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Understanding Through Empathy | Ian Welsh
Empathy isn’t a fuzzy virtue. It isn’t even a virtue at all, it is an ability. It can be used for good, or for evil. Once you understand someone you can use that understanding to help them, to heal them, to hurt them or to destroy them. Reject empathy and you reject understanding your fellow humans as well as you otherwise could. In war, that can lead to defeat; in justice that can lead to injustice; and in relationships that kills love.
Empathic Intelligence: To put yourself in their shoes, unlace yours | Psychology Today Blogs
PLoS ONE: Empathy Is Moderated by Genetic Background in Mice
Empathy, as originally defined, refers to an emotional experience that is shared among individuals. When discomfort or alarm is detected in another, a variety of behavioral responses can follow, including greater levels of nurturing, consolation or increased vigilance towards a threat. Moreover, changes in systemic physiology often accompany the recognition of distressed states in others. Employing a mouse model of cue-conditioned fear, we asked whether exposure to conspecific distress influences how a mouse subsequently responds to environmental cues that predict this distress... Our paradigm thus has construct and face validity with contemporary views of empathy, and provides unequivocal evidence for a genetic contribution to the expression of empathic behavior.
Social Networking and the Brain: Continuous Partial Empathy? | Open The Future | Fast Company
For more than a decade, tech pundits and business consultants have gone on about the "attention economy," arguing that attention has economic value due to its limited availability. It strikes me that this may miss the greater point. From a social perspective, what's limited isn't attention, but consideration. Not just hearing, but listening. Not just seeing a message, but understanding its meaning.
Wall Street's Economic Crimes Against Humanity - BusinessWeek
Shoshana Zuboff outlines why we need a philosophy of business that incorporates others, not just the self.
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The economic crisis is not the Holocaust but, I would argue, it derives from a business model that routinely produced a similar kind of remoteness and thoughtlessness, compounded by a widespread abrogation of individual moral judgment. As we learn more about the behavior within our financial institutions, we see that just about everyone accepted a reckless system that rewards transactions but rejects responsibility for the consequences of those transactions. Bankers, brokers, and financial specialists were all willing participants in a self-centered business model that celebrates what's good for organization insiders while dehumanizing and distancing everyone else—the outsiders.
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As in war, that emotional distance made it easier to operate in one's own narrow interests, without the usual feelings of empathy that alert us to the pain of others and define us as human. The narcissistic business model provided the modern day "circumstances" that enabled individuals to ignore the poisonous consequences of their choices. This paved the way for a full-scale administrative economic massacre.
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Lance Mannion: Reading off my Kindle at the County Fair with Abraham Lincoln
The way the world works these days requires that millions of people remove themselves from it for hours and hours at a time, spending their days in what are essentially halls of mirrors, wrapped up in their own thoughts, focused on their own needs and wants and desires, when they aren't wrapped up in the abstractions called corporations they work for. It's no wonder they grow a little heartless. It's no wonder they go a little mad.
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Seeing ourselves as others see us means seeing ourselves as selves, as distinct from them, and it does free us from many a blunder and foolish notion and cause us to leave off airs in dress and action by reminding us that what look like blunders and foolish notions in others aren't at all foolish to them and vice versa.
What we need is to get out and go to the fair.
Speaking of Lincoln.
Abraham Lincoln loved books and reading. Obviously. I think he'd have enjoyed having a Kindle, growing up out there on the frontier where there weren't libraries and bookstores. There are still towns and places, even in the United States, where Kindles would be a godsend to curious and intellectually minded children...adults, too. But you know what else Lincoln loved?
Fairs.
Overcoming Bias: Beware Detached Detail
Robin Hanson continues his speculation on near/far thoughts. Our effort to appear to have good near thoughts might lead to detatched details that look good but have low impact on near decisions and low resource costs.
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If our far thoughts are more distorted to present good images, then the next step down the rabbit hole is this: to judge how we will typically act, others should prefer to see our near thoughts, at least if they can distinguish near versus far thoughts. After all, near thoughts drive most day to day actions. And we should each look more to our own near thoughts to judge our own sincerity.
Once we evolved to weigh near others' thoughts more heavily, the next step would be to look for cheap ways to have good-looking near-thoughts, without paying the full price of distorting important actions. That is, our mind designer would look for ways to show "detached" near thoughts, consistent with good-image far-thoughts, but not actually impacting much on important near decisions.
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A movie can let you feel not only that people in distant times and places should fight Nazis or free slaves, but that if you were actually in such situations with near systems fully engaged, you would actually do such things. But of course since the movie's scenario has little overlap with your real life, there is little risk that near habits acquired would interfere with your usual near actions. You rarely watch movies about, say, helping poor neighbors or illegal immigrants, since those stories are less detached from your ordinary life. There is a reason they call it "escapism," after all.
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Overcoming Bias: A Tale Of Two Tradeoffs
Robin Hanson posits two mental tradeoffs among social animals and speculates on their interactions. 1) making good decisions and presenting good images to others 2) greater resources required for more detailed descriptions/thoughts. Leads to detail thinking for 'near' objects/events/people etc., and sparse thinking for 'far'.
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The first tradeoff is that social minds must both make good decisions, and present good images to others. Our thoughts influence both our actions and what others think of us. It would be expensive to maintain two separate minds for these two purposes, and even then we would have to maintain enough consistency to convince outsiders a good-image mind was in control. It is cheaper and simpler to just have one integrated mind whose thoughts are a compromise between these two ends.
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The second key tradeoff is that minds must often think about the same sorts of things using different amounts of detail. Detailed representations tend to give more insight, but require more mental resources. In contrast, sparse representations require fewer resources, and make it easier to abstractly compare things to each other. For example, when reasoning about a room a photo takes more work to study but allows more attention to detail; a word description contains less info but can be processed more quickly, and allows more comparisons to similar rooms.
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Half an Hour: The Monkeysphere Ideology
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Well - it's this. Great societies, they endure. Their fabric withstands the blows of fate and fortune and there is enough in their people to carry on after. To carry on in an altered, reformed, fundamentally different state, perhaps, but to carry on.
But what gives you that capacity is not typically your technology or your wealth or your dominions - all of which are characteristically wiped out in a crash. No it is your character, your capacity not simply to carry on, but to have a reason to carry on, to rebuild what you have lost. -
the Cracked article, which suggests that each of us has a limit of about 150 people we can know and understand and relate to. The theory is based on Dunbar's number, and Cracked calls it - with more than a little alacrity - the 'monkeysphere'. The article, which was written in 2005, is making the rounds again.
In our complex society, writes Cracked, "Most of us do not have room in our Monkeysphere for our friendly neighborhood sanitation worker. So, we don't think of him as a person. We think of him as The Thing That Makes The Trash Go Away." - 6 more annotations...
The Psychology of Transcending the Here and Now -- Liberman and Trope 322 (5905): 1201 -- Science
People directly experience only themselves here and now but often consider, evaluate, and plan situations that are removed in time or space, that pertain to others' experiences, and that are hypothetical rather than real. People thus transcend the present and mentally traverse temporal distance, spatial distance, social distance, and hypotheticality. We argue that this is made possible by the human capacity for abstract processing of information. We review research showing that there is considerable similarity in the way people mentally traverse different distances, that the process of abstraction underlies traversing different distances, and that this process guides the way people predict, evaluate, and plan near and distant situations.
Does your dog feel your pain? | The Greater Good Blog
Other animals capable of such “facial mimicry” — imitating facial expressions — include orangutans and chimps. Researchers believe that facial mimicry is a rudimentary form of empathy. Studies have found that humans who are more susceptible to contagious
Patton Oswalt
I completely ignored the deeper lesson which is do not judge, and get outside yourself, and realize that everyone and everything has its own story, and something to teach you, and that they’re also trying – consciously or unconsciously – to learn and grow
Patton Oswalt
I completely ignored the deeper lesson which is do not judge, and get outside yourself, and realize that everyone and everything has its own story, and something to teach you, and that they’re also trying – consciously or unconsciously – to learn and grow from you and everything else around them. And they’re trying with the same passion and hunger and confusion that I was feeling – no matter where they were in their lives, no matter how old or how young.
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