My own take on this is that I do think a weak version of this is correct, in that empathy is not equal to kindness or value alignment, and I think a lot of comments on your last post are making a mistake similar to this.
Empathy’s connotations need to be decoupled more.
That said, I’m going to slightly agree with the reactions, and a lot of this comes down to you often overestimating how much they are actually capable of changing the situation, and a milder issue is that you overestimate growth mindset.
The obvious example of this is IQ and human traits in general are pretty highly influenced by genetics, which we don’t control, and to put it impolitely lots of success or failure is out of your control once we realize how important IQ is.
We can realistically only select, not train people, unless we get lucky with the motivations in their brain working out correctly.
People have some control over their lives, and that control matters, but we have a bad habit of assuming that we control more than we do.
Thane Ruthenis and Kabir Kumar’s comments here are relevant:
My own take on this is that I do think a weak version of this is correct, in that empathy is not equal to kindness or value alignment, and I think a lot of comments on your last post are making a mistake similar to this.
Empathy’s connotations need to be decoupled more.
That said, I’m going to slightly agree with the reactions, and a lot of this comes down to you often overestimating how much they are actually capable of changing the situation, and a milder issue is that you overestimate growth mindset.
The obvious example of this is IQ and human traits in general are pretty highly influenced by genetics, which we don’t control, and to put it impolitely lots of success or failure is out of your control once we realize how important IQ is.
We can realistically only select, not train people, unless we get lucky with the motivations in their brain working out correctly.
People have some control over their lives, and that control matters, but we have a bad habit of assuming that we control more than we do.
Thane Ruthenis and Kabir Kumar’s comments here are relevant:
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/xPrL2xF9iYWpPmu6B/?commentId=7YscAPfjLYKdMP9qh
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/KJh2xckmCNAggisuq/?commentId=YLE4ajQfpqTZMsqZm