This maybe gets into more dicey territory of dragging random private interactions into the internet. But, I wanna doublecheck that there are people who are explicitly asking for empathy, where you expect this particular shape of “lack of interest in improving” to be the dominating thing?
(vs, say, there being some people asking for empathy in a more general universalized sense, and there are some other people you’re treating as cats where ‘lack of interest in improving’ feels like a major explainer for behavior you’re currently not empathizing with, but those are not the same people)
I ask because I feel like the usual subtext for “have some empathy” is, like, not aimed at smart Ivy league people slacking off on a group project. (nor aimed at less extreme variants of that archetype).
Where like the usual archetypical ask includes some manner of “they are experiencing some difficult thing that you are not experiencing.”
(I also think the description of what you’re doing is, like, sort of only half-empathizing? like, you’re booting up their surface-level “what it’s like to be them”, but then layering it on top of your own deeper “how you judge yourself” stuff, instead of using their own, or something?)
But, I wanna doublecheck that there are people who are explicitly asking for empathy, where you expect this particular shape of “lack of interest in improving” to be the dominating thing?
That has sometimes happened, though the other two things are much more common.
In fact the group project example did involve the professor in question saying roughly “have some empathy”, and the professor did try to argue that the other group members were perhaps experiencing some difficult things that I was not experiencing. But none of them were experiencing anything remotely difficult enough to prevent them from e.g. going through a set of ML lectures before the semester started, or planning ahead at all in the years preceding; I still think it was mostly a matter of motivation/values.
Nod. Well as a representative of Team Empathy Sometimes™, I think this was a kinda lame/not-super-appropriate use of “have some empathy!” (unless there are facts about the other classmates I don’t know).
I think it was also a matter of expectations. Should students have expected that, to properly get through a university course, they should have gone through a set of lectures that were not part of any prerequisite course? It should have been a project that a complete beginner to ML could have learned how to do over the semester. I feel as though you were in the position of someone who already knew (some) Spanish taking a Spanish 101 class and being disappointed that the other people who were on a group project with you were beginners—of course they’re beginners, that’s why they’re taking the class in the first place!
It wasn’t a class at all, it was a capstone project.
A relevant point which wasn’t in the post: the project was in senior year, and all of them ended up going into data science after graduation, as did I. I knew years before that data science was hot and in high demand at the time and would likely suit me well; I explicitly optimized for it. I don’t think any of them planned that far ahead at all.
I see. Did the capstone project need to be related to machine learning, or was it just what the group wanted to do? (But yes, most college students will not be optimizing their learning for the specific career they actually do end up in after graduation.)
It’s all about how the students in your group were selected: either these students were never actually trying and getting their perfect math scores and making it into this class required no effort on their end, or they stopped trying as soon as they qualified to sign up for their class. The second case would just be bad luck for you. The first case suggests that they had some factor X that boosted their performance without meeting your definition of trying. If you could capture that X, it could put you in a class with X and actually trying.
It was neither of those. The issue was that they put effort into following the path laid out in front of them, e.g. getting good grades in the required classes. They did not take enough responsibility/agency over their own paths to figure out what skills they would later need, and acquire those skills.
(A relevant point which wasn’t in the post: the project was in senior year, and all of them ended up going into data science after graduation, as did I. I knew years before that data science was hot and in high demand at the time and would likely suit me well; I explicitly optimized for it. I don’t think any of them planned that far ahead at all.)
This maybe gets into more dicey territory of dragging random private interactions into the internet. But, I wanna doublecheck that there are people who are explicitly asking for empathy, where you expect this particular shape of “lack of interest in improving” to be the dominating thing?
(vs, say, there being some people asking for empathy in a more general universalized sense, and there are some other people you’re treating as cats where ‘lack of interest in improving’ feels like a major explainer for behavior you’re currently not empathizing with, but those are not the same people)
I ask because I feel like the usual subtext for “have some empathy” is, like, not aimed at smart Ivy league people slacking off on a group project. (nor aimed at less extreme variants of that archetype).
Where like the usual archetypical ask includes some manner of “they are experiencing some difficult thing that you are not experiencing.”
(I also think the description of what you’re doing is, like, sort of only half-empathizing? like, you’re booting up their surface-level “what it’s like to be them”, but then layering it on top of your own deeper “how you judge yourself” stuff, instead of using their own, or something?)
That has sometimes happened, though the other two things are much more common.
In fact the group project example did involve the professor in question saying roughly “have some empathy”, and the professor did try to argue that the other group members were perhaps experiencing some difficult things that I was not experiencing. But none of them were experiencing anything remotely difficult enough to prevent them from e.g. going through a set of ML lectures before the semester started, or planning ahead at all in the years preceding; I still think it was mostly a matter of motivation/values.
Nod. Well as a representative of Team Empathy Sometimes™, I think this was a kinda lame/not-super-appropriate use of “have some empathy!” (unless there are facts about the other classmates I don’t know).
I think it was also a matter of expectations. Should students have expected that, to properly get through a university course, they should have gone through a set of lectures that were not part of any prerequisite course? It should have been a project that a complete beginner to ML could have learned how to do over the semester. I feel as though you were in the position of someone who already knew (some) Spanish taking a Spanish 101 class and being disappointed that the other people who were on a group project with you were beginners—of course they’re beginners, that’s why they’re taking the class in the first place!
It wasn’t a class at all, it was a capstone project.
A relevant point which wasn’t in the post: the project was in senior year, and all of them ended up going into data science after graduation, as did I. I knew years before that data science was hot and in high demand at the time and would likely suit me well; I explicitly optimized for it. I don’t think any of them planned that far ahead at all.
I see. Did the capstone project need to be related to machine learning, or was it just what the group wanted to do? (But yes, most college students will not be optimizing their learning for the specific career they actually do end up in after graduation.)
It’s all about how the students in your group were selected: either these students were never actually trying and getting their perfect math scores and making it into this class required no effort on their end, or they stopped trying as soon as they qualified to sign up for their class. The second case would just be bad luck for you. The first case suggests that they had some factor X that boosted their performance without meeting your definition of trying. If you could capture that X, it could put you in a class with X and actually trying.
It was neither of those. The issue was that they put effort into following the path laid out in front of them, e.g. getting good grades in the required classes. They did not take enough responsibility/agency over their own paths to figure out what skills they would later need, and acquire those skills.
(A relevant point which wasn’t in the post: the project was in senior year, and all of them ended up going into data science after graduation, as did I. I knew years before that data science was hot and in high demand at the time and would likely suit me well; I explicitly optimized for it. I don’t think any of them planned that far ahead at all.)