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Comment by ac794 | Hacker News Reader

What is the evidence that empathy exists to short-circuit reasoning? Empathy is about understanding someone else's perspective.

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Some would say you lack empathy if you want to force mentally ill people on the street to get treatment. Other people will say you lack empathy if you discount how they feel about the “illegal” bit in “illegal immigration” —- that is, we all obey laws we don’t agree with or take the risk we’ll get in trouble and people don’t like seeing other people do otherwise any more than I like seeing people jump the turnstile on the subway when I am paying the fare.

The problem, and the trick, of this word-game regarding empathy, is frequently the removal of context. For example, when you talk about "forcing mentally ill people on the street to get treatment," we divorce the practical realities and current context of what that entails. To illuminate further, if we had an ideal system of treatment and system of judging when it was OK to override people's autonomy and dignity, it would be far less problematic to force homeless, mentally ill people to get treatment. The facts are, this is simply far from the case, where in practical reality lies a brutal system whereby we make their autonomy illegal, even their bodily autonomy to resist having mind-altering drugs with severe side-effects pumped into their bodies, for the sake of comfort of those passing by. Likewise, we can delve into your dismissal of the semiotic game you play with legalism as a contingency for compassion, actually weighing the harm of particular categories of cases, and voiding context of the realities of immigrant families attempting to make a better life.

Boy, he got quiet

I don't think your comment even addresses what they argue. In the case of the drug addicted homeless person with mental health issues, context doesn't change that different people have different perspectives. For example, I believe that the system is imperfect, and yet it is still cruel and unjust for both the homeless person and innocent members of society who are the victims of violent crime for said homeless person to be allowed to roam free. You might believe that the risk to themselves and others is acceptable to uphold your notion of civil liberties. Neither of us are objectively right or wrong, and that is the issue with the definition of empathy above. It works for both of us. We're both empathetic, even though we want opposite outcomes.

Maybe we don't even need to change the definition of empathy. We just have to accept that it means different things to different people.

It's no game.

I have empathy for the person who wants to improve their family's life and I have empathy for the farmer who needs talented workers from the global south [1] but we will lose our republic if we don't listen to the concerns of citizens who champ at the bit because they can't legally take LSD or have 8 bullets in a clip or need a catalytic converter in their car that has $100-$1000 of precious metal in it -- facing climate change and other challenges will require the state to ask more of people, not less, and conspicuous displays of illegality either at the top or bottom of society undermine legitimacy and the state's capacity to make those asks.

I've personally helped more than one person with schizo-* conditions get off the street and it's definitely hard to do on an emotional level, whether or not it is a "complex" or "complicated" problem. It's a real ray of hope that better drugs are in the pharmacy in in the pipeline

https://www.yalemedicine.org/news/3-things-to-know-about-cob...

For now the embrace of Scientologist [2] Thomas Szasz's anti-psychiatry has real consequences [3]: it drives people out of downtowns, it means people buy from Amazon instead of local businesses, order a private taxi for their burrito instead of going to a restaurant, erodes urban tax bases. State capacity is lost, the economy becomes more monopolized and oligarchical, and people who say they want state capacity and hate oligarchy are really smug about it and dehumanize anyone who disagrees with them [4]

[1] https://www.ithaca.com/news/regional_news/breaking-ice-arres...

[2] https://www.bmj.com/rapid-response/2011/10/30/dr-thomas-szas...

[3] https://ithacavoice.org/2025/08/inside-asteri/

[4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rogerian_argument#Feminist_per...

Understanding another person's perspective is not necessary to determine whether they are correct. Empathy can be important for fostering social harmony, but it's also true that it can obstruct clear thinking and slow progress.

It's not there to short circuit reasoning. It's there to short circuit self interested reasoning, which is both necessary for social cohesion and a vector of attack. The farther you are from a person the more likely it is to be the latter. You must have seen it a thousand times where someone plays the victim to take advantage of another person's empathy, right?

Empathy biases reasoning toward in-group cohesion, overriding dispassionate reasoning that could threaten group unity.

Empathy is not required for logical coherence. It exists to override what one might otherwise rationally conclude. Bias toward anyone’s relative perspective is unnecessary for logically coherent thought.

[edit]

Modeling someone’s cognition or experience is not empathy. Empathy is the emotional process of identifying with someone, not the cognitive act of modeling them.

This reads like something Ayn Rand would say. Take that how you will.

I have a friend who reads ayn and agrees with her drug riddled thinking. But I still try to connect with him through empathic understanding (understanding with a person, not about him) and that lets me keep up the relation and not destroying it by pointing out and gloating about every instance where he is a good selfless person. :)

You’re right, there are nicer ways I could have made my point. Though I can’t help but point out there’s a little bit of irony in throwing a “:)” at the end of your comment when commenting on my tone haha

Oh I don't meant to do that I think. I just thought of that friend due to how hard it is to emphathize with him during discussions about rand/objectivism. It's so non-human to take egoism to that extreme. But I still try and I don't consider him stupid/inhuman for holding those beliefs.

It’s all good! Just funny in context. I didn’t take it as particularly rude or anything.

And yeah it’s good of you to do that. A little empathy/softer language can go a long way

> Empathy biases reasoning toward in-group cohesion, overriding dispassionate reasoning that could threaten group unity.

Because that provides better outcomes for everyone in a prisoner's dilemma style scenario

Which is why it’s valuable in small, generally familial groups, but pathological when scaled to society at large.

What makes you say that? I can think of several examples of those kinds of situations in society at large, like climate change for example.

Asymmetry of reciprocity and adversarial selection mean those who can evoke empathy without reciprocating gain the most; those willing to engage in manipulation and parasitism find a soft target in institutionalized empathy, and any system that prioritizes empathy over truth or logical coherence struggles to remain functional.

Do you have any evidence that the empathy free institutions you would implement would somehow be free of fraud and generate better outcomes?

Reciprocity and beneficial selection operate over longer cycles in a larger society than they do in smaller social units like families. Some altruistic efforts will be wasted, but every system has corruption: families can contain all the love and care you can imagine and still end up with abuse of trust.

The more help you contribute to the world, the more likely others' altruism will be able to flourish as well. Sub-society-scale groups can spontaneously form when people witness acts of altruism. Fighting corruption is a good thing, and one of the ways you can do that is to show there can be a better way, so that some of the people who would otherwise learn cycles of cynicism make better choices.

You are using words like 'rational', 'dispassionate' and 'coherence' when what we are talking about with empathy is adding information with which to make the decision. Not breaking fundamental logic. In essence are you arguing that a person should never consider anyone else at all?

> Empathy is not required for logical coherence.

It is. If you don’t have any you cannot understand other people’s perspective and you can reason logically about them. You have a broken model of the world.

> Bias toward anyone’s relative perspective is unnecessary for logically coherent thought.

Empathy is not bias. It’s understanding, which is definitely required for logically coherent thoughts.

I’d argue that having the delusion that you understand another person’s point of view while not actually understanding it is far more dangerous than simply admitting that you can’t empathize with them.

For example, I can’t empathize with a homeless drug addict. The privileged folks who claim they can, well, I think they’re being dishonest with themselves, and therefore unable to make difficult but ultimately the most rational decisions.

You seem to fail to understand what empathy is. Empathy is not understanding another person’s point of view, but instead being able to analogize their experience into something you can understand, and therefore have more context for what they might be experiencing.

If you can’t do that, it’s less about you being rational and far more about you having a malformed imagination, which might just be you being autistic.

— signed, an autistic

You are right, and another angle is that empathy with a homeless drug addict is less about needing to understand/analogize why the person is a drug addict, which is hard if you only do soft socially acceptable drugs, but rather to remember that the homeless drug addict is not completely defined by that simple definition. That the person in front of you is a complete human that shares a lot of feelings and experiences with you. When you think about that and use those feelings to connect with that human it lets you be kinder towards him/her.

For example, the homeless drug addict might have a dog that he/she loves deeply, maybe oceanplexian have a dog that they love deeply. Suddenly oceanplexian can empathize with the homeless drug addict. Even though they still can't understand why on earth the drug addict doesn't quit drugs to make the dog's life better. (Spoiler alert drugs override rational behaviour, now oceanplexian also understand the homeless drug addict)

Does “connecting with that human” to be “kinder towards him/her”, in the way that you describe, actually improve outcomes?

The weight of evidence over the past 25 years would suggest absolutely not.

Improve outcomes? Like make the drug addict stop being a drug addict? If so, you misunderstand the point of being kind.

If you want to maximize outcomes I have a solution that guarantees 100% that the person stops being a drug addict. The u.s. are currently on their way there and there's absolutely no empathy involved.

At a societal level, the point isn’t to be kind. The point is to be effective.

Yes, so that is not the point of being kind.

I'm having a hard time understanding what you're getting at here. Homeless drug addicts are really easy to empathize with. You just need to take some time to talk and understand their situation. We don't live in a hospitable society. It's pretty easy to fall through the cracks and some people eventually get so low that they completely give into addiction because they have no reason to even try anymore.

Being down and unmotivated is not that hard to empathize with. Maybe you've had experiences with different kinds of people, homeless are not a monolith. The science is pretty clear on addiction though, improving people's conditions leads directly to sobriety. There are other issues with chronically homeless people, but I tend to see that as a symptom of a sick society. A total inability to care for vulnerable messed up sick people just looks like malicious incompetence to me.

> Modeling someone’s cognition or experience is not empathy.

then what is it? I'd argue that is a common definition of empathy, it's how I would define empathy. I'd argue what you're talking about is a narrow aspect of empathy I'd call "emotional mirroring".

Emotional mirroring is more like instinctual training-wheels. It's automatic, provided by biology, and it promotes some simple pro-social behaviors that improve unit cohesion. It provides intuition for developing actual empathy, but if left undeveloped is not useful for very much beyond immediate relationships.

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