This simply isn’t empathy. Empathy is seeing through someone’s eyes, not imagining yourself in their shoes. It’s imagining their emotions and beliefs, not their situation.
To John in particular:
I’m not going to suggest how to feel empathy because it’s clear you don’t want to. That is fine. If your central goal is strength, nobody would expect you to be an empathetic or kind person. We also wouldn’t expect you to particularly be a happy person, but satisfaction with your own efforts can generate happiness.
I won’t discourage you because in the situation we’re in, we desperately need strong/capable people working on alignment. But quit screwing around with trying to find other sources of happiness from a competence mindset, and get back to the task you forged yourself for. That is a perfectly good source of self worth and meaning. Your despair on alignment simply isn’t warrented. I’ve read everything you’ve written in the last 3 years, carefully. You have not evaluated all routes adequately and neither has anyone else, because it’s super complicated. The game is yet afoot. Go find new approaches and get new skills if you need to.
I assume that’s how strong people want to be related to.
A life of compassionate mediocrity isn’t a different kind of strength, it’s an attempt at happiness. But there are other routes to happiness, too. I’m only going to suggest one: improve our odds of survival.
Hrm actually I think you’re right. They are anticorrelated, so it may be right to say we wouldn’t expect it, but I think you can be empathetic/kind and hypercompetent. I think there’s some causal factor there where empathy erodes strength, but it’s probably not strong. Perhaps it’s just losing some competence time on task to different goals and skills.
This simply isn’t empathy. Empathy is seeing through someone’s eyes, not imagining yourself in their shoes. It’s imagining their emotions and beliefs, not their situation.
To John in particular:
I’m not going to suggest how to feel empathy because it’s clear you don’t want to. That is fine. If your central goal is strength, nobody would expect you to be an empathetic or kind person. We also wouldn’t expect you to particularly be a happy person, but satisfaction with your own efforts can generate happiness.
I won’t discourage you because in the situation we’re in, we desperately need strong/capable people working on alignment. But quit screwing around with trying to find other sources of happiness from a competence mindset, and get back to the task you forged yourself for. That is a perfectly good source of self worth and meaning. Your despair on alignment simply isn’t warrented. I’ve read everything you’ve written in the last 3 years, carefully. You have not evaluated all routes adequately and neither has anyone else, because it’s super complicated. The game is yet afoot. Go find new approaches and get new skills if you need to.
I assume that’s how strong people want to be related to.
A life of compassionate mediocrity isn’t a different kind of strength, it’s an attempt at happiness. But there are other routes to happiness, too. I’m only going to suggest one: improve our odds of survival.
This seems like a pretty damning thing to say about empathy and kindness. I’m not even sure that I’d go this far!
Hrm actually I think you’re right. They are anticorrelated, so it may be right to say we wouldn’t expect it, but I think you can be empathetic/kind and hypercompetent. I think there’s some causal factor there where empathy erodes strength, but it’s probably not strong. Perhaps it’s just losing some competence time on task to different goals and skills.