There are at least 4 levels to the skill of empathy:
1. Imagine yourself in the other person’s shoes 2. Imagine yourself in the other person’s shoes and having their beliefs 3. Imagine yourself in the other person’s shoes and having their beliefs and values 4. Imagine yourself in the other person’s shoes and having their beliefs, values, thought process and intelligence
For the nail video, you are deploying the first level of empathy. If you believed that there is a nail in your head that causes all your problems, you would want to remove it and feel disgusted at yourself if you didn’t. However, the woman does not see things that way! The whole video is a metaphor for how the man perceives the situation. From the woman’s perspective the conversation could be something like: - Man, job search is so hard! Just yesterday... - Well, have you tried creating a Linkedin account? Woman: of course I have a Linkedin account, I wasn’t born yesterday… I just wanted to rant about this interviewer who was rude to me. I don’t need my husband to fix the problem of some people being rude, I just wanted support. Instead I learned that he sees me as an idiot. Grand.
Failing to account for a different intelligence level is, I believe, a mistake that highly intelligent people make a lot. If the median student at your college has a perfect SAT score, that tells me that SAT is not very hard, and two people with perfect SAT scores can have a big difference in intelligence.
During the first part of my MATS stream, our supervisor assigned an obligatory reading list of math textbooks that, when you divided the total page count by the number of days, amounted to 100 pages of math textbook per day. Also, optionally, you could think ahead about the research direction to choose in the stream and ask questions about that. The other people in the stream were keeping up with both. I was at first confused how, but then I learned two out of four people in our stream were IMO winners. Of course they could study 100 pages of math textbook per day and have time left over. Or maybe they already knew half of it—I’d studied many of the topics myself in college, but it was years ago and I needed a revision. Also, my thought process said the obligatory task must be completed before the optional one, but that perhaps was a mistake. So, I studied 100 pages of math textbook per day as best I could, but didn’t have time left over for anything else. At the end of the stream the supervisor approached me to say I seemed lazy and disengaged and that the results of my week of research were probably completed in the last two days (they were not).
I wasn’t lazy, I worked as hard as I possibly could. I just don’t have the brainpower of IMO winners. I myself am a national olympiad winner and I was an IMO candidate. For years on end I dedicated virtually every free moment of my time to preparing for IMO, but my teachers were disappointed and one approached me in 11th grade to lecture me about the harm of computer games. I hadn’t played computer games since 9th grade.
So, if you don’t account for people having different levels of intelligence, you may be too quick to assume that other people are not putting in effort. Did the other students in your project really not study any ML before the start of the semester, or maybe they did and it didn’t benefit them as much as it would you? What did they do before the semester then, just relax all day? Learn other things they’d need in college, like math or general programming skills? Work a job to support their family? I’m not trying to defend these particular students—I haven’t met them, maybe you are 100% right and they were just lazy—just saying these alternative explanations to laziness are generally worth considering. You planned to study machine learning years in advance, other people could’ve planned for different careers, and then their plans failed, and doing ML is their plan C which they made up on the fly.
Of course, even the highest levels of empathy will not necessarily prevent you from feeling disappointed or disgusted by people. I believe some thought processes are inherently immoral and disgusting, so you could accurately model them and still feel disgust. Motivated reasoning, sadism, narcissism, bigotry—there are many things you could simulate in your head and still remain unsympathetic towards.
Still… you appear to be operating at the lowest level of the empathy skill, and can probably do better and feel more sympathetic to people as a result.
Woman: of course I have a Linkedin account, I wasn’t born yesterday… I just wanted to rant about this interviewer who was rude to me. I don’t need my husband to fix the problem of some people being rude, I just wanted support. Instead I learned that he sees me as an idiot. Grand.
This response, however, betrays the fact that the woman in your scenario doesn’t understand even slightly what the man is asking or why.
If I ask someone—let us call this person “Alice”—who has a problem “did you try [solution X] to solve the problem”, of course that is not because I am assuming that Alice didn’t try solution X.
Rather, the point is this: Alice tells me that she has a problem that, in my understand, can be solved by solution X (although it might also not be solved by solution X). Therefore, it is either the case that Alice didn’t try X, or that Alice tried X but her problem persisted.
If the former is true, then the next question is “why not”. If the answer is “I didn’t think of that” / “I didn’t know that X existed” / etc., well, now Alice has a thing to try. If the answer is “I don’t know how to do X” / “X is hard” / etc., then perhaps I can help Alice with X, or find someone else who can help.
If the latter is true (Alice tried X but her problem persisted), then the next question is “ok, what exactly happened with you tried X”—how exactly did the attempt fail, etc. Based on the answer to that, further questions can be asked, other solutions tried, etc.
This is how you solve problems. When the support tech (the real support tech, not the trained monkey “level 1 support” person) asks “did you restart your computer”, it’s not because he thinks that you’re an idiot[1]—it’s because he needs to know what you’ve already tried in order to help you solve your problem. The answer could be “yes I tried restarting but the problem persisted”, or the answer could be “no I did not try restarting, because the ‘restart’ button is not working”, or who knows what else.
The inference from “person trying to help me asks whether I’ve tried the obvious solution” to “person trying to help me thinks that I am an idiot” is completely unwarranted.
The man interrupts her almost immediately, moving straight to problem-solving mode before she can share her experience. Even for tech support, the tech should allow the customer to describe their issue before asking them to reboot. He’s hijacking the conversation and relegating his wife to tier 1 tech support rather than starting from a reasonable model of her and going from there. It makes sense for tech support to start from step 0. This is rarely wise in an interpersonal context unless normal levels of mutual understanding are absent.
I don’t think that’s the essential element. (It definitely doesn’t happen in the “nail in head” video, please note.) Suppose the man didn’t interrupt her almost immediately (or at all); the rest of the conversation could proceed in the same way (as satirized in the video) and the woman could draw the same wrong conclusion (and people often do, in my experience).
I was responding to the hypothetical seed posed, in which it is a highly salient detail. Were the hypothetical different, I would indeed assess it differently.
There are at least 4 levels to the skill of empathy:
1. Imagine yourself in the other person’s shoes
2. Imagine yourself in the other person’s shoes and having their beliefs
3. Imagine yourself in the other person’s shoes and having their beliefs and values
4. Imagine yourself in the other person’s shoes and having their beliefs, values, thought process and intelligence
For the nail video, you are deploying the first level of empathy. If you believed that there is a nail in your head that causes all your problems, you would want to remove it and feel disgusted at yourself if you didn’t. However, the woman does not see things that way! The whole video is a metaphor for how the man perceives the situation. From the woman’s perspective the conversation could be something like:
- Man, job search is so hard! Just yesterday...
- Well, have you tried creating a Linkedin account?
Woman: of course I have a Linkedin account, I wasn’t born yesterday… I just wanted to rant about this interviewer who was rude to me. I don’t need my husband to fix the problem of some people being rude, I just wanted support. Instead I learned that he sees me as an idiot. Grand.
Failing to account for a different intelligence level is, I believe, a mistake that highly intelligent people make a lot. If the median student at your college has a perfect SAT score, that tells me that SAT is not very hard, and two people with perfect SAT scores can have a big difference in intelligence.
During the first part of my MATS stream, our supervisor assigned an obligatory reading list of math textbooks that, when you divided the total page count by the number of days, amounted to 100 pages of math textbook per day. Also, optionally, you could think ahead about the research direction to choose in the stream and ask questions about that. The other people in the stream were keeping up with both. I was at first confused how, but then I learned two out of four people in our stream were IMO winners. Of course they could study 100 pages of math textbook per day and have time left over. Or maybe they already knew half of it—I’d studied many of the topics myself in college, but it was years ago and I needed a revision. Also, my thought process said the obligatory task must be completed before the optional one, but that perhaps was a mistake. So, I studied 100 pages of math textbook per day as best I could, but didn’t have time left over for anything else. At the end of the stream the supervisor approached me to say I seemed lazy and disengaged and that the results of my week of research were probably completed in the last two days (they were not).
I wasn’t lazy, I worked as hard as I possibly could. I just don’t have the brainpower of IMO winners. I myself am a national olympiad winner and I was an IMO candidate. For years on end I dedicated virtually every free moment of my time to preparing for IMO, but my teachers were disappointed and one approached me in 11th grade to lecture me about the harm of computer games. I hadn’t played computer games since 9th grade.
So, if you don’t account for people having different levels of intelligence, you may be too quick to assume that other people are not putting in effort. Did the other students in your project really not study any ML before the start of the semester, or maybe they did and it didn’t benefit them as much as it would you? What did they do before the semester then, just relax all day? Learn other things they’d need in college, like math or general programming skills? Work a job to support their family? I’m not trying to defend these particular students—I haven’t met them, maybe you are 100% right and they were just lazy—just saying these alternative explanations to laziness are generally worth considering. You planned to study machine learning years in advance, other people could’ve planned for different careers, and then their plans failed, and doing ML is their plan C which they made up on the fly.
Of course, even the highest levels of empathy will not necessarily prevent you from feeling disappointed or disgusted by people. I believe some thought processes are inherently immoral and disgusting, so you could accurately model them and still feel disgust. Motivated reasoning, sadism, narcissism, bigotry—there are many things you could simulate in your head and still remain unsympathetic towards.
Still… you appear to be operating at the lowest level of the empathy skill, and can probably do better and feel more sympathetic to people as a result.
This response, however, betrays the fact that the woman in your scenario doesn’t understand even slightly what the man is asking or why.
If I ask someone—let us call this person “Alice”—who has a problem “did you try [solution X] to solve the problem”, of course that is not because I am assuming that Alice didn’t try solution X.
Rather, the point is this: Alice tells me that she has a problem that, in my understand, can be solved by solution X (although it might also not be solved by solution X). Therefore, it is either the case that Alice didn’t try X, or that Alice tried X but her problem persisted.
If the former is true, then the next question is “why not”. If the answer is “I didn’t think of that” / “I didn’t know that X existed” / etc., well, now Alice has a thing to try. If the answer is “I don’t know how to do X” / “X is hard” / etc., then perhaps I can help Alice with X, or find someone else who can help.
If the latter is true (Alice tried X but her problem persisted), then the next question is “ok, what exactly happened with you tried X”—how exactly did the attempt fail, etc. Based on the answer to that, further questions can be asked, other solutions tried, etc.
This is how you solve problems. When the support tech (the real support tech, not the
trained monkey“level 1 support” person) asks “did you restart your computer”, it’s not because he thinks that you’re an idiot[1]—it’s because he needs to know what you’ve already tried in order to help you solve your problem. The answer could be “yes I tried restarting but the problem persisted”, or the answer could be “no I did not try restarting, because the ‘restart’ button is not working”, or who knows what else.The inference from “person trying to help me asks whether I’ve tried the obvious solution” to “person trying to help me thinks that I am an idiot” is completely unwarranted.
Although many people are in fact idiots, and have in fact not tried the obvious thing.
The man interrupts her almost immediately, moving straight to problem-solving mode before she can share her experience. Even for tech support, the tech should allow the customer to describe their issue before asking them to reboot. He’s hijacking the conversation and relegating his wife to tier 1 tech support rather than starting from a reasonable model of her and going from there. It makes sense for tech support to start from step 0. This is rarely wise in an interpersonal context unless normal levels of mutual understanding are absent.
I don’t think that’s the essential element. (It definitely doesn’t happen in the “nail in head” video, please note.) Suppose the man didn’t interrupt her almost immediately (or at all); the rest of the conversation could proceed in the same way (as satirized in the video) and the woman could draw the same wrong conclusion (and people often do, in my experience).
I was responding to the hypothetical seed posed, in which it is a highly salient detail. Were the hypothetical different, I would indeed assess it differently.