened because the system of numbered card/open drawer is completely broken. It wasn't relly the employee's fault; although it was his mistake not checking the numbers not matching. Yelling wouldn't have fixed anything.

I got my backpack back the next morning. No one was fired. The supermarket manager didn't even apologize for the inconvenience though, but ok.

Be kind.

I think you did the right thing. Mistakes happen, and very little good would come out of demanding that this person gets fired as a result of one (though the employee probably did deserve a bit of embarrassment). The manager probably should have apologized, but it's not the end of the world.

I will admit that I get a bit paranoid with those bag-check things at the stores here. At the stores in my neighborhood, they know me well enough to where they almost never even check my card, it would be super easy for me to grab someone else's bag. I've never done it, I don't want to do it, but I could...that's why I usually don't go directly before or after work, because I don't want my bag with an expensive Macbook to get stolen.

I guess i would have done the same.

Do they throw 17 yos in jail, where you live? If so, do they do that over stealing a phone? If so... maybe it would be more moral in stepping into a political career and try to change some laws?

I knew someone that spent about 18 years in Maximum Security adult prison, from 17, because he burgled the house of an important person.

One of the smartest people I ever knew. Probably had an IQ of 140. He was an HVAC tech, and had trouble staying employed.

It totally wrecked his life, and he ended badly.

Yes, we do that stuff in the US.

Was his "trouble staying employed" because HVAC bored him out of his mind, or attention span issues, or other factors?

The world has plenty of people who are really smart, yet are really not "good employee" material.

He was angry. I mean, really angry.

He was also very big and intimidating. That didn't help.

Most of the anger came from prison, and from being screwed over, to be thrown in there.

That can make it difficult to get along with others, and those who don't play well with others, have trouble staying employed.

But it's also possible to transcend that kind of thing. I see it regularly. It just takes a lot of work. Painful, humbling, work.

But he did burgle a house, so obviously he had some pre-existing behavioral issues, right? And those are probably not gone.

> Most of the anger came from prison, and from being screwed over, to be thrown in there.

That clearly illustrates that he didn't progress at all in his understanding of life. I'd be afraid to live within few kilometers of him let alone having him work at my company if I had one

Yup. He never adjusted. He was always acting as if he was still in The Yard.

My point was, he might have already been acting as if he was in The Yard before they put him in The Yard.

Maybe, but I didn't know him, before.

I have, however, been dealing with after-incarceration folks for a few decades, and there's a particular type of attitude that is absolutely required to survive, inside, and that must be completely stripped away, once they get out, as it is pure poison, outside the wall.

> He was also very big and intimidating.

I'll bet that was unhelpful at age 17, when our <cough/> justice system was deciding his fate.

I can't even imagine how much prison would fuck me up.

Between potential sexual abuse, being around a lot of violent people, the general disregard Americans have for prisoners and convicted felons and their well-being, and the "doing what you have to to survive" mentality that seems to scar incarcerated people, it would be hard for it not to change you as a person.

I really hate how the US handles prisons, and I really hate the "lock them up and throw away the key" mentality we have here. I hope it's obvious, that's not something I agree with.

Sounds really unusual for a first offense at that age even for burglary. So I assume there’s more to the story.

Yeah. He never got specific, but I think so. However, this was also "Down South," where the rich folks literally have the prosecutors and police on their payroll.

Tons of factors in the US for this stuff; which state you're in, how they stole the phone (e.g. violent vs. just grabbing it off a table when the owner isn't looking), prior history, if they're tried as a child vs adult, and (let's be honest) if they can afford a good lawyer.

It definitely wouldn't be "weird" to throw a 17 year old in jail for stealing an iPhone, particularly in my case it would likely have been tried as a "mugging" and I suspect classified in the "violent" category (even though I was unharmed).

I'd be lying if I said I wasn't tempted to throw the book at this kid, it did kind of cause a bit of frustration and trauma that I still haven't completely worked through, but I still think I made the right choice, even if everyone else in my life disagrees.

A friend of mine got life in prison with no parole at 17.

I myself got 6 months jail time at 17 after being subject to a highly illegal and corrupt legal racket in a small town, when a meth-dealing police officer planted weed on me at the scene of an accident. I was also homeless. Good times.

Sure. Though politician more likely to win would be one who's hardliner on crime and propose tough laws not compassionate ones.

This depends on the kid, doesn’t it?

> I didn't see any good coming from throwing a 17 year old kid into jail, and I remember how stupid I was when I was 17.

For example, being forced to confront the consequences of their actions at 17 when the punishment is lesser and likely to include diversion or similar might have prevented them from committing a similar crime when older and receiving a harsher penalty — which in your empathy, you ensured would happen by refusing to punish them. Their practice and willingness to use force, as described in your referenced comment, indicates this isn’t their first time committing such a crime. By normalizing that crime wouldn’t be punished, you created a worse situation.

You can see similar unfolding at scale in major US cities, where crime (particularly theft) skyrocketed — and intensified, eg the recent subway burnings in NYC. Without enforcing norms, they break down.

A good heuristic for me is “what happens when everybody behaves that way?” In this case, it leads to society degrading.

Being tried as a child when you’re 17 is by no means a “given”. It’s entirely possible, even likely, that this would go to grownup court and they’d be given the full consequences.

“Force” is a pretty strong word, it was barely a shove. Just enough to give themselves a head start running away.

I do not in any way agree that I created a “worse” situation than a child being sent to prison. I think it is extremely naive to think that sending someone to an American prison will create anything but a worse felon. This isn’t Norway, American prisons are purely punitive.

I don’t know which stats you’re referring to, but I highly doubt that “yuppies not pressing charges against children stealing two year old iPhones” is a significant cause of a crime uptake.

> “Force” is a pretty strong word, it was barely a shove. Just enough to give themselves a head start running away.

People call it “toxic empathy” not because empathy is inherently wrong, but because it leads to people such as yourself minimizing the use of force in a crime (which you admit this was) while showing selective empathy only for the perpetrator and not their future victims.

> Being tried as a child when you’re 17 is by no means a “given”.

> I do not in any way agree that I created a “worse” situation than a child being sent to prison.

These both sounds like you’re rationalizing an emotive decision, post hoc.

> I think it is extremely naive to think that sending someone to an American prison will create anything but a worse felon. This isn’t Norway, American prisons are purely punitive.

They likely would’ve negotiated a plea for a misdemeanor and treatment on a first offense, in the US. Even first time lower felonies result in supervised probation and mandatory treatment, eg, the recommended outcome for drug felonies.

Again, you seem to be focusing entirely on your feelings — without an honest account of either the likely outcome of prosecution, the criminal’s future (having normalized violent robberies), or their future victims.

This is why it’s called “toxic empathy”: because you’re soothing your own feelings without engaging in rational analysis nor true empathy, eg, by understanding that sometimes criminals turn their lives around because they’re punished or that future victims deserve your care also.

No, you’re making a lot of assertions here that are not founded.

> while showing selective empathy only for the perpetrator and not their future victims.

Actually that’s not what I did. I didn’t really concede them “using force”, a light shove really isn’t “force” any more than an asshole pushing his way onto the subway is “using force”, and I said in sibling comments that I would have pressed charges if I genuinely thought that there was any real risk of danger on my end.

And again, I absolutely do not concede that putting a kid through the system is automatically going to lead to better results.

> These both sounds like you’re rationalizing an emotive decision, post hoc.

I am not rationalizing a decision “post hoc”, because that was literally the decision making process that was being employed when I was given the option to press charges. You can say it was dumb, that’s fine, but it’s not “post hoc”, because it’s not “post”.

> you’re soothing your own feelings without engaging in rational analysis nor true empathy, eg, by understanding that sometimes criminals turn their lives around because they’re punished or that future victims deserve your care also.

That can happen, but that’s not usually what happens when people get put through the system. You have no reason to think that bureaucratically punishing a child is going to force them to turn their life around. You’re asserting it.

I do not agree with your characterization of my character as “toxic empathy”.

Frankly I find this line of thinking pretty tiring, with people pretending that they care about abstract “future victims”, that may or may not exist, as a means of LARPing empathy.

You ignored the expected outcomes to emphasize your emotional rationalization based on “jailing a child”. That was never likely to happen, based on how US law works. For theft, even felony theft, you’re usually talking about supervised probation on a first offense — the same as felony drug offenses. There’s a whole chart of proscribed sentences based on offense and contributing factors.

> That can happen, but that’s not usually what happens when people get put through the system.

But that’s not the relevant question, eg, you’re ignoring the fact most thieves don’t stop because someone declined to prosecute them, either. You’re holding me to standards you didn’t apply to yourself.

The relevant question is — “for serial criminals who later stopped, what caused them to?”

In many cases, being jailed does stop their repeated criminality or stop the pathway of escalation. By contrast, there’s also many people who because they’re not punished, continue to escalate until they commit a violent offense and the state is forced to jail them.

> Frankly I find this line of thinking pretty tiring, with people pretending that they care about abstract “future victims”, that may or may not exist, as a means of LARPing empathy.

We’re discussing practiced criminals who likely offended before and will again — and who were physically aggressive with their victim.

You’re accusing me of “LARPing” empathy, but you’re showing time after time you’re not engaging in empathy (either understanding the thieves nor concern about victims), but soothing your emotions. That you don’t think future victims matter or people are genuinely concerned about them speaks to your own lack of empathy — both in general (ie, you can’t imagine how the person who stole from you might harm someone else and that person might be hurt) and in particular (ie, you can’t imagine how I’d genuinely be concerned about other victims, because that’s not how you feel).

You’re the one LARPing empathy to cover for your toxic emotionally driven conduct.

First, calling my conduct “emotionally driven” really doesn’t work as an insult for me.

I still don’t consider what I have done as “toxic”. I used discretion to not press charges because I don’t think that pushing a kid through the system was going to lead to anything good.

Let’s say grant that a stolen iPhone wouldn’t lead to jail time, let’s say I am wrong about that. Even if that’s the case, if I genuinely believed that jail time was in the picture, are you saying that my decision here was “rational”?

Also, no, you’re the one LARPing. You’re inventing future victims that you do not have any reason to think exist as a means of dismissing my point.

the irony in calling someone "extremely naive" while talking about a 17 year old getting prison time for snatching a phone. on top of the rest of the posts

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