My Empathy Is Rarely Kind
There’s a narrative I hear a lot: if I empathize more, put myself in other peoples’ shoes, try to feel what they’re feeling, see things from their perspective, etc, then I’ll feel kinder toward them. I’ll feel more sympathetic, be gentler, more compassionate or generous.
And man, that sure is not my experience with empathy.
I usually relate to other people via something like suspension of disbelief. Like, they’re a human, same as me, they presumably have thoughts and feelings and the like, but I compartmentalize that fact. I think of them kind of like cute cats. Because if I stop compartmentalizing, if I start to put myself in their shoes and imagine what they’re facing… then I feel not just their ineptitude, but the apparent lack of desire to ever move beyond that ineptitude. What I feel toward them is usually not sympathy or generosity, but either disgust or disappointment (or both).
Like… remember the classic It’s Not About The Nail? You should watch the video, it’s two minutes and chef’s-kiss-level excellent. (Spoilers past here!) It opens with a woman talking about how she feels a relentless pressure in her head, she’s afraid it’s never going to stop, etc. Then the camera changes angle… and we see that there’s a nail stuck in her forehead. The guy next to her is like “Yeah… uh… y’know, there’s a nail in your head, I bet if we just got that sucker out of there…” to which the woman replies “It’s not about the nail! Stop trying to fix things when what I need is for you to just listen!”.
When I try to empathize with that woman, what I feel toward her is disgust. If I were in her shoes, I would immediately jump to getting rid of the damn nail, it wouldn’t even occur to me to not fix it. Sure, there have been times (though admittedly rare) when I want someone else to be sympathetic and supportive, but when I am not even trying to fix something myself I certainly do not expect sympathy from others. I can lean into the suspension of disbelief; if I were next to her, I could role-play as a supportive friend or partner. But put myself in her shoes? If I were in her shoes, behaving the way she behaves, I would feel disgust toward myself. She is not just inept in handling her problems, she lacks even the desire to fix that ineptitude, even when her problems are clearly imposing costs on both herself and those around her.
Another example: back in college, I had a long group project. And I liked my teammates, they were fun to hang out with while working on the project. Sure, I was the one doing most of the heavy lifting—not just the core technical parts, but also the writing, because both my relevant technical skills and my writing skills were in a whole different league from the rest of the team. But that was fine, I didn’t really think of them as people-who-were-supposed-to-be-helpful. As long as that suspension of disbelief was in place, no problem; it was an interesting project and I was happy to do it.
(I don’t think any of the people on that team are likely to see this, but if any of them do: this is the place to stop reading. Seriously, it will not do you net good to keep going.)
Then a conversation between myself and the professor overseeing the project dug a little too deep, and my disbelief temporarily ceased to be suspended. I had to look at the ineptitude of my teammates. What made it hurt wasn’t that they were stupid; this was a college where the median student got a perfect score on their math SATs, they were plenty smart. They just… hadn’t put in the effort. It was a machine learning project, and I was the only one on the team who’d studied any ML (years earlier; I knew well in advance that it would be a necessary skillset eventually, and already had experience with multiple other ML projects). Had I been in their shoes, I’d have at least gone through a set of ML lectures online before the semester started.
The disappointment came from seeing what they could have been, and seeing that they didn’t even try for it. They’d all come to one of the best colleges in the world, and then just followed the path of least resistance with minimal foresight for four years.
… then the conversation wrapped up, the suspension of disbelief went back into place, and I went back to enjoying their company.
I think a core factor here is something like ambition or growth mindset. When I have shortcomings, I view them as shortcomings to be fixed or at least mitigated, not as part of my identity or as a subject for sympathy. On the positive side, I have goals and am constantly growing to better achieve them. Tsuyoku naritai. I see people who lack that attitude, who don’t even really want to grow stronger, and when empathy causes the suspension of disbelief to drop… that’s when I feel disgust or disappointment in my so-called fellow humans. Because if I were in their shoes, I would feel disgust or disappointment in myself.
And then I put the suspension of disbelief back, and enjoy the cats’ company.
If you’re one of those people who wish people would empathize more, and believe this would lead to more kindness and compassion and gentleness and generosity… well, the main takeaway is for you. Consider that kindness and gentleness are not necessarily what everyone else feels, when they empathize.
And for those who share an experience more like mine… perhaps having pointed directly at the issue, you can now see a little better where others are coming from, when they ask for empathy. They don’t understand that empathy does not induce the things they imagine, for everyone. But empathy probably does induce kindness and gentleness and the like for them.
Lastly, for whatever smartass is about to suggest that my disgust/disappointment reaction is itself a problem to be fixed: only if it can happen in a way that makes me stronger, rather than weaker. I have no intention of lowering my standards for myself, unless that is somehow going to make me achieve more rather than less. Don’t go bullshitting me about how a kind and compassionate life of mediocrity is a “different kind of strength” or some such cope. But subject to that constraint, I would certainly like better ways of relating to people.
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This post makes me feel like you have a nail in your head. If you want to relate to other people you may have to accept that it’s possible to value different things.
I think if you are an unusual person, then “imagining how you would feel if you were physically in their position” isn’t really that useful a form of empathizing, and you have to take into account a lot of the real psychology of other people in order for it to be an informative exercise. I don’t know whether that will in itself produce kindness or gentleness but it’s probably a precondition.
It’s nice to believe that everyone is just doing the best they can in response to the problems and situations they’ve faced, but it isn’t true. To my eyes, the woman in the video is not portrayed as someone with sad-yet-understandable psychological blockers, but simply as an idiot; and John’s reaction to empathizing with her there (“If I were in her shoes, behaving the way she behaves, I would feel disgust toward myself”) is appropriate.
I agree within the context of the video, but the video feels like it straw-persons the type of person the woman in the video represents (or rather, I’m sure there are people who err as clearly and foolishly as the woman in the video, but the instances I remember observing of people wanting advice not problem solving all seemed vastly more reasonable and sympathetic) so I don’t think it’s a good example for John to have used. The nail problem is actually visible and clearly a problem and clearly a plausibly-solvable problem.
Huh, I think most people have problems like this, though they’re at times more self-aware about it than the nail video. Many people, including myself, have flaws that would require an investment of time/effort but if done- even one-time investments for some- would give good improvements to their life whether through better mental health or through being closer to their ideal self. Classic examples being cleaning your room, fixing a part of a house that’s breaking down everyone keeps putting off, exercising more, reading that math paper now instead of a month from now, asking someone out, and so on.
The nail video is hyperbolic, but I don’t see it as excessively so, and I do think it illustrates the core issue of how people relate to their own minds while not necessarily being willing/able to go actually fix it or potentially recognize it.
The two examples John used in the post are the nail video and John’s teammates who did ~none of the work.
If people want to defend the position that empathy should rarely make you judge people more harshly for their behavior, they should give other examples, rather than imply that John is getting those two wrong (as those two are consistent with his position).
I think generalizing from fictional evidence puts the conversation off to a bad start because John uses a misleading intuition pump for how empathy would play out in more realistic situations
It’s fair to not want to defend fictional examples as non-representative, though I think it was helpful for illustration. (And he did give the other example of the team project at the elite university where John did most of the heavy lifting.)
To be clear, they did substantially more than zero of the work.
It is likely that they felt they did more useful work than John felt they did.
the question is not what they FELT, but what they actually did. people frequently feel they did more then their fair share, and sometimes people check that empirically, and it’s turn out that some people are right and others are wrong.
some people do more then their share and notice it, while other do less, and in self-servicing way believe they did most of the work.
asking what people feel, instead of what actually happened, is part of the algorithm that create this problem and encourage that sort of self-lies.
Sure. My point was that maybe John felt like he did more than he really did.
and yet again, you say “felt”. what I’m trying to do is to point at that.
Say more words?
healthy environment, the operate on the first level of simulacra, talk and think about what people did, actually, in the world, not about what people feel. feelings belong to the third level.
saying John was wrong, and actually didn’t did disproportional amount on the work invite factual discussion. talking about who feel what invite… i dunno, some weird l3 shenanigans, in which what someone feel is relevant argument, EVEN IF THEY ARE WRONG.
in some black-box, looking on algorithmic intent sense, the reason to talk about what they feel they dud, and not what they did, is to obscure the difference, to give the feelings power, place in the discussion as legitimate argument, even when the feeling is wrong, and if it counts, it should count against the person.
the sentence “It is likely that they felt they did more useful work than John felt they did.” is the sort of sentence that that jump to me as dangerous in that way, as talking about the feelings, on them and John, instead of what actually happened.
this remind me anecdote i read in the comments in certain blog. , both romantic partners believe that they do most of the housework, but then they decide to check, and it turned out one of them right and one of them wrong, one person was doing 75% of the work, and the other 25%. both of them was feeling they did most of the work. the one who did 25% of the work felt they did most of the work. so what?
I am skeptical of this measurement. Your wording suggests that they were able to determine this with 2 digits of precision. I doubt that. Maybe you meant “one person was doing 3⁄4 and the other 1/4”, which sounds much more plausible and implies a much rougher, vaguer measurement.
As far as I remember (I did not re-read the OP), John provides no evidence that he did all or most of the work. We have only his word for it.
The problem of calculating workload is inherently highly nebulous and partially subjective, because a task can be more painful and/or time-consuming for one person than for another. In general it is not possible to measure workload precisely, not even in principle.
I wasn’t suggesting this at all. i consider 1⁄4 equivalent to 75% (and dislike to use the / character because it move when I change languages, and this is annoying). i find this claim weird—i use percentage all the time and people generally understand that 75% means quarter.
this is the sort of discussion that we should have! he did provide some evidence, though little.
i once had classwork that should done in pair, that i get 90 ad grade and my teammate get 60 (i think? some numerical equivalent of F). and i was reigned with him freeloading, i just dislike all this school teamwork things. but the teacher noticed that i’m the only one who did work. so it’s my experience it’s not hard to notice who do what part of the work.
true, but irrelevant. when someone saying they did all or almost all precision is irrelevant. you don’t get the difference between 90% and 50% by being imprecise.
Can you please point out the relevant part?
somewhere in the comments, about how he talked about it with the professor. it’s not STRONG evidence, if you say you are not convinced I will not say it unreasonable. the next step would have been to decide what are the right kind of evidence, and then ask for them.
Sorry, I am not going to read through the comments to look for it.
Yeah, legit, i avoided do it second time myself :-)
(I’ve downvoted this for a rather unusual reason: it starts a big thread under the top most comment, and I wish it wasn’t in the way of seeing the next-most-upvoted comment.
This is pretty weird, cos I think this is a fine comment in isolation. I’m trying out downvoting more (that is, being a more active “micro-moderator”) and I’m sure I’ll do it wrong in lots of situations).
I (genuinely) appreciate the downvotes, disagrees and critical comments. I want to expand a bit on my thinking, so people can give me pushback that will convince me more.
In threaded commenting systems like ours, replying to popular comments makes your comment much more visible than it would be as a top-level comment. This feature is common enough, that on Reddit (another threaded commenting system) people talk about “hijacking” a top comment to broadcast something they’re interested in.
I think it’s pretty plausible that people should have a higher bar for commenting on highly upvoted comments (especially ones without much discussion underneath them). I’m definitely not sure though; if I imagine people doing that, I worry about the responses that get lost.
But the responses do come with a cost. Take a look at www.lesswrong.com/moderation: I don’t think it would be better if more people had to read the rejected content (enough people for each piece of content that it got sufficiently downvoted). So I think it does seem worth, in some circumstances, risking a bit of silence for a better signal:noise ratio.
On a slightly more meta level: lately I’ve been thinking about Well-Kept Gardens Die By Pacifism and its exhortations to downvote more. As Ben Pace once said: sometimes, when I notice I’m undershooting a goal, I like to make sure I overshoot it for a bit, and then dial back. So I am trying out more votes of “I wish this comment hadn’t happened to me at this point”, regardless of whether it was a good comment in some contextless way.
I’d also been reading this thread on why people don’t explain their downvotes, and that tipped me even further in the direction of explaining my downvote, as I’d get a bit more data on what it was like (of course, every good downvote is alike, and every bad downvote is bad in its own way, so I’m sure I’m only getting a very particular sample).
I appreciate your explanation of your explanation of your downvote.
I expect these kinds of problems to be solved by the LW karma system and the “off-topic?” reacts. I believe the LW karma system is robust, well-implemented, and generally used very properly by users. I also believe it typically functions very well in terms of elevating desirable comments and punishing/downgrading lower-value ones. It’s not perfect, but it’s not only better than literally every other comment ranking system I have come across, but also perfectly adequate (IMO) to handle potential hijacking situations.
I am struck by the extent to which you, as a mod running this site and implementing this very system, don’t seem to agree with me on this. If it was just this one comment, I wouldn’t say much. But I recall @habryka also said at some point during the unfortunate kerfuffle a month and a half ago:
And also:
Is this something the entire LW mod team agrees with, broadly? It seems entirely incompatible with my own experience on this site.
I think you’re asking if the whole mod team agrees with “the LW karma system is NOT robust, well-implemented and generally used very properly by users”.
I think in general the LW team thinks that the karma system is generally used properly by users (not sure about “very properly”, for example I think we’re probably not skilled enough, as a userbase, at using it. Habryka might even disagree with “properly”, because he so strongly wants more. downvotes).
I don’t know what opinions people have about the implementation. I think, for example, most people on the team think that agreement voting is quite good, that having weak/strong votes is good, and that our vote scaling is good.
For “robust”, I think most people think it fails sometimes on the actual website, and not just in possible corner cases.
(We’re really getting into the weeds about which color to paint the bike-shed here[1], but nonetheless....)
Thinking aloud… One issue is that this is a pretty unexpected reason, and I currently would not be able to raise this hypothesis as why I was being downvoted. Normally it means the substance of the comment was bad or somehow norm-violating, I have little-to-no sense that ppl downvote for hijacking threads on LW.
On the other hand I think I was slightly hijacking the thread. Well, that’s not right. I felt the comment section was very overwhelming with a sense of “You are wrong and you are doing empathy wrong”, and my comment agreeing with the post got little-to-no traction in-spite of being the very first comment on the post, so I came to find someone in-particular to argue with. I think it was probably good for the discourse for me to post a counterargument under the top comment. I thought the top comment was a pretty good encapsulation of the view I disagreed with (I did look at the other comments and felt this was most appropriate to disagree with). I could’ve written a shortform or top-level post, but I guess I don’t think that responding to a prominent comment is a bad place for me to provide counterarguments. In my model many of the other comments are primarily provide social force rather than unique and additional points/arguments (e.g. multiple instances of “you’re just switching yourself into their decisions, not their psychology” highly upvoted, a claim I disagree with), so I wasn’t especially pushing out much substantive content, and again, providing a counterargument is not off-topic, so I think this isn’t relevantly a hijacking.
Perhaps we should have a feature for comments for when your comment is a nitpick / off-topic / aside, where you can choose to make your comment be collapsed-by-default and at the bottom of the set of immediate replies.
Also, this thread could be a good option for the “move thread to open thread” feature, with a two-way link.
I think your comment was a little bit “cheating” against LW’s systems, and thus deserving of a little downvote. I don’t know if a norm exists against this kind of cheating, but I think it should.
IIRC, I kinda perceived that you were trying to pushback against a general vibe spread throughout the comment section. Your comment is basically not engaging with cata’s comment at all. You reference the video, which cata doesn’t, and you reference “believing everyone is doing the best they can”, which is not something cata says. You were pushing against the general zeitgeist, and you did it in a way that uses a quirk of the commenting system to give it prominence.
I think you should have written a top-level comment pushing back against the other comments, perhaps linking to them. And then the karma system could have buoyed it to the top, or not.
Some fair points; I don’t quite agree, but I think a marginal downvote is not worth a lot of discussion, I’ll bow out here.
The obvious consequence of such a norm is comments having to say things like “don’t upvote this comment too much, because otherwise you will be robbing me of replies which I would otherwise get” or “please downvote this comment, so that it gets pushed down, so that I can get people replying to me, instead of staying silent because of a weird and incidental fact of comment section sorting”. This would be very bad, obviously.
The things which you are trying to do with the karma system would destroy its usefulness.
Comments that hijack an unrelated thread can be downvoted (and thus hidden), or their authors censured for abusing the commenting system. This is a non-problem on Less Wrong.
I approve of explaining your downvotes. This is good, because it gives us the opportunity to discuss why those downvotes might be a bad idea.
I agree it’s obvious that it at least pushes some in this direction. I think some versions of this could be very bad, though mostly it would be not that bad.
By “destroy its usefulness”, how much less useful do you mean to say it would become?
I didn’t mean, in that comment, to imply that Ben was hijacking. I was just trying to provide at least one example of a pathological interaction with threading and karma.
Having refreshed myself on Ben’s comment and its parent, I now think he was doing something continuous with hijacking.
That would depend on how widespread your way of using it became. If very widespread—then basically all of the usefulness would be lost. If somewhat widespread—then only most of the usefulness would be lost. If only a handful of people did as you propose to do—then much of the usefulness would be lost, though not most.
If by “very widespread” you mean like ~10% of votes, I disagree. Do you mean that?
If by “much of the usefulness would be lost” you mean something like “people would see comments that they liked <90% as much” or “people would get less than 90% of the information about what some kind of weighted LessWrong-consensus thought”, I disagree. Do you mean that?
I mean something like “a majority of the most active users do this regularly”.
Those are very weak criteria, much weaker than anything I had in mind… and you still disagree that any such thing would happen? I do not see how such a view is supportable.
Fwiw I don’t find this very convincing. If a comment gets highly up voted for instance, it has the consequence of getting more dumb replies, but mostly people just accept that rather than having to caveat their comments and asking not to up vote.
Also has the consequence of getting more smart replies, simply as a result of getting more replies overall due to being more popular.
If writing good comments resulted in stupid comments in response (a drawback) with no corresponding benefit, then people would write fewer good comments. The reason we don’t observe the latter to be happening isn’t because stupid responses aren’t a disincentive, but because good responses (alongside stuff like increased karma, reputation, the intrinsic desire to communicate deeply-held beliefs, the feeling that Someone is Wrong on the Internet, etc.) are a sufficiently good incentive that overcomes this disincentive.
People don’t ask not to upvote because receiving upvotes is obviously a desirable thing for the comment-writer.[1] To the extent your confusing comment tries to imply otherwise, it appears entirely out of tune with reality.
Unless you impose a cost big enough to render this claim false, which would be the case if something-like-kave’s-proposal gets implemented
A comment getting up voted has highs status implications, and gets their ideas seen more. I think that’s the main desirable thing of high up votes, more discussion is really hit or miss in terms of desire ability.
Which is the point of my comment, there’s tons of externalities to the system of up voting and down voting that we just put up with because the system basically works.
And when you change the system by imposing an additional constraint/disincentive on receiving karma, without a corresponding benefit (unlike in the case of bad responses, which come attached with good responses), the balance of externalities changes. Therefore, so does commenters’ behavior.
Moreover, I disagree with the notion that more discussion is neutral on average/in expectancy. That’s only if the original comment writer[1] can’t easily distinguish between productive and unproductive responses or can’t bring themselves emotionally to ignore the latter and focus only on the former. If the person can do that, then they obtain positive value from the responses overall (they get to learn something new or have their misconceptions corrected, for example), even if the majority of them are useless.
Or the audience!
I have never found this to be the case.
In fact, I just did a quick-and-dirty check. I went to my comments feed on GreaterWrong, sorting by “Top” (i.e., in descending karma value order). I then opened up the first 10 comments in the list. Then, I set the “offset” URL parameter to
1000(i.e., went to the 51st page of the list, showing my 1001st through 1020th highest-rated comments), and opened up the first 10 comments on that page. For each comment, I counted the number of direct replies which I would consider to be dumb (not wrong, but dumb). The counts:Total number of dumb replies to my 1st through 10th highest-upvoted comments: 2
Total number of dumb replies to my 1001st through 1010th highest-upvoted comments: 1
Given the sample sizes, I’m going to mark this one down as “no difference detected”.
This is an insane reason to downvote something. (Also, the fact that it even sort of makes sense to you to do this—especially given your strong familiarity with the Less Wrong commenting system—is a sign that something is very wrong… maybe with the commenting UI, perhaps, or… with something.)
(Really, though, what a terrible, terrible reason to downvote. What the hell?)
Not sure whether that makes sense, but FWIW you can just hit the [-] symbol to collapse the whole subthread.
I’m aware! It doesn’t help because I had to read the subthread first to see if I want to read it.
I mean, yeah, the empathy is how I notice the value differences, and then I’m disgusted or disappointed by their values.
The reason people say stuff like “if you empathize more, you’ll feel kinder towards them” is that the negative emotions behind your judgements require prediction error, and understanding necessarily crowds it out.
To give a toy example, it’s easy to get frustrated when a calculator isn’t working because it should work, dammit. You just bought the damn thing, how can it be broken already!? But then, if you stop to wonder if it has batteries in it and it doesn’t, it get’s a lot harder to stay frustrated because it’s a lot harder to hold onto the idea that the calculator “should” work in such a state. You don’t stop judging it as “non-functioning” because obviously it’s non functioning, you just lower your expectations to match the reality of the situation; if you want it to work, you need to put batteries in.
The recognition of “Oh, this isn’t a functioning calculator” is a necessary step between “expecting the calculator to work” and understanding (or even asking) why it’s not a functioning calculator. So there’s necessarily going to be that “Shit, okay. I guess I don’t have a working calculator” where you have to mourn the loss of what you thought you had, before you reorient to the reality that you find yourself faced with.
That is to say, feeling disgusted and disappointed is fine. What happens next? What happens once you accept that people do have these values, empathize further, and try to undertand where these (perhaps unfortunate) values come from? And then go through as many steps of that as needed before you could say “If I was missing my battery, and X, and Y, and Z, I would also have these messed up values and choose not to take the nail out of my head?”
Suppose Alice’s daughter Beth gets cancer and slowly dies. After a long battle, numerous doctors that tell them Beth’s death is inevitable, and many nights in the hospital, Alice finally watches as Beth breathes her last. Then, Alice feels a stab of intense grief and goes into mourning for the next month.
Do you claim these negative emotions are a result of prediction error, and that Alice would feel zero grief if she only had an accurate understanding of the situation? Color me skeptical.
Another example: suppose Carl is tied to some train tracks and sees a train approaching. As the train gets closer, Carl feels an intense sense of fear, and anger against the person who tied him up. Do you claim this is also a prediction error? The bad thing that Carl is afraid of hasn’t actually happened yet (the train has yet to reach him); where exactly is the error located?
These are good questions. Thanks for the pushback :)
Yes, but not in the way you think. “[Perfectly] accurate understanding of the situation”, such that there is no grief to experience, is an impossibly high standard. The implication of “If you’re sad you’re just a bad rationalist!” absolutely does not follow. It’s closer to the opposite, in that if you’re flinching from experiencing sadness (or other emotions) you’re resisting updating.
I give some explanation of how this relates to the process of grieving in a different comment downstream (ctrl-f “pet”), but there’s another aspect that I’d like to touch on here.
My Grandpa won life. The man was very successful in business, in marriage, in family. He lived into old age with a full mind, and as active as one can be in his later years. It’s really hard to expect more out of life than this, so when he finally croaked in his nineties… it’s kinda hard to expect more. I mean, yeah, it’d have been nice to have him for a few more years, and yeah, occasionally people live longer. Sure, it’d be nice for aging to have been solved. But overall it’s kinda like “That’s how it’s supposed to go. If only all life went so well”. At his funeral, there were a lot of people smiling and remembering him fondly.
In contrast, lose someone important who is in their twenties, and it’s devastating. There are going to be all sorts of ways in which you expected things to go differently, and updating your maps there (i.e. “grieving”) sucks. Alice’s death sucks not just because you would like more for her, but because you thought she would get more. And she didn’t. And that matters. These funerals are not so fun and full of smiles.
Yes, most definitely.
The anger error is located in the mismatch between expecting the person who tied him up to have followed some norms which he clearly he wasn’t bound by, and the reality that he did not follow the norms. In that situation, I have a hard time imagining being angry because I can’t see why I’d ever put some expectations like that on someone who wasn’t bound by them. Even if it was my own brother I wouldn’t be angry because I’d be too shocked and confused to take my prediction error as his fault. Not “Fuck you for doing this to me” but “Fuck me for not recognizing this to be possible”.
The fear error is locating in the mismatch between expecting to be safe and the reality of not being safe. This one is utterly unreasonable to expect anyone to solve on the fly like that, but 1) when people resign themselves to their fate (the example given to me by the Jewish man who taught me this stuff was Jews in concentration camps), there is no more fear, and 2) when you can easily untie yourself minutes before the train gets there it’s not so scary anymore because you just get off the tracks.
It’s worth noting that these things can get pretty complicated, and fear doesn’t necessarily feel the way you’d expect when you actually find yourself in similar situations. For example, I have a friend whose rope harness came undone while rappelling, leaving him desperately clinging to the rope while trying to figure out how to safely get to the ground. Afterwards, he said that he was afraid until his harness fell apart. After that, he was just too busy figuring out what to do to feel afraid. Rising to the occasion often requires judiciously dropping prior expectations and coming up with new ones on the fly.
Let me propose an alternate hypothesis:
Emotions evolved as a way of influencing our behavior in useful directions. They correspond (approximately—this is evolution we’re talking about) to a prediction that there is some useful way of changing your behavior in response to a situation. Fear tells you take precautions, anger tells you to retaliate, contempt tells you to reconsider your alliance, etc. (Scott Alexander has a post on ACX theorizing that general happiness and sadness are a way of telling you to take more/fewer risks, but I can’t find it at the moment.)
I think your examples of fear disappearing when people give up hope of escape are explained at least as well by this hypothesis as by yours. Also your example of your friend who “was afraid until his harness fell apart”—that was the moment when “taking precautions” stopped being a useful action, but it seems pretty weird to conjecture that that was the moment when his prediction error disappeared (was he predicting a 100% chance of the harness breaking? or even >50%?)
On my model, examples of people giving up anger when they accept physical determinism strike me as understandable but mistaken. They are reasoning that some person could not have done otherwise, and thus give up on changing the person’s behavior, which causes them to stop feeling anger. But this is an error, because a system operating on completely deterministic rules can still be altered by outside forces—such as a pattern of other people retaliating in certain circumstances.
On my model, the correct reason to get angry at a murderer, but not to get angry at a storm, is that murderers can (sometimes) be deterred, and storms cannot. I think the person who stops feeling anger has performed an incomplete reduction that doesn’t add up to normality.
Notice that my model provides an explanation for why different negative emotions occur in different circumstances: They recommend different actions. As far as I can see, you have not offered an explanation for why some prediction errors cause fear, others anger, others disgust.
Your model also appears to require that we hypothesize that the prediction errors are coming from some inner part of a person that can’t be questioned directly and is also very stupid. We seemingly have to believe that an 8-year-old is scared of the dark because some inner part of them still hasn’t figured out that, yes, it gets dark every night, dipshit (even though the 8yo will profess belief in this, and has overwhelming experience of this). This seems implausible and unfalsifiable.
This isn’t an alternative hypothesis. It’s another part of the same picture.
Notice how it’s a new prediction about how your behavior needs to be changed? That’s because you’re learning that the path you’re currently on was built on false presumptions. Get your predictions right the first time, and none of this is needed.
Anger is a good example of this.
If you’re running around in the fantasy world of “We’re all just going to be nice to each other, because that’s what we should do, and therefore we should wish only good things on everyone”, then a murderer breaks things. Anger is an appropriate response here, because if you suppress anger (because of rationalizing about determinism or whatever) then you end up saying stupid things like “He couldn’t have done any differently! One dead is enough, we don’t need another to die!”.
But this is a stupid way to go through life in the first place, because it’s completely delusional. When I say that I wouldn’t be angry at someone who tied me to the tracks, that doesn’t mean I’m incapable of retaliation. I’ve never been murdered or tied to train tracks, but one time some friends and I were attacked by strangers who I correctly inferred were carrying knives and willing to use them—and I wasn’t angry at them. But, rather than lamenting “Sigh, I guess he was bound to do this” when fleeing didn’t work, I turned and threw the guy to the ground. While I was smashing his face with my elbows, I wasn’t feeling “GRR! I HATE YOU!”. I was laughing about how it really was as incredibly easy as you’d think, and how stupid he had to be to force a fight with a wrestler that was significantly larger than himself.
Anger is a flinch. If you touch a hot stove, sure, it makes sense to flinch away from the stove. Keeping your hand there—rationalizing “determinism” or otherwise—would be foolish.
But also, maybe you wouldn’t be in this situation, if you weren’t holding to some silly nonsense like “My allies would never betray me”, and instead thought things through and planned accordingly.
And perhaps even more importantly, is your flinch actually gonna work? They often don’t. You don’t want to end up the fool in impotent rage blubbering about how someone did something “wrong” when you in fact do not have the power to enforce the norm you’re attached to. You want to be the person who can see crystal clear what is going on, what their options are, and who doesn’t hesitate to take them when appropriate. Anger, like flinching in general, is best as a transient event when we get surprised, and until we can reorient.
Heh. This is where we’re going to differ big time. There’s a gigantic inferential chasm here so none of this will ring true, but nevertheless here is my stance:
It is our outer wrappings that are very stupid most of the time. Even when your inner part is stupid too, that’s generally still the fault of the outer wrapping getting in the way and not doing its job. Stupid outer layer notwithstanding, that inner layer can quite easily be questioned directly. And updated directly.
The way I came to this view is by learning hypnosis to better fix these “irrational inner parts”, peeling the onion a layer at a time to come up with methods that work in increasingly diverse circumstances, and eventually recognizing that the things that work most generally are actually what we do by default—until we freak out and make up stories about how we “can’t” and “need hypnosis to fix these non-directly accessible very stupid inner parts”. Turns out those stories aren’t true, and “hypnosis” is an engineered way of fighting delusion with delusion. The stories feel true due to confirmation bias, until you tug at the seams.
It seems to me that you should change your behavior as circumstances change, even if the changes are completely expected. When you step into deep water, you should start swimming; when you step out of the water, you should stop trying to swim and start walking again. This remains true even if the changes are 100% expected.
Do you mean to say that you have some empirical way of measuring these “prediction errors” that you’re referring to, separately from the emotions you claim they explain?
Got any data you can share?
If you use your technique on an 8-year-old who is scared of the dark at night, do you actually predict your technique would reveal that they have a prediction that it won’t get dark at night? Would your technique allow you to “directly update” the 8yo so that they stop being scared of the dark?
Yes, your behavior at time t = 0 and time t = 1 ought to be different even if the changes between these times are entirely predicted. But at t = 0, your planned behavior for t = 1 will be swimming if you foresee the drop off. If you don’t see the drop off, you get that “Woah!” that tells you that you need to change your idea of what behavior is appropriate for t >=1.
I guess I should have said “Notice how your planned behavior has to change”.
Well, if you were to walk outside and get rained on, would you experience surprise? If you walked outside and didn’t get rained on, would you feel surprised? The answers here tells you what you’re predicting.
No, I wouldn’t expect the 8-year-old to be doing “I expect it to not get dark”, but rather something more like “I expect to be able to see a lack of monsters at all times”—which obviously conflicts with the reality that they cannot when the lights are out.
The way I’d approach this depends on the specific context, but I generally would not want to directly update the kids beliefs in any simple sort of way. I take issue with the assumption that fear is a problem in the first place, and generally find that in any case remotely like this, direct overwriting of beliefs is a bad thing.
I’m 13 posts into a big sequence laying out my thoughts on this, and it’s full of examples where I’ve achieved what might seem like unusual results from a “this stuff is unconscious and hard” perspective, but which aren’t nearly so impressive once you see behind the curtain.
The one I posted today, for example, shows how I was able to get both of my daughters to be unafraid of getting their shots when they were two years old (separate instances, not twins), and how the active ingredient was “not giving a shit if they’re afraid of their shots”.
If you want more direct proof that I’m talking about real things, the best example would be the transcript where I helped someone greatly reduce his suffering from chronic pain through forum PMs, following the basic idea of “Obviously pain isn’t a problem, but this guy sure seems to think it is, so how is he going wrong exactly?”. That one did eventually overwrite his felt experience of the pain being a bad thing (for the most part), but it wasn’t so quick and direct because like with the hypothetical scared 8 year old, a direct overwrite would have been bad.
If you want to learn more about “direct overwriting”, then that’s the section on attention, and I explain how I was able to tell my wife to constrict her blood vessels to stop bleeding in about thirty seconds, and why that isn’t nearly as an extraordinary claim as it might seem like it should be.
I should probably throw together a sequence page, but for now they’re all on my user profile.
I feel like I have experienced a lot of negative emotions in my life that were not particularly correlated with a feeling of surprise. In fact, I can recall feeling anger about things where I literally wrote down a prediction that the thing would happen, before it happened.
Conversely, I can recall many pleasant surprises, which involved a lot of prediction error but no negative emotions.
So if this is what you are relying on to confirm your theory, it seems pretty disconfirmed by my life experience. And I’m reasonably certain that approximately everyone has similar observations from their own lives.
I thought this was understood, and the only way I was taking your theory even mildly seriously was on the assumption that you meant something different from ordinary surprise.
I find it quite plausible they would have a preference for seeing a lack of monsters. I do not find it remotely plausible that they would have a prediction of continuously being able to see a lack of monsters. That is substantially more stupid than the already-very-stupid example of not expecting it to get dark.
Are you maybe trying to refer to our models of how the world “should” work, rather than our models of how it does work? I’m not sure exactly what I think “should” is, but I definitely don’t think it’s the same as a prediction about what actually will happen. But I could maybe believe that disagreements between “should” and “is” models play a role in explaining (some) negative emotions.
I am not searching through everything you’ve ever written to try to find something that matches a vague description.
I feel like we’ve been talking for quite a while, and you are making extraordinary claims, and you have not presented ANY noteworthy evidence favoring your model over my current one, and I am going to write you off very soon if I don’t see something persuasive. Please write or directly link some strong evidence.
Ah, that’s what you’re getting at.
Okay, so for example, say you angrily tell your employee “I expect you to show up on time!”. Then, he doesn’t, and you’re not surprised. This shows that you (meta) expected your (object level) expectation of “You will show up on time!” to be false. You’re not surprised because you’re not learning anything, because you’ve chosen not to. Notice the hesitance to sigh and say “Well, I guess he is not going to show up on time”?
This stickiness comes from the desire to control things combined with a lack of sophisticated methods of control. When you accept “He is not going to show up on time”, you lose your ability to tell him “I expect you to show up on time!” and with it your ability too put pressure on him to be punctual. Your setpoint that you control to is your expectation, so if you update your expectation then you lose your ability to (crudely) attempt to control the person’s behavior. Once you learn more sophisticated methods of control, the anger no longer serves a purpose so you’re free to update your expectations to match reality. E.g. “I don’t know if you’re going to show up on time, but I do know that if you don’t, you will be fired! No hard feelings either way, have a nice day :)”
This is a really tricky equivalence to wrap ones mind around, and it took me years to really understand even after I could see that there was something there. I explain this more in my post expectations=intentions=setpoint, and give examples of how more sophisticated attempts to control cede immediate reality and attempt to control towards trajectories instead—to concretely better results.
Yeah, I think positive emotions generally require prediction errors too, though I’m less solid on this one. People are generally more willing to update on pleasant surprises so that prediction error discomfort is less likely to persist enough to be notable, though it’s worth noting that this isn’t always the case. Imposter syndrome is an example where people get quite uncomfortable because of this refusal.
The prediction error is not the same as negative emotions. Prediction error is the suffering that happens while you refuse to update, while negative emotions like sadness come while you update. You still have to have erred in order to have something sad to learn, but it’s not the same thing.
Now that I say it, I realize I had the opportunity to clarify earlier, because I did notice that this was a point of confusion, and I chose not to take the opportunity to. I think I see why I did, but I shouldn’t have, and I apologize.
Again, giant chasm of inferential distance. You’re not passing the ITT yet, and until you do it’s going to be real tough for you to “test” anything I’m saying, because you will always be testing a misinterpretation. It’s obviously reasonable to be suspicious of such claims as attempts to hide from falsifiability, but at the same time sometimes that’s just how things are—and assuming either way is a poor way of finding truth.
To distinguish, you want to look for signs of cognitive dissonance, not merely things that you disagree with. Because if you conclude that you’re right on the surface level because the other person gets something wrong two levels deep… and your judgment of whether they’re wrong is your perspective, which they disagree with… then you’ve just given up on ever learning anything when there’s a disagreement three or more levels deep. If you wait to see signs that the person is being forced to choose between changing their own mind or ignoring data, then you have a much more solid base.
That, and look for concrete predictions that both sides can agree on. For example, you took the stance that anger was appropriate because without it you become susceptible to murderers and don’t retaliate—but once I pointed out the alternative, I don’t think you doubt that I was actually able to fight back without anger? Or is that genuinely hard to believe for you?
Hey, kids are stupid. Adults too. Sometimes people even keep expecting people to not piss them off, even when they know that the person will piss them off :p
Jokes aside, this is still the “expectations=intentions” thing. We try to not see our expectations as predictions when we’re using them as intents, but they function as predictions nonetheless.
“Should” is used as an attempt to disconnect ourselves from updating on what will happen in order to try to make something happen—because we recognize that it will likely fail and want to try anyway. If I say “You will show up on time” as if it’s a matter of fact, that’s either powerful… or laughable. And if I sense that I don’t have the authority to pull that off, I’m incentivized to back off to “You SHOULD show up on time” so that I don’t have to accept “I guess you won’t show up on time, huh?” when you don’t. I can always say “Okay maybe he won’t BUT HE SHOULD” and immediately negate the uncomfortable reality.
So “Yes, I’m talking about our models of how the world should work”, and also that is necessarily the same as our models of how the world does work—even if we also have meta models which identify the predictable errors in our object level models and try to contain them.
Maybe that part could use more emphasis. Of course we have meta models that contradict these obviously wrong object level models. We know that we’re probably wrong, but on the object level that doesn’t make us any less wrong until we actually do the update.
That’s fine, no pressure to do anything of course. For what it’s worth though, it’s very clearly labeled. There’s no way you wouldn’t recognize at a glance.
I don’t think that’s fair. For one, your model said you need anger in order to retaliate, and I gave an example of how I didn’t need anger in order to retaliate. I think the fact that I don’t always struggle with predictable anger while simultaneously not experiencing your predicted downsides is clear evidence, do you not?
Of course, this isn’t strong evidence that I’m right about anything else, but it’s absolutely fatal to the idea that your model accurately depicts the realm of possibility. If your model gets one thing this wrong, this unexpectedly, how can you trust it to tell you what else to view as “extraordinary”?
You’re welcome to read my posts, or not. They’re quite long and I don’t expect you to read them, but they’re there if you want a better understanding of what I’m talking about.
Either way, I’m happy to continue because I can see that you’re engaging in good faith even though you’re skeptical (and maybe a bit frustrated?), and I appreciate the push back. At the end of the day, neither my ability to retaliate without anger, nor my ability to help kids overcome fear by understanding their predictions, hinge on you believing in it.
At the same time, I’m curious if you’ve thought about how it looks from my perspective. You’ve written intelligent and thoughtful responses which I appreciate, but are you under the impression that anything you’ve written provides counter-evidence? Do you picture me thinking “Yes, that’s what I’m saying” before you argue against what you think I’m saying?
I didn’t respond to this because I didn’t see it as posing any difficulty for my model, and didn’t realize that you did.
I don’t think you need anger in order to retaliate. I think anger means that the part of you that generates emotions (roughly, Kahneman’s system 1) wants to retaliate. Your system 2 can disagree with your system 1 and retaliate when you’re not angry.
Also, your story didn’t sound to me like you were actually retaliating. It sounded to me like you were defending yourself, i.e. taking actions that reduced the other guy’s capability of harming you. Retaliation (on my model) is when you harm someone else in an effort to change their decisions (not their capabilities), or the decisions of observers.
So I’m quite willing to believe the story happened as you described it, but this was 2 steps removed from posing any problem to my model, and you didn’t previously explain how you believed it posed a problem.
I also note that you said “for one” (in the quote above) but then there was no number two in your list.
I do see a bunch of signs of that, actually:
I claimed that your example of your friend being afraid until their harness broke seems to be better explained by my model than yours, because that would be an obvious time for the recommended action to change but a really weird time for his prediction error to disappear. You did not respond to this point.
I claimed that my model has an explanation for how different negative emotions are different and why you experience different ones in different situations, and your model seemingly does not, and this makes my model better. You did not respond to this point.
I asked you if you had a way of measuring whatever you mean by “prediction error”, so that we could check how well the measurements fit your model. You told me to use my own feelings of surprise. When I pointed out that doesn’t mach your model, you said that you meant something different, but didn’t clarify what you meant, and did not provide a new answer to the earlier question about how you measure “prediction error”. This looks like you saying whatever deflects the current point without keeping track of how the current point is related to previous points.
Note that I don’t actually need to understand what you mean in order for the measurement to be interesting. You could hand me a black box and say “this measures the thing I’m talking about” and if the black box produces measurements that correlate with your predictions that would be interesting even if I have no clue how the black box works (as long as I don’t see an uninteresting way of deriving your predictions from its inputs). But you haven’t done this, either.
I gave an example where I made an explicit prediction, and then was angry when it came true. You responded by ignoring my example and substituting your own hypothetical example where I made an explicit prediction and then was angry when it was falsified. This looks like you shying away from examples that are hard for your theory to explain and instead rehearsing examples that are easier.
You have claimed that there’s evidence in your other writing, but have refused to prioritize it so that I can find your best evidence as quickly as possible. This looks like an attempt to dissuade me from checking your claims by maximizing the burden of effort placed on me. In a cooperative effort of truth-seeking, you ought to be the one performing the prioritization of your writing because you have a massive advantage in doing so.
Many of your responses seem like you are using my points to launch off on a tangent, rather than addressing my point head-on.
This seems like it’s just a simple direct contradiction. You’re saying that model X and model Y are literally the same thing, but also that we keep track of the differences between them. There couldn’t be any differences to track if they were actually the same thing.
I also note that you claimed these are “necessarily” the same, but provided no reasoning or evidence to back that up; it’s just a flat assertion.
There are some parts of your model that I think I probably roughly understand, such as the fact that you think there’s some model inside a person making predictions (but it’s not the same as the predictions they profess in conversation) and that errors in these predictions are a necessary precondition to feeling negative emotions. I think I can describe these parts in a way you would endorse.
There are some parts of your model that I think I probably don’t understand, like where is that model actually located and how does it work.
There are some parts of your model that I think are incoherent bullshit, like where you think “should” and “is” models are the same thing but also we have a meta-model that tracks the differences between them, or where you think telling me to pay attention to my own feelings of surprise makes any sense as a response to my request for measurements.
I don’t think I’ve written anything that directly falsifies your model as a whole—which I think is mostly because you haven’t made it legible enough.
But I do think I’ve pointed out:
several ways in which my model wins Bayes points against yours
several ways that your model creates more friction than mine with common-sensical beliefs across other domains
several ways in which your own explanations of your model are contradictory or otherwise deficient
that there is an absence of support on your side of the discussion
I don’t think I require a better understanding of your model than I currently have in order for these points to be justified.
You’re extending yourself an awful lot of charity here.
For example, you accuse me of failing to respond to some of your points, and claim that this is evidence of cognitive dissonance, yet you begin this comment with:
Are you really unable to anticipate that this is very close to what I would have said, if you had asked me why I didn’t respond to those things? The only reason that wouldn’t be my exact answer is that I’d first point out that I did respond to those things, by pointing out that your arguments were based on a misunderstanding of my model! This doesn’t seem like a hard one to get right, if you were extending half the charity to me that you extend yourself, you know? (should I be angry with you for this, by the way?)
As to your claim that it doesn’t pose difficulty to your model, and attempts to relocate goal posts, here are your exact words:
This is wrong. It is completely normal to not feel anger, and retaliate, when you have accurate models instead of clinging to inaccurate models, and I gave an example of this. Your attempt to pick the nit between “incapacitation” vs “dissuasion” is very suspect as well, but also irrelevant because dissuasion was also a goal (and effect) of my retaliation that night. I could give other examples too, which are even more clearly dissuasion not incapacitation, but I think the point is pretty clear.
And no, even with the relocated goalposts your explanation fails. That was a system 1 decision, and there’s no time for thinking slow when you’re in the midst of something like that.
No, I made it very clear. If you have a fraction of the interest it would take to read the post and digest the contents, you would spend the ten seconds needed to pull up the post. This is not a serious objection.
Again, it’s totally understandable if you don’t want to take the time to read it. It’s a serious time and effort investment to sit down and not only read but make sense of the contents, so if your response were to be “Hey man, I got a job and a life, and I can’t afford to spend the time especially given that I can’t trust it’ll change my mind”, that would be completely reasonable.
But to act like “Nope, it doesn’t count because you can’t expect me to take 10 seconds to find it, and therefore must be trying to hide it” is.… well, can you see how that might come across?
So if I tell you that the bottle of distilled water with “Drinking water” scribbled over the label contains the same thing as the bottle of distilled water that has “coolant” scribbled on it… and that the difference is only in the label… would you understand that? Would that register to you as a coherent possibility?
I’m sorry, but I’m having a hard time understanding which part of this is weird to you. Are you really claiming that you can’t see how to make sense of this?
You’re missing the point of my question. Of course you think you’ve pointed that stuff out. I’m not asking if you believe you’re justified in your own beliefs.
There are a lot of symmetries here. You said some thing’s that [you claim] I didn’t respond to. I said some things which [I claim] you didn’t respond to. Some of the things I say strike you as either missing the point or not directly responding to what you say. A lot of the things that you’ve said strike me in the same way. Some of the my responses [you claim] look like cognitive dissonance to you. Some of your responses [I claim] look that way to me. I’m sure you think it’s different because your side really is right, and my side really is wrong. And of course, I feel the same way. This is all completely normal for disagreements that run more than a step or two deep.
But then you go on to act like you don’t notice the symmetry, as if your own perspective objectively validates your own side. You start to posture stuff like “You haven’t posted any evidence [that I recognize]” and “I’m gonna write you off, if you don’t persuade me”, with no hint to the possibility that there’s another side to this coin.
The question is, do you see how silly this looks, from my perspective? Do you see how much this looks like you’re missing the self awareness that is necessary in order to have a hope of noticing when you’re inhabiting a mistaken worldview, which pats itself on the back prematurely?
Because if you do, then perhaps we can laugh about our situation together, and go about figuring out how to break this asymmetry. But if you don’t, or if you try to insist “No, but my perspective really is better supported [according to me]”, the symmetry is already broken.
You complain that I failed to anticipate that you would give the same response as me, but then immediately give a diametrically opposed response! I agreed that I didn’t respond to the example you highlighted, and said this was because I didn’t pick up on your implied argument. You claim that you did respond to the examples I highlighted. The accusations are symmetrical, but the defenses are very much not.
I did notice that the accusations were symmetrical, and because of that I very carefully checked (before posting) whether the excuse I was giving myself could also be extended to you, and I concluded definitively that it couldn’t. My examples made direct explicit comparisons between my model and (my model of) your model, and pointed out concrete ways that the output of my model was better; it seems hugely implausible you failed to understand that I was claiming to score Bayes points against your model. Your example did not mention my model at all! (It contrasts two background assumptions, where humans are either always nice or not, and examines how your model, and only your model, interacts with each of those assumptions. I note that “humans are always nice” is not a position that anyone in this thread has ever defended, to my knowledge.)
And yes, I did also consider the meta-level possibility that my attempt to distinguish between what was said explicitly and what wasn’t is so biased as to make its results useless. I have a small but non-zero probability for that. But even if that’s true, that doesn’t seem like a reason to continue the argument; it seems like proof that I’m so hopeless that I should just cut my losses.
I considered including a note in my previous reply explaining that I’d checked if you could use my excuse and found you couldn’t, but I was concerned that would feel like rubbing it in, and the fact that you can’t use my excuse isn’t actually important unless you try to use it, and I guessed that you wouldn’t try. (Whether that guess was correct is still a bit unclear to me—you offer an explanation that seems directly contradictory to my excuse, but you also assert that you’re saying the same thing as me.)
If you are saying that I should have guessed the exact defense you would give, even if it was different from mine, then I don’t see how I was supposed to guess that.
If you are saying that I should have guessed you would offer some defense, even if I didn’t know the details, then I considered that moderately likely but I don’t know what you think I should have done about it.
If I had guessed that you would offer some defense that I would accept then I could have updated to the position I expected to hold in the future, but I did not guess that you’d have a defense I would accept; and, in fact, you don’t have one. Which brings us to...
(re-quoted for ease of reference)
I have carefully re-read the entire reply that you made after the comment containing the two examples I accused you of failing to respond to.
Those two examples are not mentioned anywhere in it. Nor is there a general statement about “my examples” as a group. It has 3 distinct passages, each of which seems to be a narrow reply to a specific thing that I said, and none of which involve these 2 examples.
Nor does it include a claim that I’ve misapplied your model, either generally or related to those particular examples. It does include a claim that I’ve misunderstood one specific part of your model that was completely irrelevant to those two examples (you deny my claim that the relevant predictions are coming from a part of the person that can’t be interrogated, after flagging that you don’t expect me to follow that passage due to inferential distance).
Your later replies did make general claims about me not understanding your model several times. I could make up a story where you ignored these two examples temporarily and then later tried to address them (without referencing them or saying that that was what you were doing), but that story seems neither reasonable nor likely.
Possibly you meant to write something about them, but it got lost in an editing pass?
Or (more worryingly) perhaps you responded to my claim that you had ignored them not by trying to find actions you took specifically in response to those examples, but instead by searching your memory of everything you’ve said for things that could be interpreted as a reply, and then reported what you found without checking it?
In any case: You did not make the response you claimed that you made, in any way that I can detect.
Communication is tricky!
Sometimes both parties do something that could have worked, if the other party had done something different, but they didn’t work together, and so the problem can potentially be addressed by either party. Other times, there’s one side that could do something to prevent the problem, but the other side basically can’t do anything on their own. Sometimes fixing the issue requires a coordinated solution with actions from both parties. And in some sad situations, it’s not clear the issue can be fixed at all.
It seems to me that these two incidents both fall clearly into the category of “fixable from your side only”. Let’s recap:
(1) When you talked about your no-anger fight, you had an argument against my model, but you didn’t state it explicitly; you relied on me to infer it. That inference turned out to be intractable, because you had a misunderstanding about my position that I was unaware of. (You hadn’t mentioned it, I had no model that had flagged that specific misunderstanding as being especially likely, and searching over all possible misunderstandings is infeasible.)
There’s an obvious, simple, easy, direct fix from your side: State your arguments explicitly. Or at least be explicit that you’re making an argument, and you expect credit. (I mistook this passage as descriptive, not persuasive.)
I see no good options from my side. I couldn’t address it directly because I didn’t know what you’d tried to do. Maybe I could have originally explained my position in a way that avoided your misunderstanding, but it’s not obvious what strategy would have accomplished that. I could have challenged your general absence of evidence sooner—I was thinking it earlier, but I deferred that option because it risked degrading the conversation, and it’s not clear to me that was a bad call. (Even if I had said it immediately, that would presumably just accelerate what actually happened.)
If you have an actionable suggestion for how I could have unilaterally prevented this problem, please share.
(2) In the two examples I complained you didn’t respond to, you allege that you did respond, but I didn’t notice and still can’t find any such response.
My best guess at the solution here is “you need to actually write it, instead of just imagining that you wrote it.” The difficulty of implementing that could range from easy to very hard, depending on the actual sequence of events that lead to this outcome. But whatever the difficulty, it’s hard to imagine it could be easier to implement from my side than yours—you have a whole lot of relevant access to your writing process that I lack.
Even assuming this is a problem with me not recognizing it rather than it not existing, there are still obvious things you could do on your end to improve the odds (signposting, organization, being more explicit, quoting/linking the response when later discussing it). Conversely, I don’t see what strategy I could have used other than “read more carefully,” but I already carefully re-read the entire reply specifically looking for it, and still can’t find it.
I understand it’s possible to be in a situation where both sides have equal quality but both perceive themselves as better. But it’s also possible to be in a situation where one side is actually better and the other side falsely claims it’s symmetrical. If I allowed a mere assertion of symmetry from the other guy to stop me from ever believing the second option, I’d get severely exploited. The only way I have a chance at avoiding both errors is by carefully examining the actual circumstances and weighing the evidence case-by-case.
My best judgment here is that the evidence weighs pretty heavily towards the problems being fixable from your side and not fixable from my side. This seems very asymmetrical to me. I think I’ve been as careful as I reasonably could have been, and have invested a frankly unreasonable amount of time into triple-checking this.
Before I respond to your other points, let me pause and ask if I have convinced you that our situation is actually pretty asymmetrical, at least in regards to these examples? If not, I’m disinclined to invest more time.
Oh, the situation is definitely asymmetrical. In more ways than you realize.
However, the important part of my comment was this:
If you can’t say “Shoot, I didn’t realize that”, or “Heh, yeah I see how it definitely looks more symmetrical than I was giving credit for (even though we both know there are important dissymmetries, and disagree on what they are)”, and instead are going to spend a lot of words insisting “No, but my perspective really is better supported [according to me]”… after I just did you the favor of highlighting how revealing that would be… then again, the symmetry is already broken in the way that shows which one of us is blind to our limitations.
There’s another asymmetry though, which has eluded you:
Despite threatening to write me off, you still take me seriously enough to write a long comment trying to convince me that you’re right, and expect me to engage with it. Since you failed to answer the part that matters, I can’t even take you seriously enough to read it. Ironically, this would have been predictable to you if not for your stance on prediction errors, Lol.
Also, with a prediction error like that, you’re probably not having as much fun as I am, which is a shame. I’m genuinely sorry it turned out the way it did, as I was hoping we’d get somewhere interesting with this. I hope you can resolve your error before it eats at you too much, and that you can keep a sense of humor about things :)
Guess we’re done, then.
We can be, if you want. And I certainly wouldn’t blame you for wanting to bail after the way I teased you in the last comment.
I do want to emphasize that I am sincere in telling you that I hope it doesn’t eat at you too much, and that I hoped for the conversation to get somewhere interesting.
If you turn out to be a remarkably good sport about the teasing, and want to show me that you can represent how you were coming off to me, I’m still open to that conversation. And it would be a lot more respectful, because it would mean addressing the reason I couldn’t take your previous comment seriously.
No expectations, of course. Sincere best wishes either way, and I hope you forgive me for the tease.
Understanding crowds out prediction error, it does not necessarily crowd out negative emotions, which is part of the point of this article.
That is, I understand the last paragraph, but it does not then go ‘thus I feel kindness’ necessarily. There may be steps to take to try to help them up, but that does not necessitate kindness, I can feel disgust at someone I know who could do so much more while still helping them. Possibly one phrasing of it as based on your calculator example, is there’s no need for there to be a “lower expectations” step. I can still have the dominant negative emotion that the calculator and the calculator company did not include a battery, even if I understand why.
No, it actually does. Which is the point of my comment :P
When I say “prediction error” I don’t mean that you verbally say stuff like “I predict X” and not having bets scored in your favor. I mean that thing where your brain expects one thing, and sensory data coming up suggesting not that, and you get all uncomfortable because reality isn’t doing what it’s “supposed to”.
In other words, your actual predictions, not necessarily the things that you declare your predictions to be.
You could, yes, but it would require mismodeling them as someone who could do more than they actually can given the very real limitations which you may or may not understand yet. I can stay as furious as I want at the calculator, but only if I shut out of my mind the fact that of course it can’t work without a battery, stupid. The fact that I might say “I know I know, there’s no battery but...” doesn’t negate the fact that I’m deliberately acting without this knowledge. It just means I’m flinching away from this aspect of reality.
And it turns out, that’s not a good idea. Accurately modeling people, and credibly conveying these accurate models so that they can recognize and trust that you have accurately modeled them, is incredibly important for helping people. Good luck getting people to open themselves to your help while you view them as disgusting.
This is just kicking the can one step further. You can still be annoyed, but you can no longer be annoyed at “the stupid calculator!” for not working. You have to be annoyed at the company for not including batteries—if you can pull that one off.
But hey, why did they not include batteries? If it turns out that it’s illegal for whatever reason and they literally can’t because the authorities check, where goes your annoyance now?
If your reasoning results in “I can’t have negative emotions about things where I deeply understand the causes”, then I think you’ve made a misstep.
They could have done more. The choices were there in front of them, and they failed to choose them.
I will feel more positive flavored emotions like kindness/sadness if they’re pushed into hard choices where they have to decide between becoming closer to their ideal or putting food on the table; with the converse of feeling substantially less positive when the answer is they were browsing dazedly browsing social media. With enough understanding I could trace back the route which led to them relying more and more on social media as it fills some hole of socialization they lack, is easy to do, … and still retain my negative emotions while holding this deeper understanding.
I disagree that I am inaccurately modeling them, because I dispute the absolute connection between negative emotion and prediction error in the first place. I can understand them. I can accurately feel the mental pushes that push against their mind; I’ve felt them myself many times. And yet still be disquieted, disappointed in their actions.
Regardless, I do not have issues getting along with someone even if I experience negative emotions about how they’ve failed to reach farther in the past—just like I can do so even if their behavior, appearance, and so on are displeasing. This will be easier if I do something vaguely like John’s move of ‘thinking of them like a cat’, but it is not necessary for me to be polite and friendly.
Word-choice implication nitpick: Common usage of lower expectations means a mix of literal prediction and also moral/behavioral standards. I might have a ‘low expectation’ in the sense that a friend rarely arrives on time while still holding them ‘high expectations’ in the what-is-good sense!
No, I can be annoyed at the calculator and the company. There’s no need for my annoyance to be moved down the chain like I only have 1 Unit of Annoyance to divvy out. Or, you can view it as cumulative if that makes more sense, that it ties back into the overall emotions on the calculator. If I learn that supplying batteries is illegal, my annoyance with the company does decrease, but then it gets more moved primarily to the authorities. Some remains still, and I’m still annoyed at the calculator despite understanding why it doesn’t have a battery.
I do think the calculator metaphor starts to break apart, because a calculator is not the system that feeds-back-on-itself to then decide on no batteries.
Humans are complex, and I love them for it, their decisions, mindset, observations, thought processes, and so much more loop back in on themselves to shape the actions they take in the world. …That includes both their excellent actions where they do great things, reach farther, become closer to their ideals… as well as when they falter, when they get ground down by short-term optimization leaving them unable to focus on ways to improve themselves, and find themselves falling short. But that does mean my negative emotions will be more centered on humans, on their beliefs and more. Some of this negative evaluation bleeds off to social media companies optimizing short-form content feeds, or society in vague generality for lack of ambition, but as I said before it isn’t 1 Unit of Annoyance to spread around like jam.
That is, you’re talking this like the concept of blame, when negative emotions and blame are not necessarily the same thing. Paired with this: You appear to be implicitly taking a hard determinist sort of stance, wherein concepts like blame and ‘being able to choose otherwise’ start dissolving, but I find that direction questionable in the first-place. We can still judge people’s decisions, it is normal that their actions are influenced by their interactions with the world, and I can still feel negative emotions about their choices. That they were not able to do better, that their decisions did not go elsewise, that they failed to reinforce good decisions and more.
I do take a hard deterministic stance, so I’d like to hear your thoughts here. Do you agree w/ the following?
People literally can’t make different choices due to determinism
Laws & punishments are still useful for setting the right incentives that lead to better outcomes
You’re allowed to have negative emotions given other people’s actions (see #1), but those emotions don’t necessarily lead to better outcomes or incentives
I remember being 9 years old & being sad that my friend wasn’t going to heaven. I even thought “If I was born exactly like them, I would’ve made all the same choices & had the same experiences, and not believe in God”. I still think that if I’m 100% someone else, then I would end up exactly as they are.
I think the counterfactual you’re employing (correct me if wrong) is “if my brain was in their body, then I wouldn’t...” or “if I had their resources, then I wouldn’t...”, which is saying you’re only [80]% that person. You’re leaving out a part of them that made them who they are.
Now, you could still argue #2, that these negative emotions set correct incentives. I’ve only heard second-hand of extreme situations where that worked [1], but most of the time backfires
Son calls their parent after a while “Oh son, you never call! Shame shame”
Child says their sorry, but the parent demands them to show/feel remorse or it doesn’t count.
Guilt tripping in general, lol
What do you think?
One of my teacher’s I still talk to pushed a student against the wall, yelling at them that they’re wasting their life w/ drugs/etc, fully expecting to get fired afterwards. They didn’t get fired & the student cleaned up (I believe this was in the late 90′s though)
Yes. But also that people are still making those choices.
Yes. But I would point out that ‘punishment’ in the moral sense of ‘hurt those who do great wrongs’ still holds just fine in determinism for the same reasons it originally did, though I personally am not much of a fan
Yes, just like I can be happy in a situation where that doesn’t help me.
No, it is more that I am evaluating from multiple levels. There is
basic empathy: knowing their own standards and feeling them, understanding them.
‘idealized empathy’: Then I often have extended sort of classical empathy where I am considering based on their higher goals, which is why I often mention ideals. People have dreams they fail to reach, and I’d love them to reach further, and yet it disappoints me when they falter because my empathy reaches towards those too.
Values: Then of course my own values, which I guess could be considered the 80% that person, but I think I keep the levels separate; all the considerations have to come together in the end. I do have values about what they do, and how their mind succeeds.
Some commenters seemingly don’t consider the higher ideals sort or they think of most people in terms of short-term values; others are ignoring the lens of their own values.
So I think I’m doing multiple levels of emulation, of by-my-values, in-the-moment, reflection, etc. They all inform my emotions about the person.
And I agree. If I ‘became’ someone I was empathizing with entirely then I would make all their choices. However, I don’t consider that notably relevant! They took those actions, yes influenced by all there is in the world, but what else would influence them? They are not outside physics. Those choices were there, and all the factors that make up them as a person were what decided their actions.
If I came back to a factory the next day and notice the steam engine failed, I consider that negative even when knowing that there must have been a long chain of cause and effect. I’ll try fixing the causes… which usually ends up routing through whatever human mind was meant to work on the steam engine as we are very powerful reflective systems. For human minds themselves that have poor choices? That often routes back through themselves.
I do think that the hard-determinist stance often, though of course not always, comes from post-Christian style thought which views the soul as atomically special, but that they then still think of themselves as ‘needing to be’ outside physics in some important sense rather than fully adapting their ontology. That choices made within determinism are equivalent to being tied up by ropes, when there is actually a distinction between the two scenarios.
A negative emotion can still push me to spend more effort on someone, though it usually needs to be paired with a belief that they could become better. Just because you have a negative emotion doesn’t mean you only output negative-emotion flavored content. I’ll generally be kind to people even if I think their choices are substantially flawed and that they could improve themselves.
I do think that the example of your teacher is one that can work, I’ve done it at least once though not in person, and it helped but it definitely isn’t my central route. This is effectively the ‘staging an intervention’ methodology, and it can be effective but requires knowledge and benefits greatly from being able to push the person.
But, as John is making the point, a negative emotion may not be what people are wanting, because I’m not going to have a strong kindness about how hard someone’s choices were… when I don’t respect those choices in the first place. However, giving them full positive empathy is not necessarily good either, it can feel nice but rarely fixes things. Which is why you focus on ‘fixing things’, advice, pointing out where they’ve faltered, and more if you think they’ll be receptive. They often won’t be, because most people have a mix of embarrassment at these kinds of conversations and a push to ignore them.
I certainly understand why you think that. I used to think that myself. I pushed back myself when I first heard someone take such a “ridiculous” stance. And yet, it proved to be true, so I changed my mind.
The thing that I was missing then, and which you’re missing now, is that the bar for deep careful analysis is just a lot higher than you think (or most anyone thinks). It’s often reasonable to skimp out and leave it as “because they’re bad/lazy/stupid”/”they shouldn’t have” or whatever you want to round it to, but these things are semantic stopsigns, not irreducible explanations.
Pick an issue, any issue, and keep at the analysis until you do get to something irreducible. Okay, so you’ve kicked the can one step further and are upset with the people who banned shipping batteries or whatever. Why did they do it? Keep asking “Why? Why? Why?” like a curious two year old, until there is no more “why?”. If, after you feel like you’ve hit the end of the road, you still have annoyance with the calculator itself, go back and ask why? “I’m annoyed that the calculator doesn’t work… without batteries?” How do you finish the statement of annoyance?
The way I was initially convinced of this was by picking something fake, subjecting myself to that “overconfident” guy’s incessant questioning, with an expectation of proving to him that it was endless. It wasn’t, he won. Since then I’ve done it with many more real things, and the answer is always the same. Empirically, what happens, is that you can keep going and keep going, until you can’t, and at that point there’s just no more negative around that spot because it’s been crowded out. It doesn’t matter if it’s annoyance, or sadness, or even severe physical pain. If you do your analysis well, the experience shifts, and loses its negativity.
If you’re feeling “badness” and you think you have a full understanding, that feeling of badness itself contains the clues about where you’re wrong.
This is a bit of a distraction, but Thane covered it pretty well:
In other words, there are reasons for their choices. Do you understand why they chose the way they did?
Notice the movement of goal posts here? I’m talking about successfully helping people, you’re saying you can “get along”. Getting along is easy. I’m sure you can offer what passes as empathy to the girl with the nail in her head, instead of fighting her like a beliggerent dummy.
But can you exclaim “You got a nail in your head, you dummy!” and have her laugh with you, because you’re obviously correct? If you can’t trivially get her to agree that the problem is the nail, and figure out with you what to do about it, then your mismodeling is getting in the way.
This higher level of ability is achievable, and the path to get there is better modeling than you thought possible.
No, I believe I’m fully aware the level of deep careful analysis, and I understand why it pushes some people to sweep all facets of negativity or blame away, I just think they’re confused because their understanding of emotions/relations/causality hasn’t updated properly alongside their new understanding of determinism
Because I wanted the calculator to work, I think it is a good thing for calculators in stores to work, I am frustrated that the calculator didn’t work… none of this is exotic, nor is it purely prediction error. (nor do prediction error related emotions have to go away once you’ve explained the error… I still feel emotional pain when a pet dies even if I realize all the causes why; why would that not extend to other emotions related to prediction error?)
You assert this but I still don’t agree with it. I’ve thought long and hard about people before and the causes that make them do things, but no, this does not match my experience. I understand the impulse that encourages sweeping away negative emotions once you’ve found an explanation, like realizing that humanities’ lack of coordination is a big problem, but I can still very well feel negative emotions about that despite there being an explanation.
Relatively often? Yes. I don’t blame people for not outputting the code for an aligned AGI because it is something that would have been absurdly hard to reinforce in yourself to become the kind of person to do that.
If someone has a disease that makes so they struggle to do much at all, I am going to judge them a hell of a lot less. Most humans have the “disease” that they can’t just smash out the code for an aligned AGI.
I can understand why someone is not investing more time studying, and I can even look at myself and relatively well pin down why, and why it is hard to get over that hump… I just don’t dismiss the negative feeling even though I understand why. They ‘could have’, because the process-that-makes-their-decisions is them and not some separate third-thing.
I fail to study when I should because a combination of short-term optimized positive feeling seeking which leads me to watching youtube or skimming X, a desire for faster intellectual feelings that are easier gotten from arguing on reddit (or lesswrong) than slowly reading through a math paper, because I fear failure, and much more. Yet I still consider that bad, even if I got a full causal explanation it would have still been my choices.
I don’t have issues with helping people, there “goalposts” moved forward again, despite nothing in my sentence meaning I can’t help people. My usage of ‘get along’ was not the bare minimum meaning.
Getting along with people in the nail scenario often means being friendly and listening to them. I can very well do that, and have done it many times before, while still thinking their individual choices are foolish.
I don’t think your comment has supplied much more beyond further assertions that I must surely not be thinking things through.
How did you arrive at this belief? Like, the thing that I would be concerned with is “How do I know that Russel’s teapot isn’t just beyond my current horizon”?
Oh no, nothing is being swept away. Definitely not that. More on this with the grieving thing below.
The prediction error goes away when you update your prediction to match reality, not when you recite an explanation for why your current beliefs are clashing. You can keep predicting poorly all you want. If you want to keep feeling bad and getting poor results, I guess.
With a good explanation, you don’t have to.
Yes, you’re still losing your pet, and that still sucks. That’s real, and there’s no getting away from what’s real. You don’t get to accurate maps painlessly, let alone effortlessly. There’s no “One simple trick for not having to feel negative emotions!”.
The question is how this works. It’s very much not as simple as “Okay, I said he ded now I’m done grieving”. Because again, that’s not your predictions. The moment that you notice the fact that “he’s dead” is true can be long before you start to update your actual object level beliefs, and it’s a bit bizarre but also completely makes sense that it’s not until you start to update your beliefs that it hits you.
Even after you update the central belief, and even after you resolve all the “But why!?” questions that come up, you still expect to see everyone for Christmas. Until you realize that you can’t because someone is no longer alive, and update that prediction too. You think of something you’d have wanted to show him, and have to remember you can’t do that anymore. There are a bazillion little ways that those we care about become entwined with our lives, and grieving the loss of someone important is no simple task. You actually have to propagate this fact through to all the little things it effects, and correct all the predictions that required his life to fulfil.
Yet as you grieve, these things come up less and less frequently. Over time, you run out of errant predictions like “It’s gonna be fun to see Benny when—Oh fuck, no, that’s not happening”. Eventually, you can talk about their death like it’s just another thing that is, because it is.
Is it possible, do you think, that the way you’re doing analysis isn’t sufficient, and that if you were to be more careful and thorough, or otherwise did things differently, your experience would be different? If not, how do you rule this out, exactly? How do you explain others who are able to do this?
:) I appreciate it, thanks.
I’m holding the goal posts even further forward though. Friendly listening is one thing, but I’m talking about pointing out that they’re acting foolish and getting immediate laughter in recognition that you’re right. This is the level of ability that I’m pointing at. This is what is what’s there to aim for, which is enabled by sufficiently clear maps.
It contained a bit more than that. I checked to make sure I wasn’t being too opaque (it happens), but Claude can show you what you missed, if you care.
The big thing I was hoping you’d notice, is that I was trying to make my claims so outrageous and specific so that you’d respond “You can’t say this shit without providing receipts, man! So lets see them!”. I was daring you to challenge me to provide evidence. I wonder if maybe you thought I was exaggerating, or otherwise rounding my claims down to something less absurd and falsifiable?
Anyway, there are a few things in your comment that suggest you might not be having fun here. If that’s the case, I’m sorry about that. No need to continue if you don’t want, and no hard feelings either way.
Empirical evidence of being more in tune with my own emotions, generally better introspection, and in modeling why others make decisions. Compared to others. I have no belief that I’m perfect at this, but I do think I’m generally good at it and that I’m not missing a ‘height’ component to my understanding.
Because, (I believe) the impulse to dismiss any sort of negativity or blame once you understand the causes deep enough is one I’ve noticed myself. I do not believe it to be a level of understanding that I’ve failed to reach, I’ve dismissed it because it seems an improper framing.
At times the reason for this comes from a specific grappling with determinism and choice that I disagree with.
For others, the originating cause is due to considering kindness as automatically linked with empathy, with that unconsciously shaping what people think is acceptable from empathy.
In your case, some of it is tying it purely to prediction that I disagree with, because of some mix of kindness-being-the-focus, determinism, a feeling that once it has been explained in terms of the component parts that there’s nothing left, and other factors that I don’t know because they haven’t been elucidated.
Empirical exploration as in your example can be explanatory. However, I have thought about motivation and the underlying reasons to a low granularity plenty of times (impulses that form into habits, social media optimizing for short form behaviors, the heuristics humans come with which can make doing it now hard to weight against the cost of doing it a week from now, how all of those constrain the mind...), which makes me skeptical. The idea of ‘shift the negativity elsewhere’ is not new, but given your existing examples it does not convince me that if I spent an hour with you on this that we would get anywhere.
This, for example, is a misunderstanding of my position or the level of analysis that I’m speaking of. Wherein I am not stopping there, as I mentally consider complex social cause and effect and still feel negative about the choices they’ve made.
Grief like this exists, but I don’t agree that it is pure predictive remembrance. There is grief which lasts for a time and then fades away, not because my lower level beliefs are prediction to see them—away from home and a pet dies, I’m still sad, not because of prediction error but because I want (but wants are not predictions) the pet to be alive and fine, but they aren’t. Because it is bad, to be concise.
You could try arguing that this is ‘prediction that my mental model will say they are alive and well’, with two parts of myself in disagreement, but that seems very hard to determine the accuracy as an explanation and I think is starting to stretch the meaning of prediction error. Nor does the implication that ‘fully knowing the causes’ carves away negative emotion follow?
This is more about socialization ability, though having a clear map helps. I’ve done this before, with parents and joking with a friend about his progress on a project, but I do not do so regularly nor could I do it in arbitrarily. Joking itself is only sometimes the right route, the more general capability is working a push into normal conversation, with joking being one tool in the toolbox there. I don’t really accept the implication ‘and thus you are mismodeling via negative emotions if you can not do that consistently’. I can be mismodeling to the degree that I don’t know precisely what words will satisfy them, but that can be due to social abilities.
When you don’t provide much argumentation, I don’t go ‘huh, guess I need to prod them for argumentation’ I go ‘ah, unfortunate, I will try responding to the crunchy parts in the interests of good conversation, but will continue on’. That is, the onus is on you to provide reasons. I did remark that you were asserting without much backing.
I was taking you literally, and I’ve seen plenty of people fall back without engaging—I’ve definitely done it during the span of this discussion, and then interpreting your motivations through that. ‘I am playing a game to poke and prod at you’ is uh.....
A good chunk of it is the ~condescension. Repeated insistence while seeming to mostly just continue on the same line of thought without really engaging where I elaborate, goalpost gotcha, and then the bit about Claude when you just got done saying that it was to ‘test’ me; which it being to prod me being quite annoying in-of-itself.
Of course, I think you have more positive intent behind that. Pushing me to test myself empirically, or pushing me to push back on you so then you can push back yourself on me to provide empirical tests (?), or perhaps trying to use it as an empathy test for whether I understand you. I’m skeptical of you really understanding my position given your replies.
I feel like I’m being better at engaging at the direct level, while you’re often doing ‘you would understand if you actually tried’, when I believe I have tried to a substantial degree even if nothing precisely like ‘spend two hours mapping cause and effect of how a person came to these actions’.
Hm. Given the way you responded here, I don’t think it’s worth my time to continue. Given the work you put into this comment I feel like I at least owe you an explanation if you want one, but I’ll refrain unless you ask.
That goes back to “thinking of the person like a cat”. And I guess I do then empathize with them in the same way I empathize with cats.
Except that they’re not cats, right?
When I accept that a calculator won’t work without batteries, that’s not “thinking of the calculator like a rock”, and choosing to not notice the differences between the calculator and a rock so as to avoid holding it to higher standards. I’m still looking at the calculator as a calculator, just more specifically, as a calculator which doesn’t have any batteries—because that’s what it is. The idea is to move towards more detailed and accurate models, not less. Because this gives you options to improve the calculator by adding batteries.
Your words imply that you have expectations for “humans” which empirically do not seem to be holding up so far as you can tell. Rather than turning away from this failed expectation, saying “I won’t even think of them as human”, look into it. Why, exactly, are people failing to behave in the ways you think they should? Why is it wrong of you to expect people to behave in the ways you wished they would?
Or, put another way, what is the missing constraint that you’re not seeing, and how can you provide it such that people can and will live up to the standards you want to hold for them? (easier said than done, but doable nonetheless)
Intelligence and personality, which are both largely innate.
Genetic engineering…?
(EDIT: And, like, UBI / social safety nets / reform the education system / solve unemployment / cure all diseases / etc. All of these things would surely improve many people’s ability to perform well in life.)
You may not be doing enough of putting yourself into her shoes. Specifically, you seem to be putting yourself into her material circumstances, as if you switched minds (and got her memories et cetera), instead of, like… imagining yourself also having her world-model and set of crystallized-intelligence heuristics and cognitive-bandwidth limitations.[1] Putting your inner homunculus in the place of her inner homunculus.
One of the complications in agent foundations is that a bounded agent’s effective action-space is much more limited than its physical action-space. There is, for example, a sequence of keystrokes you can execute right now that would result in your outputting the code of an aligned AGI. This is an action that is technically available to “you” – but it’s obviously not available to you in any relevant sense. The failure to model that would be a failure.
It’s subtler in cases where, like, “some part of the person knows what they need to do to fix their situation but they can’t bring themselves to admit it and do it”, or whatever. It’s not as straightforward as directly missing knowledge; not isomorphic to lacking the key to an encrypted file. But I think it’s directionally similar: they’re not making decisions in the decision-theoretic landscape you model them as occupying.
From the perspective of someone with a nail stuck in their head, the world does not look like there’s a nail stuck in their head which they could easily remove in order to improve their life in ways in which they want it to be improved. The world looks like a confused muddle, a constantly shifting dreamscape. They’re not sure whether the nail is real, whether the nail can be removed, whether removing the nail would help, whether removing the nail is what they want. Their models of all of those things also keep wildly oscillating on a day-to-day basis: they can’t act as a coherent agent over long horizons because neither their world-model nor their desires are stable. And even when they happen to be in the “removing the nail will fix it!” mental state, they’re often just unable to make their body execute those motions: they lack the willpower/executive function/whatever-mental-resource to act on such plans, even when they manage to form them. Which, I think, is closer to “being unable to raise your arm because your muscles are crucially fatigued” rather than to “a personal choice/failure”.
They’re best modeled not as agents who are being willfully obstinate, but as people helplessly trapped in the cognitive equivalents of malfunctioning motorized exoskeletons.
Or, another frame, which is pretty uncharitable but is probably directionally correct: imagine them as yourself with brain damage. You can’t move from the brain-damaged mind-state to a pre-injury mind-state by a sequence of normal human mental motions. Similarly, it’s not a set of actions actually available to these people, for them to “snap out of it” and become John-like.
On that note: Based on what I wrote above, one might expect me to be imbued with some sort of heartfelt emotions-level universal love. But… no, not really.
I do want everyone in the world to be happy and live good lives. Not only intellectually, I feel strongly about this. But those desires and feelings don’t route through emotional empathy in me.
On the emotional level, I don’t like most people. I find it easy to empathize with them in the deep way described above, but this does nothing to make me want to be friends with them. The “enjoying cats’ company” mental motion doesn’t come easily to me; my default emotions-level stance towards them is… disinterest.
Which is to say, doing empathy correctly indeed wouldn’t necessarily make one kinder. It’s possible to empathize with someone deeply enough to make all their faults understandable and their mistakes forgivable, and still not like them on a personal level.
But I do think you’re failing to empathize deeply enough here.
Edit: Oh, didn’t read the comments before posting, I see everyone already said that. I have more analogies though. :P
I think this is false. It’s like the old “dragon in the garage” parable: the woman is too good at systematically denying the things which would actually help to not have a working model somewhere in there. It’s very much a case of “some part of the person knows what they need to do to fix their situation but they can’t bring themselves to admit it and do it”, and that does not look from-the-inside like “a confused muddle, a constantly shifting dreamscape”.
Yes, it is probably true that “some part of them knows what they need to do.” This does not mean all of their options are clearly laid out before them and they constantly make the conscious and informed decision that you would be able to make in their situation, and think “yes, I will choose the obviously worse option, because I’m just that self-destructive and lazy.”
It means something more like “they are trapped in a cognitive whirlpool of suffering, and the set of options in their head is not enough to swim out of it.” Importantly, a complete sense of empathy must be recursive, where you recognize that the mental motions you would easily make to fix the situation (or to fix the inability to fix the situation, etc.) are not available to them.
If this feels too exculpatory: imagine your friend now has a device built into their head that gives them an electric shock every time they try to do math. The device also has an ejection mechanism, but they also get a shock every time they think about the device or how to remove it. (For whatever reason it’s impossible for anyone else to forcibly remove the device from your friend’s head.) Not only that, but thinking about “building up the willpower to withstand electric shocks” also gives them an electric shock!
Seeing a person in this situation would make me feel deeply sad, not disgusted. The part of them that wants to do math and the device in their head are in direct conflict, and at least in the current equilibrium there is no way for them to come to an agreement. Not only will they be unable to reap the many benefits of doing math, they will get a bunch of needless shocks every time they encounter a situation where math is needed—they will attempt to do math, get a shock, think about the stupid device, get another shock, think about the device again, get another shock… If they want to avoid being shocked, the most “rational” option available to them is to avoid math entirely, which is itself a pretty terrible and sad solution.
Having previously argued the other side of this, I’ll now say: I think the next question is “what useful thing is John’s disgust doing?”. It’s probably within John’s action space to (perhaps effortfully) switch from feeling disgust to feeling sadness here for these reasons.
Realistically, this is not near the top of John’s priorities regardless, but if I were John and if this were reasonably cheap, my crux would be “does making this change cost me something important/loadbearing”. (I guess in the worlds where it’s cheap to change aesthetics here, it’s probably not very costly, and if it’s expensive it’s because this is woven through a lot of other important decisionmaking processes for John)
((I’d bet it’s at least theoretically achievable to make that switch without John losing other things he cares about except the rewiring-time, but, nontrivial))
I think a lot of people automatically connect empathic-kindness to a ‘this is fine’ stance, I see a lot of it in how people phrase things in the comments of this post, and I notice it in myself because I, well, empathize with John because I have similar feelings at times even if seemingly not as strong.
So, it can feel risky to get rid of that, because in a way it is part of how I keep my standards up. That I desire/require more from people, that I dream for both myself and them to be better, and some amount of disquiet or even disgust is a useful tool there. I’m still polite, but it serves as a fuel.
It is certainly possible to get around without that. However I look at various people I respect that have high standards and they seem to have some degree of this though perhaps they don’t conceptualize it as related to empathy, and then I look at others who I do see lowering their standards and being more wishy-washy over time due to pure ~positive-tinged empathy. Sadness at their faltering is a more passive drive in a lot of ways, disgust helps both in pushing oneself to improve and also in my experience with convincing friends of mine to try for more. Though, of course, I am going to be helpful and friendly even as I find their faltering disquieting. So it feels like to deliberately switch in such a way risks part of the mind that maintains its own standards.
that is very interesting claim! why you believe it? my experience is that my aesthetics are part of ,y preference—not choose by me, almost impossible to change. I don’t feel disgust, but i don’t think i can switch easily if i decided so. in the same way i can’t decide mechs are cool, or dragons are uncool.
@Caleb Biddulph’s reply seems right to me. Another tack:
I think you’re still imagining too coherent an agent. Yes, perhaps there is a slice through her mind that contains a working model which, if that model were dropped into the mind of a more coherent agent, could be used to easily comprehend and fix the situation. But this slice doesn’t necessarily have executive conscious control at any given moment, and if it ever does, it isn’t necessarily the same slice that contains her baseline/reflectively endorsed personality.
E. g., perhaps, at any given moment, only part of that model is visible to the conscious mind, a 3D object sliding through a 2D plane, and the person can’t really take in the whole of it at once, realize how ridiculous they’re being, and act on it rationally. Or perhaps the thought of confronting the problem causes overwhelming distress due to malfunctioning emotional circuitry, and so do the thoughts of fixing that circuitry, in a way that recurses on itself indefinitely/in the style of TD learning. Or something else that’s just as messy.
Human brains haven’t solved self-interpretability, and human minds aren’t arranged into even the approximate shape of coherent agents by default. Just because there’s a module in there somewhere which implements a model of X doesn’t mean the person can casually reach in and do things with that module.
Edit: After reading your other responses, yeah, “not modeling them as creatures particularly similar to yourself” might just be the correct approach. I, uh, also don’t find people with weak metacognitive skills particularly relatable.
To expand on that...
In my mental ontology, there’s a set of specific concepts and mental motions associated with accountability: viewing people as being responsible for their actions, being disappointed in or impressed by their choices, modeling the assignment of blame/credit as meaningful operations. Implicitly, this requires modeling other people as agents: types of systems which are usefully modeled as having control over their actions. To me, this is a prerequisite for being able to truly connect with someone.
When you apply the not-that-coherent-an-agent lens, you do lose that. Because, like, which parts of that person’s cognition should you interpret as the agent making choices, and which as parts of the malfunctioning exoskeleton the agent has no control over? You can make some decision about that, but this is usually pretty arbitrary. If someone is best modeled like this, they’re not well-modeled as an agent, and holding them accountable is a category error. They’re a type of system that does what it does.
You can still invoke the social rituals of “blame” and “responsibility” if you expect that to change their behavior, but the mental experience of doing so is very different. It’s more like calculating the nudges you need to make to prompt the desired mechanistic behavior, rather than as interfacing with a fellow person. In the latter case, you can sort of relax, communicate in a way focused on transferring information, instead of focusing on the form of communication, and trust them to make correct inferences. In the former case, you need to keep precise track of tone/wording/aesthetics/etc., and it’s less “communication” and more “optimization”.
I really dislike thinking of people in this way, and I try to adopt the viewing-them-as-a-person frame whenever it’s at all possible. But the other frame does unfortunately seem to be useful in many cases. Trying to do otherwise often feels like reaching out for someone’s hand and finding nothing there.
If this is what you meant by viewing others as cats, yeah, that tracks.
Edit: Oh, nice timing.
Yeah, that.
If you have a literal nail on your head, it might affect you more than just give you headaches and snag your sweaters.
It can also affect your cognition, decision making, and emotional response. Empathy in this case ideally entails more than imagining “what if my mind, controlled by my immortal soul and nothing else, is plucked into the head of a woman with a nail in her head?” and instead imagine if your brain will react similarly to hers.
How this analogy extends further is left as an exercise to the reader.
Well, I can certainly emphasize with the feeing that compromising on a core part of your identity is threatening ;-)
More seriously, what you are describing as empathy seems to be asking the question:
“What if my mind was transported into their bodies?”
rather than
“What if I was (like) them, including all the relevant psychological and emotional factors?”
The latter question should lead feelings of disgust iff the target experiences feelings of disgust.
Of course, empathy is all the more difficult when the person you are trying to emphasize with is very different from you. Being an outlier can clearly make this harder. But unless you have never experienced any flavour of learned helplessness/procrastination/akrasia, you have the necessary ingredients to extrapolate.
On my model of empathy, you should feel what the subject feels in a sort of sandboxed mode, but this is (usually) a strategy for understanding them, and then you take that understanding out of the sandbox and you feel the way you feel about the situation that is revealed by that understanding.
It seems perfectly plausible that empathizing with a lazy person makes you feel contentment or apathy “inside the sandbox” and then this causes you to feel disgust outside the sandbox. That doesn’t imply to me that you’re doing empathy wrong.
If you mean to suggest that the simulated feelings from inside the sandbox should be exported and you should feel them in primary reality as a replacement for what you would otherwise feel, then I don’t think you’re describing “empathy” as most people use the term, and I don’t endorse that as a strategy. That seems like it would lead to obvious problems like e.g. empathy for a suicidal person resulting in you wanting to kill that person (or maybe wanting to kill yourself, depending on how the references are exported).
I think you make an important point in this context- understanding that all the emotions you’re “feeling” are still coming from you, not from them.
“A monk rowed out to the middle of a calm lake to meditate. A while later, they were bumped into and interrupted by another boat! The monk opened their eyes in anger, ready to chide the other monk for being so careless and making them so angry… to find the other boat empty. The anger was inside them, not from another monk.”
I don’t think that koan is drawing the same distinction that I was drawing (and therefore suspect you may have misinterpreted me). I was contrasting a scenario where you feel emotions (inside the sandbox) that are shaped by the empathy-subject’s desires and principles, and then feel different emotions (outside the sandbox) shaped by your own desires and principles.
I agree in a technical sense that all the emotions you feel are coming from you (including the ones inside the sandbox), although I also think that emotions are usually a response to your circumstances (and the relation between you and those circumstances) and that they can be appropriate or inappropriate responses to those circumstances. I think it (usually) doesn’t make sense to try to understand emotions by considering only the person and ignoring their circumstances. Thus, the koan seems wrong-headed to me.
(The koan’s analysis of its own scenario also seems very shallow—the fact that no one is inside the boat does not mean that no one is at fault! Why wasn’t the boat properly secured to the dock? This doesn’t particularly matter if the koan is just trying to point to a concept so that you know what the speaker is even referring to, but it’s a weakness if the koan is trying to be persuasive.)
I was simply trying to decorate a compliment, so I suppose I will stop doing that 🤔 (EDIT: from a later vantage point, I think I now see it’s better to say “sorry for adding a distraction” rather than passively projecting blame.)
(I for one quite enjoyed the koan, even if it is not drawing quite the same distinction that dweomite was drawing. That is ok. And hey, it triggered further clarification from dweomite, which is a fine outcome.)
That koan doesn’t really seem to be related to what we’re discussing.
That aside (and this is mostly off-topic, because—see previous line), the koan also seems to “rig the thought experiment”—the author makes it easy for himself. Consider an alternative version:
“A monk rowed out to the middle of a calm lake to meditate. A while later, he was bumped into and interrupted by another boat! The monk opened his eyes in anger, and saw that the rowboat was occupied by another monk, who was deliberately bumping his rowboat into the first monk’s boat. The first monk berated the second monk for doing this, yelling at him to stop, as this was making him angry and making it impossible for him to meditate. But the second monk replied that the anger was inside the first monk, not coming from anywhere else; ‘suppose that there were no one in this boat,’ he said; ‘suppose that it were just the wind causing the boats to bump into each other—you would still be angry!’. Meanwhile he continued to bump his rowboat into the first monk’s boat. The first monk tried to ignore the distraction and resume his meditations, but was unable to do so. Meanwhile the second monk bumped the boats together harder, and the first monk’s boat capsized, dumping its occupant into the water. ‘What you’re feeling is still inside yourself!’ called the second monk down to the first monk as the latter drowned in the lake.”
To be clearer, the koan is meant to be related only to a sub-item of a sub-item of a comment: “you are simulating their emotions”, rather than the original post or to any entire comment.
Empathy does not just stop when you consider that their life shaped them that way! Empathy is part of emulating their mind, why they might behave in this way, and then dragging that back to how your mind understands things. Empathy is still and should be integrated within your understanding of the world, your values, even if you understand that they are shaped differently. You can still be displeased, unhappy that they’ve been shaped in a certain way, disquieted because they do not grasp for all that they can be. I feel empathy for someone who has faltered, failed to reach even if they do not even want to reach for more because of how they’ve been affected by life.
As well, even if I take the strict latter definition and proceed from their mental frame entirely, that still entails some degree of disquiet. People often wish that they could be more, find things easier, be less stressed but then fail to take routes that lead to that which are visible from the outside but hard to see from the inside.
At that point I’m just back to thinking about them as cats.
Perhaps my terminology in the post was wrong, since I do in fact empathize with cats, and I can empathize with humans the same way I empathize with cats without inducing disgust/disappointment. That’s part of the suspension of disbelief; I empathize with them in a way which does not involve thinking of them as creatures very similar to me.
Can you expand on how you interact with cats? Do you spend much thought hypothesizing about what a cat is thinking? I do, and find it to make a significant difference in (kitty petting frequency) outcomes even though the information rate is so low and I always have many hypotheses; if that isn’t what you mean then I’d like to understand in detail what kind of modeling you’re doing when you interact with a cat “as a cat”.
Yeah, I track (my guesses of) what the cat is thinking/feeling, and one part of that is putting myself in their place and experiencing (what I believe to be) some of their feelings.
That doesn’t sound like empathy; it sounds more like you go through life viewing other people as without agency and remembering they have agency disgusts you. There’s a step beyond that where you run a sandboxed emulation of their mindset, which is IMO what’s typically meant by empathy.
I think proper guide for alignment researcher here is to:
Understand other people as made-of-gears cognitive engines, i.e., instead of “they don’t bother to apply effort for some reason” “they don’t bother to apply effort because they learned in the course of their life that extra effort is not rewarded”, or something like that. You don’t even need to build comprehensive model, you just can list more than two hypotheses about possible gears and not assume “no gears, just howling abyss”.
Realize that it would require supernatual intervention for them to have your priorities and approaches.
I would suggest that this dehumanization is a problem to be fixed. One of the key functions of empathy seems to be recognition of equal moral worth and complexity, which tends to induce kindness and gentleness. This is why empathy is a good method for de-escalation.
It seems like you’re conflating empathy with a lack of judgement—one can relate to someone’s situation without approving of their (lack of) ambition.
EDIT: Maybe a better distinction here is projection/empathy. Trying to understand why someone might not be interested in emotional support over growth while still respecting them as a full person (e.g. not a cat) is the latter, while imagining them being in a bad situation yet having the same agentic mindset as you is the former. Empathy helps you make better theories of mind, meaningfully support others, etc.
This comment seems internally contradictory. You say “empathy seems to be recognition of equal moral worth and complexity”, and then two sentences later “one can relate to someone’s situation without approving of their (lack of) ambition”. So which is it? Does empathy imply recognition of equal moral worth, or doesn’t it?
Sorry about the miscommunication! If I understand correctly, you claim that
“Empathy involves recognizing equal moral worth and complexity” contradicts “you can empathize with someone without approving of their lack of ambition.”
These are contradictory iff being ambitious/agentic/etc. is a prerequisite for equal moral worth. I strongly disagree; a person doesn’t have any less moral worth because they’re unambitious.
It’s not a defined sentence to say, “everyone has equal moral worth”. If I said, “every integer has an equal chance of being chosen,” how exactly do I choose one?
The neat thing about hypotheticals is you can use them, even if they’re internally inconsistent. For example, if I asked you what would happen if gravity suddenly stopped, well… the universe would cease to exist. But you can still play with the idea, and say something like, “we’d all float off the Earth.” Saying everyone has “equal worth” is another of those funny hypotheticals. It’s not defined, but we can play with it and say stuff like, “then I guess everyone deserves food, water, and shelter.”
The issue with these kind of games is they don’t actually help you understand the world. They can help you make a pretend world where people are usually happy, but eventually, anytime you’re playing pretend, you’re going to bump against a facet of the real world where people would be happier acknowledging it. This is why I usually encourage people to define their terms, and make sure they can construct their ideology, so we both know where it really comes from. So, to you:
Where does “moral worth” come from?
How do you actually weigh different people’s moral worth? If I consider my pet rock a person, will he get equal consideration to your grandma?
My answers are:
From the ability to take mutually beneficial actions (e.g. a honeybee giving me honey in exchange for food and shelter).
Well, it shouldn’t matter too much as long as every weight is positive, eh?
Sure, I probably should’ve been more precise in my wording, although I’ll note that my point still got across concisely. The answers to your questions are wrapped up in lots of morality/ethics/prickly questions, but here’s my thoughts with ~30 seconds of thinking:
1. Moral patients have some level of self-awareness, consciousness(?), and capacity for suffering.
2. Agree—doesn’t really matter.
I haven’t dug into the literature and arguments around moral patienthood, but would love to at some point.
These seem like excessive and unusual demands in the context of such a discussion. I concede there is some argument to be had for defining the terms since they are inherently vague, but this is not a philosophical treatise where that feels more appropriate. This feels similar to how in arguments about AGI some folks argue that you should not use the word intelligence (as in intelligence explosigion) since it is undefined. Moral worth, just as intelligence, seems like a useful enough concept to apply without needing to define it. To wit, John originally indicated disgust at people less ambitious than him and used the words “so-called fellow humans”, and at that depth of analysis it feels congruent for other people to intuit that he assigns less moral worth to these people and vaguely argue against it.
When people talk about intelligence, they’re hinting at something they haven’t yet been able to define, but are pretty sure has a good definition. It’s like in the 1800s when physicists came up with the ‘electric force’. Where does it come from? Who knows, but someone will eventually figure it out and come up with a good definition (gauge theory + Wigner’s classification). Until then, they make do with an approximation. By the way, I do think intelligence is well-defined, and here is its definition:
I’m not so opposed to people using heuristics or approximations, I’m just opposed to doing so when they’re wrong. If someone says, “this heuristic doesn’t seem to be working for me,” and your only rebuttal is, “but the heuristic says...” you probably should check that the heuristic actually applies. And the best way of doing that is figuring out what you really believe.
Absolutely. It generally seems to have worked for society to spend a lot of effort into brainwashing people into saying, “everyone is equal, and thus they deserve <things that are good for society when most people get them>.” The point of saying “everyone is equal” isn’t because it makes society better to believe so, it’s because it makes society better to believe this is a well-defined justification of all the other things that we should give people. Probably the reason this was the justification used, and not something like, “the forest smiles upon the generous” is because… oh wait, that justification has also been used. But “everyone is equal” actually is a little better, because it applies a neat symmetry trick that makes it easier to find the best actions (note: this is the heuristic).
My hypothesis is when people[1] say “I don’t want you to help I want you to listen”, they mean “your suggestions suck and I don’t want to deal with them, but I would like some mammal comfort”.
it’s me, I’m people
I do not think that’s the typical case more broadly, but it’s definitely a thing which happens and which I sympathize with.
It sounds like you’re not really empathizing, even when you say you’re trying to do so. Emotional empathy involves feeling someone else’s feelings, and cognitive empathy involves understanding their mental processes. What you seem to be doing is imagining yourself in a superficially similar situation, and then judging the other person on their failure to behave how (you imagine) you would.
TLDR: Skill issue.
Empathy is not: That person acts like this. How would I feel if I acted like this? Oh, absolutely disgusted of myself.
Empathy is: This person acts like this. How must he feel inside to act like this? Have I ever felt like that? Can I understand or extrapolate from my experiences how this would be? Maybe from my internal states when I was really exhausted or hangry or drunk or in rage or depressed? Could I imagine having this internal state so that I would act like this? This also involves how the internal state would have to be different to not feel disgusted of yourself.
By the time I’ve adjusted for enough factors that I wouldn’t feel disgusted with myself, I’m back to thinking of the person as a cat. They’re just not a creature particularly similar to me at all.
It seems as if you think of most people as cats. Does this mean that your AI safety work is largely motivated by ‘animal welfare’-like concerns, or do you mainly do it for the rest of the people who you don’t think of as cats?
Neither. I don’t want to die to AI, and I don’t want the universe to be optimized into a shape an AI likes rather than a shape I like (because I expect I would not like the AI’s preferred shape at all). Having lots of flourishing humans is one big part of a shape I like, but I’m not really doing it for their benefit.
A world I like would probably also include many cool flowers, but I’m not doing the work for the flowers’ benefit.
You… might need more Kant?
“Never use a person purely as means, but rather always also at least partially as ends in themselves” is the starting injunction from which to derive most of the other stuff.
Once you do that over and over, you’ll begin to notice regularities in the proof tactics and lemmas that come up, and think about how these logical structures would work if copied over and over...
...and another formulation that might lead to the “the same categorical imperative” IS SIMPLY just “do that which would be great if everyone did it” and then trying to unpack that logically in specific cases, noticing different roles, different promises, different duties...
...either way you eventually start seeing Natural Law, in the convergently (across situations) useful reasoning patterns that arise. You’re likely to notice that Natural Law is very big, and gets complex for N-person systems, and that you don’t understand it very well yet (and probably at its outer reaches it requires solving NP-hard optimization problems), but your life would go better if you did, and other people would be nicer to be around if they also understood it more.
You gain light context-sensitive attachments to some of it, and get the ability to warn people when you might have to predictably tit-for-tat them if they defect in predictable ways! You become a more morally mature person, who causes less accidental harm, and recognizes formal debts more reliably.
A coherently articulable conscience, based in an assumption of universal moral reasoning accessible at least in theory to all persons, leads to greater continence (a good word, used in many different ways by many different philosophers (I often just use the word to mean: less likely to metaphorically “pee” on stuff like an oblivious dog)) <3
But then yeah… you stop even “the cats” as cats.
You start seeing them as either willfully ignorant (incorrigible) monsters, or as childishly ignorant but essentially corrigible fools… or some variation on these themes, like maybe as developmentally disabled people who could hypothetically be fixed by raising their iq enough for them to learn to read and do basic arithmetic or whatever?
(For me, the Piraha are a deeply challenging test case for many moral theories, given their irremediable innumeracy and non-recursive grammar and so on… I currently suspect that a coherently good moral system would not allow them to vote or sign contracts, but I’m not sure.)
One of the great great great sadnesses of LW culture, from my perspective, is that the actual real original meaning of “incorrigible” and “corrigible” and so on (related to the degree of culpability for a harm caused by a person, based on mens rea and vincible ignorance and so on)… is overshadowed by Eliezer’s concept of “being a a super slavey slave, who is really mindless and literalistic and non-creative and passive, but is safe to use as a wish granting genie nonetheless (or somehow because of that)” that he happened to hang the world “corrigibility” on :-(
I’m curious, if you imagine someone who is more conscientious and making better life descisions than you, if they were to look upon you, do you expect them to see you as some kind of cat as well? Similarily, if you were to imagine a less conscientious version of yourself? If you can find empathy here, maybe just extend along these lines to cover more people.
Also, having a deterministic view of the universe makes it easy for me to find empathy. I just assume that if i was born with their genetics and their experiences I would be making the exact same descisions that they are now. I use that as a connection between myself and them and through that connection I can be kinder to them as I would hope someone would be kinder to me in that situation. If you have sympthy for people born into poverty, it’s the same concept.
is there more to this than is described by something vaguely like agents and devices? (most of the point is in the abstract)
Your original method worked well. You were able to be kind to others, enjoy their company and accept their flaws. Perhaps thinking about others like a cat is a good technique for you to use. Your seem very kindly disposed to cats. Cats are fellow intelligent mammals. I think we are not so different from them.
Similarly other people are both similar to us in various ways and quite different in others. Its not always easy to tell which. But we all suffer, there is a lot of pain in a life. We also experience happiness. We have dreams. I don’t see why you should switch from your methods to mine. My methods work for me but yours were working fine for you! But if you want to experiment I would try asking yourself the following questions:
”How are they being brave”
“What is their dream”
”What part of their life is causing them the most pain”
I think you can ask these questions about cats too.
I felt sad when reading this. I would argue that this is not the best mindset for your personal productivity, and almost certainly not for your happiness. I think it would better to practice empathy/love for yourself.
Yes, sorry, you’ve heard the “self-love” thing a million times, it sounds so trite by now, that paragraph contained no new information. Rather than a full argument, I will give you an example.
When I was about to write this comment, I felt a twinge of guilt, like “this comment might take me a while to write, I should get back to work instead.”
Previously, I might have been unable to face this feeling fully. Paraphrasing my subverbal mental motions: “If I really think about whether I want to write this comment or get to work, and come down on the side of writing the comment, I’ll be disgusted by how lazy I am! That’s scary and unpleasant. But I really want to write a comment, and if I let myself really consider it, it might not happen because my System 2 strongly prioritizes productivity. The only way to get what I want here is to pretend I don’t see my guilt and start writing.”
But now, I have a mindset that “regardless of what I do, I just really genuinely love myself. Sometimes I will do things that are bad by my own lights, but I will fundamentally be okay even if this happens.”
This gave me some breathing room and unlocked the option to actually think about this. I love that I want to improve the world by doing work! I love that I want to improve the world by writing this comment! What’s the best solution to make myself as fully satisfied as possible?
I determined that I should try to limit the scope of the comment to this one part of your post, without commenting much on the rest of it. Otherwise, I might have written an even longer comment explaining my take on everything in this whole post instead of just this one piece of it, which would have taken even more time. Not only did I have the mental resources to come up with a decent compromise, I felt way better about it afterwards.
This comment still took way longer than I wanted it to, but instead of beating myself up, I am calmly factoring this into my model of myself, hopefully letting me make better choices in the future. Without the constant background noise of guilt, I feel like I can come up with more strategies, e.g. outlining the exact structure of my future comments before I start so they don’t sprawl as much. But regardless, I feel genuine gratitude for the part of myself that wanted to write this comment, especially since I think it turned out to be a good comment that accords with my values in many ways.
To the rest of your post, I will just say that loving-kindness/metta (closely adjacent to “empathy”) feels amazing and when I am feeling it I feel that I am fundamentally closer to the kind of person I’d like to be. I was not really able to access this emotion, or internalize the mindset described in this comment, until I went on a Jhourney meditation retreat last week. I’ll keep the shilling brief: I would recommend them extremely highly.
I don’t think I’m lacking self-love. Rather, my self-love is decidedly not unconditional. I am in fact quite competent and have achieved quite a lot (even if I’m still far from my own goals), and I love and respect myself for that. Insofar as I imagine myself a worse or weaker person, I have less love and respect for that person, and that seems straightforwardly correct.
Yeah, this is something my model of you would have said, and I also might have said something like this about myself until recently.
Your method of relating-to-yourself can work for motivation and I know there are lots of very successful people who use it. But it seems to have serious disadvantages, certainly for personal happiness (although, probably like you, I would endorse sacrificing much of my own happiness to increase the odds of solving AI alignment if I thought that was a trade I could make). I suppose I don’t have enough experience to know whether positive self-talk will actually increase my productivity, but surely it’s at least worth an experiment, and I actually feel quite optimistic about it. If it doesn’t work, I suppose I can always return to the daily self-beatings.
Idk why my comment is so downvoted right now, I think my model of self-motivation is similar to what Nate Soares writes in Replacing Guilt. Perhaps not the touchy-feely part about self-love, it’s been a while since I read it
There’s a handful of people who just really hate on woo-ish things in general. Personally I try to push mildly in the opposite direction to compensate.
Interesting, I really enjoyed Replacing Guilt, but if anything it made me more more willing/able/fine-with experiencing a disquiet or deep disappointment at other’s actions. It made the ways to improve more obvious while helping to detach it from guilt-based motivation. I was still, as John phrases it, having conditional self-love but it was less short-term and less based around guilt, but still about reaching-farther and doing-more.
I don’t necessarily disagree with this way of looking at things.
Serious question—how do you calibrate the standard by which you judge that something is good enough to warrant respect, or self-respect?
To illustrate what I mean, in one of your examples you judge your project teammates negatively for not having had the broad awareness to seriously learn ML ahead of time, in the absence of other obvious external stimuli to do so (like classes that would be hard enough to actually require that). The root of the negative judgment is that a better objective didn’t occur to them.
How can you ever be sure that there isn’t a better objective that isn’t occurring to you, at any given time? More broadly, how can you be sure that there isn’t just a generally better way of living, that you’re messing up for not currently doing?
If, hypothetically, you encountered a better version of yourself that presented you with a better objective and ways of living better, would you retroactively judge your life up to the present moment as worse and less worthy of respect? (Perhaps, based on the answer to the previous problem, the answer is “yes”, but you think this is an unlikely scenario.)
It’s not that conscious/reflective. Respect is an emotion; my standards for it are more on the instinctive level. Which is not to say that there aren’t consistent standards there, but they’re not something I have easy direct control over or ready introspective access to.
(tl;dr: you should be kind to yourself)
suppose you have some major flaw that you should fix; something you feel kind of vaguely bad about it, but somehow you just haven’t ever managed to fix it. given that you being aware of it hasn’t already just fixed it, it’s probably not trivial to fix. now imagine someone (whose opinion you care a lot about) comes in and berates you for it. they call you an idiot, a fool, the entire circus—the whole works. they argue that you should obviously just do X (you’ve already tried to do X, but they don’t know that, because they’re so convinced that you’re wrong that you can’t get a word in edgewise).
maybe after thinking about it for a while you’d agree, but in that moment? you’d probably feel quite upset and defensive and annoyed. if you respect this person’s opinion a lot, you might even feel ashamed or afraid. and however hard it usually is to make progress on improving, it is probably even harder in that moment.
being disgusted at people for having a nail in their head is counterproductive to them taking the nail out. being disgusted at yourself for having a nail in your head is counterproductive to you taking the nail out of your own head.
you’d probably feel a lot better if someone sat down with you and first listened to all the things you had tried, and understood your confusion at why you find it so hard to fix something that seems easy to fix, etc. it’s possible to still convey a sense of urgency and importance without meanness.
just as you can treat other people this way, so too can you treat yourself this way; just as this is more effective to get other people to do what you want so too is this a better way to get yourself to do what you want.
I do in fact treat myself that way in cases where the assumptions bind—i.e. cases where I have in fact tried the first basic things and they didn’t work and need debugging. And I do have sympathy for others in those cases.
I do not think that is the typical case in my experience; “you’ve already tried to do X, but they don’t know that, because they’re so convinced that you’re wrong that you can’t get a word in edgewise” is not actually how it usually works. (Indeed, on occasions when this sort of thing explicitly comes up in conversation, I go out of my way to make sure that they do have plenty of room to correct me if I’ve misunderstood what they’ve done so far! In general, I specifically put a lot of effort into not trampling over people in conversation.) The typical case is that they have some internal narrative about how The Thing isn’t so bad, or it’s not really something which needs fixing at all, or it’s normal, or it’s not really under their control (and therefore not their fault), or fixing The Thing is supererogative, or [...]. And that narrative excuses the fact that they have not, in fact, put in real effort, other than sometimes clearly-performative “trying”.
Consider the example from the post of my teammates on that project. Why didn’t they study any ML? Well, it’s not like the school had any requirement for them to do so. They took the classes they were required to take, and did reasonably well in those classes. They followed the path as it was laid out. What they failed to do was take any responsibility for themselves. The Thing was presumably seen as supererogative. It’s not like they tried to do it and failed; they just never had enough agency over their own lives to figure out what skills they would need and acquire those skills, other than deferring to the school’s requirements.
Two incidents that I recently witnessed, involving lower orders of society than those high-flying-if-they-would-but they-don’t students.
I woke in the small hours of the morning to hear someone in the road outside shouting “Useless piece of shit! Fucking go! Fucking shit! Why won’t it fucking go! Useless fucking piece of fucking shit!” and so on. I looked outside and it was a young man on an electrically assisted bicycle, which appeared to have stopped electricking. There was another chap with him, on an ordinary bicycle, who was saying nothing, because what could you say? What could I have said? That was the state of mind he was in, which a Buddhist would call unskillful, and no-one can wave a magic wand to awaken him to his folly. I doubt it would have gone down well to point out that screaming at the bike won’t recharge the battery, and if he wants to get wherever he’s going, he’ll just have to pedal the whole weight of the bike himself.
They passed on, but it was a while before his screaming passed out of hearing. Sound carries a long way at night.
Cycling through town one evening, I heard someone raving angrily in the street. On drawing near, I saw it was a man, not young, bare-chested, and I guessed he had just been thrown out of the nearby pub. Rough type, I’d call him working class if I thought there was any chance he was actually employed. I couldn’t make out a word he yelled. Others in the street were watching the spectacle and keeping their distance. What could any one have done?
These people’s minds are surely hideous, broken places. And however vividly I imagine them, I don’t care about these people, and I don’t care what becomes of them as long as I never encounter them.
There is a saying, “Tout comprendre, c’est tout pardonner,” but I don’t think so.
What I wonder about the group project teammates: What were they doing with their time, instead of contributing to the ML project? When a person “doesn’t put in the effort” on one project, there’s something else they are doing — whether that’s hanging out and flirting with one another; or doing work for a different course; or planning their goat-yoga startup; or just watching agog as the the high-performer breezes through everything, and hoping to learn by exposure.
Those people have some priorities, and they’re doing something (even if it’s napping). If a person came to college for four years of easy dating and a degree, with an eye toward future marital and job prospects, that’s a goal. “Not putting in the effort” is not a goal, though.
Which is to say: I’m guessing that what it’s like to be these people is probably not about “being a person who puts in low effort on ML projects”. There’s something else they are doing, that they are caring about. Empathizing would be connecting to that, not to the “low effort on ML projects” judgment.
This actually doesn’t have to be the case. I had a similar ML project experience, and the issue is the other guy didn’t have the same “figure things out” ethic as me. My best model of their mentality is that things happened to them, rather than they had the ability to do things. If they couldn’t passively soak up knowledge, or passively type in the right words to an LLM to get the right code outputted, they didn’t really know how to go and figure that out. They spent about as much time as me on the project, but their contribution was probably negative because they kept interrupting my work to ask me questions. I don’t think the issue was different priorities, just a different perspective on the world. Their perspective is probably better (healthier, happier) in situations of abundance, but not when you have to get things done or starve (or get a bad grade).
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.
Perhaps it is not true for you, and I wouldn’t be surprised if you have not experienced this much given the confusion around “companionship” in some previous discussions, but I think there is a literary trope of “discovering the power of friendship” (cue your eye roll here) which is actually real in some important ways. Without attempting anything thorough here and trying to keep things as john-frame-native as possible, I expect that the strengthening-not-weakening thing is that having others who care about you (read, in this context, but there is much more, as: who can/will sympathize with you even if they think you could be trying harder) gives most people more energy and motivation to go do positive things that are harder / more unpleasant than they might otherwise have done. And failed attempts are less draining (and therefore also less prospectively daunting) when you have sympathy from those you love, regardless of whether they think on reflection that you tried hard enough on that failed attempt. Kind and compassionate =\= mediocre. (Though it can, if provided in an enabling way to someone who is vulnerable to being enabled in ways they would regret on reflection. I strongly think though that you should largely strive to ignore this dynamic in your thinking as a salve to focusing overmuch on it IMO)
And yet they graduated with the same degree that you did, and earn just as much money as you do (if not more).
The real question is not, “Why did they follow the path of least resistance,” the question is, “Why did you not?”
Have you in fact received sympathy from others over situations where you, on reflection, were not really trying to fix the problem?
In small ways, occasionally? Like, with you there have been times where we’re like “well, we should do X” and then I’m like “ok but that sounds unpleasant” and you’re like “yeah, I sympathize”.
I’d guess that most people who have a stronger-than-you empathy-begets-sympathy/kindness have also experienced more significant moments of receiving (real-feeling, non-cat-like) sympathy from others over issues that they are for whatever reason not (yet?) trying to fix. (Or, possibly, better imaginations for this sort of thing / more vicarious experience through a different history of fiction consumption.)
I also think that, as other commentors have noted, the “have empathy” action CAN be imagining one as having the same material circumstances as another and then propagating supposedly similar feelings from that, as you describe it in your post. But if that fails to generate anything that seems sympathetic, then it’s time to do the reverse. Condition on having the feelings, then propagate those back into a (as charitable as possible) model of values and motivations. And I think that even when those values/motivations are very different from your own, it is often (if not always) possible to find something that is sympathetic in there. (And then more fleshed out feelings can propagate back from that, etc.) For training this, I recommend finding a very good director and taking scene-study acting classes run by him/her :)
Putting yourself in their shoes is not empathy, running their entire mind in (system 1) sim is much closer, and when that fails, just feeling what they’re feeling without adding your reactions on top of it works. Doing real empathy is exceptionally important for romantic relationships imo.
I had a similar empathy problem a year ago, doing inner work around emotions fixed this, now a whole class of interactions I previously system 2 muddled through (such as people wanting comfort over solutions) now are mostly system 1 handled. I cannot stress enough, this is a system 1 problem with a system 1 solution.
I would briefly describe what I used to do as “putting myself in their shoes” (not real empathy!) and what I do now as “letting their experience in”, “being them”, etc.
I haven’t written about this much but Chris describes the same transformation here with a different frame and view about what blocks it.
There’s probably standard psychological/therapy literature on this too, seems like a very common block for people to have. (I say block because learning to do real empathy is mostly unlearning blocks NOT learning a new skill.)
Oh I forgot: generally lack of empathy comes from not being comfortable with feeling every feeling. Chris mentions this, it’s a good post.
E.g. without feeling disgust what would John have to feel? Maybe helplessness? If he actually ran their mind in sim properly?
Maybe empathizing properly would mean he has to fix them and he doesn’t want that responsibility?
Idk there can be all sorts of couplings and locally optimal strategies that result in not feeling them and empathizing properly.
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.)
I think you are missing an important point. Hot take: The I need you to “just listen to me” might be a mechanism that often useful. Very often it happens that people are overeager to tell you how to solve your problems, without first building a good model of the world. They try to solve the problem before you can even give them all the information neccesary to generate a good suggestion.
Of cause this mechanism is very dumb. It’s implemented at the level of emotions. People don’t realize that this is the evolved purpose. You can do a lot better by taking manual control.
That is not to say your conclusion is wrong. But I think it is important to understand what is going on. I expect that if you can convey to somebody a mechanistic model of why they want to you to “just listen”, they have a better model tha allows them to choose better.
I also look down on people I consider worse than me. I used to be more cynical and bitter. But now people receive me as warm and friendly—even people outside of a rationalist “truth-first” type community.
I’m saying this because I see in you a desire to connect with people. You wish they were more like you. But you are afraid of becoming more like them.
The solution is to be upfront with them about your feelings instead of holding it in.
Most people care more about being understood than being admired. The kind of person who prioritizes their own comfort over productivity within an abstract system—they are probably less autistic than you. They are interested in you. If you are disgusted with their mindset, they’ll want to know. If you explain it to them, and then listen to their side of where they are coming from, and then you will learn a more detailed model of them.
If you see a way they personally benefit (by their own values) by behaving differently—then telling them is a kindness.
Another thing is that a lot of people actually want you to be superior to them. They want to be the kitten. They want you to take care of it. They want to higher status people around them. They want someone to follow. They want to be part of something bigger. They want a role model to have something to aim towards. Many reasons.
Being upfront can also filter you into social bubbles that share your values.
lol! I can feel empathy towards normies better than you can feel empathy towards normies! ;-)
(lol… its a joke… see: its an empathy failure about empathy failures? see?!? <3)
but kidding on the square aside, when I wrote the Friendly Drunk Fool Alignment Strategy i channeled my empathy super super hard (but the sandbox around the version of me that wrote that would fail every so often (which was fine because then I’d be able to edit the text to lampshade the writing process and make the parody more clear to at least some readers))...
it did not involve just being aware of only what they’re aware of and also wasn’t limited to just using the thinking tactics they think with… (which can both be part of empathy)
...but also to feel how they feel (what’s salient to them, and how they accept/reject), and to imagine the kind of ego structure they have (why they love themselves, and what they look for in other people), and to have the kind of world model they have (ie the absence of a coherent world model) and vibe with their moral developmental stage (how they answer the Heinz Dilemma) and it was kinda great because:
(1) it caused some actually smart and good people to feel physical pain to read (presumably because they like… go around with that Suspension Of Disbelief Stuff turned on most of the time, because if they didn’t then maybe their monkey selves would be howling in pain or whatever??)
and (2) several normal people gave me positive feedback IRL for finally saying something they agree with and felt good about reading even though it was on LW, allowing me to safely write them off as possibly valid co-founders :-)
like that essay really did pass some Ideological Turing Tests! which is SO FUCKED UP! right?
(or at least it seems fucked up if you’re at Kohlberg level 3A (like most people on LW are)… and then at Kohlberg level 3B I think you take it for granted as a constraint, and then IF there are higher levels of moral development above that (which Kohlberg himself never empirically managed to find in statistically significant numbers) THEN they prolly have reliable and articulable tactics for changing the constraint(s) that the brute fact of Society Being Bad imposes… that’s why High School Principles believe in their work (when they do believe in it), I think? they think they literally fixing the foundations of Why Things Are Bad???)
that said, i have so much sympathy for you!
...once you stop going around with that suspension of disbelief I predict that you’ll just curl up and cry, like I did, and like lots of people do, for a while, and that will feel terrible
...and then either you’ll become a Super Villain (like many do) or else you’ll grow up and work on finding some other Saints to cooperate with without having the normies around functioning as institutional graphite rods to slow down the social reactions necessary to save Humanity ;-)
the thing is… relating to Humanity the way I relate won’t help you be super tactical, because I’ve basically stopped caring about their opinions unless they are a some kind of idealized Saint or Philosopher or Timocrat or Oligarch or whatever… like if they are a real institutional player whose beliefs cause behavior that actually matters, rather than making up excuses for their behavior that doesn’t matter much except to them, then maybe I “care” about “what they would think of me”? ;-)
otherwise I’m basically all in on (1) strategic exploration to find a higher global maxima and (2) the Socratic Philosophic stance of “only feeling right in caring about the opinions of the hypothetical best-opinion-haver that could hypothetically exist” <3
in the meantime, normies in the US don’t exist on EITHER scale: they mostly just contribute to the construction of the Median Republican Voter and the Median Democratic Voter and they buy and sell in the marketplace like economically naive consooooooomers...
as individuals who might move and shake and alter legislation or policy they are basically cute puppies, and produce aggregate effects on The World Vector by accident, and that’s why the world is A Dumpster Fire
FPTP etc. belaboring would be boring to people who know what FPTP is, and also to people who don’t.
((Cearly: I’m not strong enough to fix things on my own… the legislation that authorizes the FDA’s existence still has almost exactly the same form it did during covid when it killed over a million people… and my last two posts on LW are sitting at Zero and −6 Karma… also the voters of California recently voted in FAVOR of slavery… and so on… the puppies are manifestly unfit to rule… (tho the best puppies, as a group, trying to make good things happen on purpose as a “mere” voluntary internet interest group, can still be found here on LW so far as I know)))
how to save the world (skippable)
so basically… my suggestion, if you want to be Instrumental here, is to palliate while upping the variance?
...and if you’re trying to do a Virtue Spiral in order to be Instrumental rather than just accepting your Character (whether Player or Non-Player) as is, try some keyword OTHER than the Empathy stat to jack way way up...
if I had one to suggest: get really into what is called Metta in Pali maybe?
however, since most people in the west do the Buddhist or sometimes Hindu versions, one way to up the variance might be to try the Jainist version?
(but there’s a lot of rationalists who curled up in a ball, cried, and then retreated to Meditation, so maybe the entire “eastern Metta” idea doesn’t have enough variance to move the needle… maybe diagonalize even harder than that? maybe try Confucian ren? or Islamic submission? or … yeah… there are lots of text corpuses that point to real parts of the space of all possible Virtues)
and really… the thing most normal people should probably do for really reals (if they play with personality traits like empathy or any of the other ones (real or made up or whatever)) is to get a nicely comprehensive baseline assessment, find their worst trait (a high bad one, or a low good one), and simply fix that first! <3
anyway. its a real problem. I sympathize with your challenges with empathy ;-)
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.
One missing part of the post is causing the largest degree of disconnect, the lack of explaining their internal reasons/beliefs/way-they-were-shaped that made them like this, and of understanding that. Regardless of whether John in actuality has an issue in empathizing, or whether a short post just left out the obvious, I do think the core argument still importantly holds.
You can understand and feel people’s emotions without their own opinion on their mental state and emotions becoming a dominant factor, which is a core confusion repeated in the other comments.
Someone comes to me with a nail in their head? I can understand that they feel stressed, tired out, are used to the pain and have stopped considering it as something to fix.… while still having my primary emotion be a strong disquiet that they’re faltering. That means my empathy might be unkind, because how they are shaped and how they handle their life is shaped by my empathy and my own values.
I can construct a slightly more idealized version of themselves in my head, knowing that a decent chunk of their problems would be solved without the nail, that they’d be happier, while knowing that their current way of thinking about things poisons the idea of removing the nail itself. I can also construct a version that is elaborated upon by my own values, because I never just consider their mind, I also consider how I think of them, how I interact with them, how they make me feel. And my values importantly intercede in here, and deliberately having empathy, considering what they feel in-depth and focused, can make me dislike them more.
Like in John’s examples, they’ve failed to live up to his ideals, and also very likely failed to live up to any of their own ideals. Most people want more, desire more, but short-sighted near-term optimization has ground away the parts of them that reach for more. It is not a strange or exotic observation that people fail to reach their ideals.
That is, I think a lot of the responses to John’s post are making the same understanding mistake he’s objecting to, that it must be a kindness or it is fake empathy. I can understand and empathize with the reasons that they can barely consider removing the nail, while still then the final result of all my empathy is that I know they’ve failed. I’m saddened for them yet disgusted by their failures, of the knowledge of what they could have been, of knowing that they’re constrained in such ways like a nail in their skull they “just” need to break free.
An intuition pump here that is more dramatic than college students slacking is that of a government official who became corrupt due to needing money. If I considered detailed knowledge of their life I would empathize, see how they got put into unfavorable positions while trying to pay medical bills, how they desperately tried to convince themselves, how it grew worse over time, how they failed to report on themselves in moments of awareness… and then I very likely would still be disgusted by what they’ve become, how they’ve failed to meet my own standards and likely their own. Even harsher potentially, knowing the ways they’ve faltered and considered and then faltered again and again (even though I understand why, that I may have even made similar choices in such a scenario).
I don’t hold this as strong as John seemingly does. I have noticed this in myself too, that I emotionally understand and know why they do not adjust themselves to do better- because I fail at fully applying that myself- but that does not make me more kind precisely. Some mix of not believing in my heart that kindness is the right response, because people often connect kindness to their emotions of ‘this is fine’, and also a general belief that it simply is a lacking, that understanding and feeling it myself does not mean I hold a positive emotion towards it.
To be eloquent: A god’s eye view where all flaws are drawn clear at hand, each of them hard to justify even if understandable, drawn into a tapestry of regrets. Seeing the whole tapestry just makes the pattern clearer.
I just drafted a comment defending a hypothetical woman of your description, about how the desire to have her pain & suffering be recognized and not wanting to solve the object level problem could grow out of someone who had adapted to an environment where indeed nobody ever recognized her pain & suffering as real, and how this had significantly hurt her, to the point where she didn’t trust their mere words to be honest.
Then I figured out a way around my YouTube blocker to watch the video. Now I agree that the right response is not some lower-level psychological problem, but that she is just messing up for no good reason and needs to be held to higher standards. So I broadly am on board with your disgust response.
Nod, although I wanna flag, there’s the thing where the woman in the video is, like, a caricature, not the real thing. And there are some instances of the real thing that are more like that caricature, and others where I think it’s an unfair and/or incomplete characterization. (So, like, feeling disgust at that caricature isn’t super informative)
I agree.
I wrote the above because, for a minute, I kind of forgot that sometimes people don’t screw up for good reasons, sometimes they’re screwing up for pointless reasons. It wasn’t adaptive, it didn’t make sense, and they should do better.
Suppose there actually were perfectly good reasons for the nail to be there? Like, taking it at the most literal level, taking it out would create an open wound with a lot of blood loss, etc., and would make things a lot worse in the short run?
Sometimes people haven’t thought about or actually tried the obvious solutions, and sometimes they have and, for whatever reason, feel as though they’re worse than putting up with the problem. “The situation sucks but it’s still a local optimum, so just let me vent and listen without offering solutions.”
My late wife would insist all the time that “Mr. Fixit is not welcome” because she thought (not without reason) that letting me act would have a good chance of making things worse than they already were.
There is, in fact, no reason why being compassionate should doom you to a life of mediocrity. A lot of very compassionate people manage to simultaneously be extremely self-critical, even beyond the point where it’s helpful for their productivity.
What is a “cope”, is an idea that you are either nice or brilliant. And you seem to be a victim of it. So in the spirit of tsuyoku naritai, stop coming up with excuses not to learn a valuable skill, deluding yourself into thinking that it somehow going to make you less successful in other domains and go put some effort into acquiring it.
That’s because you are not actually empathizing with the woman. You are empathizing with a man who notices the nail in the head. This is understandable because the point of the video is to make you do exactly that, it frames the situation in this particular manner that makes empathizing with the woman very hard, while empathizing with the man as easy as possible. Essentially you are being manipulated into empathizing with whoever the author of the video wants.
As a practicum of empathy and withstanding this sort of manipulation, try to re-frame the situation in such a way, where it’s the woman who is in the right. And no, just switching genders of the characters won’t do—that’s not the point of the exercise. The point is to come up with a situation in which a complaining character who wants to be listened to, is obviously in the right, while a character who is proposing a solution is obviously in the wrong. Just like in the video it’s obvious that the woman with the nail in the hand is wrong and stupid.
I was lucky, and grew up with children who were similarly dedicated to me. I was the maths guy, another swam, another played piano, but we did the other activities too. It’s no surprise that we quickly became friends, at least until my parents yanked me from my childhood to worship closer to the cult center of Morridor.
I think going to primary school with people who “got it”—who put in the effort to be their best, who loved learning just because it’s interesting and wanted to share that with the rest of the world, and who were genuinely kind—set me up to empathize with other humans positively. It wasn’t just these two friends, there were a dozen others at my school who were pretty cool. Because everyone around me seemed to be dedicated to something and were just cool, smart people in general, I kind of just assumed everyone was like this.
Then in eighth grade, my parents took us north to the heart of Morridor, and something seemed… off. I had classes with the children of math professors, and yet, their math abilities were years behind the median student at my old math club. There were some literary freaks who seemed to get off on spouting Latin or being the erudite speedreader, but this seemed more of an instrumental good—how much can we showoff to the girls?—rather than because they actually cared about being smart. This was when I subconsciously began to realize not everyone was like my childhood friends.
Years passed, and eventually I made friends with the smart crowd, and like me they were mostly “immigrants” to Morridor. I.e., they didn’t grow up in its epicenter, but their parents brought them to Zion in high school. An intersting fact about Utah is that running is very competitive. Probably because the ones that couldn’t run fast enough died in the Missouri Extermination Order or the trek west, but who really knows? Anyways, at least at my school, running happened to be the equivalent of rowing or fencing. The dedicated kids’ parents told them they had to do a sport in high school, and they mostly all chose running. People that messed up their freshman year might have to start with track instead of cross country, and some people got injured and had to stop running, but all the smart or dedicated people ended up in the sport for at least a semester or two.
The relevance of running is that, while I happened to care a lot about academics, and most of my friends were the top in academics at my school, this is not why we were friends. It was from running hundreds of miles together. It was almost a lucky coincidence that they happened to be the best students, and it let me continue to believe that most humans try. Maybe only a little in maths (taking calculus in tenth grade isn’t too slow, right?), but that’s because they’re placing in state at running. The logic doesn’t quite follow, since most were doing neither, but getting handily beaten in every workout twice a week does amazing things for one’s suspension of disbelief.
In eleventh grade, one of these friends said, “you shouldn’t be so hard on others; I know you care a lot about math and computer science, and are sad not everyone cares as much as you, but everyone has something they’re good at. Maybe they’re really into legos, or photography, or something.” I think this was after I tried to organize the math club to participate in a math olympiad, and only a few people showed up, or maybe one of the few computer science club meetings I organized that had a positive number of participants.
“That’s not true,” I replied. “Some people are just worse at everything. Some people just don’t try.” At the time, I took more of a ‘nurture’ than ‘nature’ approach, so the former was proof of the latter, and that irked me. It was probably the first time I consciously realized that not all humans are like me, most people don’t actually try hard, and in fact most of my friends—which includes the smartest people at my school—don’t even try.
The cult brainwashing had still got me good, so I still thought people had inherent value (whatever that means), and I still cared about others (a lot), but empathy became a little more painful. I was disappointed that they didn’t try harder, when they knew they could, and in fact had someone waiting to help them out, if only they wanted to learn maths or cs. But probably, my primary emotion was jealousy. If only I didn’t care so much, I too could just relax and have fun.
Now, I primarily feel disgust. I see the opportunities they squandered because it required the bare minimum of effort. One friend, who probably could’ve gone to an Ivy League or maybe even MIT, wouldn’t even bother to fill out an application (but they did write 10,000 words for the local religious university.… a religion they didn’t believe in). They had thirteen years of subsidized education—or, to be a little more generous, seven years of secondary education—where their only job was to learn as much as they could, and they utterly failed.
I don’t expect people to push themselves as hard as I did. I don’t expect myself to push as hard as I see some others do. But, I do feel a little unsympathetic when I see people complain about the positions they’re in, positions that they put themselves in with over a decade of willful ignorance and doing nothing more than the minimum expectations of their parents. And, when I try to empathize with them, I get it. I understand why they made the choices they did. It was certainly more enjoyable, at least before adulthood. But I don’t understand how they can claim to both “care about learning” and not go out and learn. Or even, “care about others,” and not go out and get the skills so they can make a meaningful difference. This isn’t necessarily about earning to give; some of my friends are going into teaching, but how can they teach what they never learnt? It disappoints me that some people are content with mediocracy, and it disgusts me when the same people claim to themselves that they’re trying.
There are still people that I can empathize with kindly. I wish I could with everyone around me, like I did in elementary school, but sometimes the rest of reality forces the issue.
I think the post Humans are not automatically strategic speaks to the sort of attitude that you are frustrated with and describe the students as having.
Sounds like this agency thing is so central to how you orient to the world that you’re bringing it with you when you try to empathize with someone (at least if they’re human).
If you want to try to do something more like the sort of empathizing that other people talk about, you could try:
Imagining some other scenario where the way that you would relate to that other scenario matches the way that this person is relating to the scenario that they’re in.
Finding a case where someone is showing some of the agency thing, in a context where you wouldn’t, and empathize with them in that scenario. (This can also help with doing 1, if you also notice how you relate to this context where you wouldn’t show that agency thing, because it adds to your collection of ‘other scenarios’ which could match how someone else engages with a scenario where you would have more agency.)
Empathizing with people in contexts that are orthogonal to the agency thing, where how much agency a person is showing isn’t central to what’s happening. (Perhaps someone liking a book/movie/hobby/etc. that you don’t like?)
I relate to this post a lot. I too often feel frustrated with people for what I see as a lack of… what’s the right word to capture this? I’ll say strategicness in a Humans are not automatically strategic sense.
I think, on first approximation at least, that there is a amount of strategicness that is reasonable to expect from others, and if they fall (well) beneath it, it is reasonable to feel disgust and/or disappointment. But when I look more closely, I’m not so sure.
One issue is that I myself often fall (well) below this level of reasonable strategicness. Maybe this just means that I suck. That the bar is set at an appropriate height and I am just doing a bad job of meeting it.
Or maybe it means that the bar is actually being set too high. I’m not sure. But I at least think it’s plausible that we (well, at least people who can relate to this post) are biased towards placing the bar higher than it should be placed, and that this bias stems from a failure to understand a bunch of subtle things that make adulting difficult. In fact, I suspect that these subtle blockers are a big part of what prevent rationalists from winning as much as one might expect, and are a strong candidate for what The Art should have it’s sights on.
I also think back to chapter 87 of HPMoR. Harry and Hermione’s discussion of, I’m not sure how to put this either. How high to set the bar for morality for Draco Malfoy?
Harry makes the point that we’re a product of our environments, and that given the environment Draco has been exposed to, it’s not really reasonable to expect much more of him. Maybe something similar is true for your classmates. Maybe even for the girl with the nail in her head.
I’m being rather vibes-y here. Really I think the path forward is to dissolve the question. What exactly are we asking when we ask where it is reasonable to set the bar? Whether it is a net good for society overall to “hold people accountable” for falling beneath it? Whether it is helpful in a more local relationship or group to have such accountability? Whether it does you good as an individual to set your expectations at a certain level? I’m not exactly sure what the right questions to ask are, nor their answers.
I’ve considered that myself before, part of the response I eventually got to was that my standards don’t have to lower. I can just have high standards. Just as my morality can be demanding regardless that I fail to reach its demands.
That is, my answer to the Draco-style thing is that it is good to encourage him to get better. To notice that he was worse, that he’s gotten better and that is an improvement. Just as someone who was a hitman-for-hire giving up on that because of a moral revelation and being merely a sneak-thief is still a win.
They are still a person who fails, who does not reach my bar; I hold disgust for their actions even within their newly-better state, but that I can still encourage them to become better. I still hold my bar higher than they are at.
The main problematic part of this stance is that of linking your emotions and actions to it, of feeling disquiet that you and everyone around you fails to reach the brilliant gleaming stars they could be, and then still being happy. Trying to improve, not out of guilt, but out of a sheer desire to do better, to see the world grow.
I really liked Replacing Guilt by So8res, not just in the avoiding relying on guilt part, but of instilling a view of reaching for more.
Hermione’s issue is one of blame and not quite understanding change, of still blaming Draco for his actions before he improved himself, of thinking that because Draco had failed so harshly he couldn’t be recovered. Whereas Harry views Draco as someone he can convince and tempt to become a better person, because Draco can choose to be better, that his failures are not intrinsic to him as a person. The issue is not precisely her blame, I can still be angry at someone for their actions before they changed though it loses impact, but rather the lack of a drive to push Draco to a higher point. So the issue is not a bar, but rather the willingness/belief of dragging them up to the bar.
This doesn’t seem any more outlandish or problematic to me than sensory issues such as colorblindness, synesthesia, or aversion to certain textures. It’s just a pattern of thought involving simulating another person and a strong disgust reaction to it. That’s interesting on a human level and basically seems like a personality quirk. People can feel threatened by others who proclaim they do not share the same emotional reactions to stimuli and activities, whether it’s empathy, comedy, a band, a cuisine, travel, sports, or whatever. In some domains, we’ve normalized disagreement. In others, like empathy, we haven’t. It seems to me like it would be good to at least appreciate the spectrum of experiences of empathy.
I don’t quite understand why this is a large enough problem in your life even to trigger writing a LW post about?
I imagine that you would just curate your group of friends to consist of people you can empathize with, to fulfill your psychological need to have people to feel empathy towards, and just model all other humans as you would model any other part of the world.
Unless I am misunderstanding what you mean by “being able to empathize with someone”, and you have a genuine shortage of people who would fulfill your requirements? (In my mind it’s not insanely hard to find such people, I think above a certain level of communication and self-reflection ability this is a non-issue.)
People do sometimes write LW posts about things that aren’t, like… serious problems in their own personal lives.
The OP seems to me to be an observation of a pattern and a commentary on that pattern. I found both elements to be useful. And the key takeaway of the post is even helpfully marked as such:
Seems clear to me.
I don’t really know why so many commenters are talking about things like a “psychological need to have people to feel empathy towards”. Where does OP talk about having any such thing…?
I felt like the post was written in a tone describing a personal issue. And if this is not a personal issue for OP and they have some easy way of dealing with it, that seems like a weird thing to omit from the post.
That was pure inference on my part. I do think having people to feel empathy towards makes me happier. I felt sad when I was grappling with similar questions years ago as OP, and I had to accept that I won’t be able to feel empathy towards most people, I should just model them as part of the external world, and not try to imagine myself in their place.
If OP has some other reason for wanting to empathize with people, I would like to know, because I can’t really imagine other important reasons.
That was not my reading.
What do you mean by this…? What’s to “deal with”? OP describes, as I said, a pattern, and comments on that pattern. I don’t see that anything has been omitted.
Ok, now this is actually really weird. You’re saying that the only reason you can think of to want to feel empathy toward other people… is to make yourself happier…?
Or am I misunderstanding something?
In any case, OP does not say anything about “wanting to empathize with people”, as far as I can tell. There is this line, at the end:
But it seems like the whole point of the post is to rebut the presumption that this must necessarily involve “more empathy” or any such thing.
I do most things in my life to try to make myself happier. (And I think this is the revealed preference of most people, even if they don’t admit it, because being seen as “selfish” is sometimes socially not tolerated well.)
(But I don’t have a fully fleshed out moral philosophy, and I would not feel confident in asserting that “I do everything only to make myself happier”. E.g. I do notice myself being nicer to people in general than what would naively be predicted under the “100% selfish” model.)
I’ve recently been playing with the idea that you have to be either autistic or schizophrenic and most people pick the schizophrenic option, and then because you can’t hold schizophrenic pack animals accountable, they pretend to be rational individuals despite the schizophrenia.
Edit: the admins semi-banned me from LessWrong because they think my posts are too bad these days, so I can’t reply to dirk except by editing this post.
My response to dirk is that since most people are schizophrenic, existing statistics on schizophrenia are severely underdiagnosing it, and therefore the apparent correlation is misleading.
Autism and schizophrenia are positively correlated.
For clarity, I wouldn’t describe it as “empathy makes me feel disgust”, I would describe it as “attempts to be empathetic make me feel disgust, which gets in the way of being empathetic”.
Empathy is neither feeling kindness nor disgust, empathy is feeling (not necessarily understanding) what the other person feels. Sometimes understanding or being kind can help in being empathetic, but neither is a requirement, strictly speaking.
Disgust can be empathetic, if the other is also disgusted. Otherwise it is something other than empathy.
I had a similar insight after doing some meditation and noticing how my own emotions are both predictable and ephemeral. There was a brief period where I’d carelessly say something that upset someone, they’d go into “not OK” mode, because they were upset, and all I’d be able to think was “alright let’s just give it a minute for the upsetness to pass and then we can move on with the conversation”.
I think this post is great and points at a central bottleneck in AI alignment.
Previously John stated most people can’t do good alignment research because they simply bounce of the hard problems. And the proposed fix is to become sufficiently technically proficient, such that they can start to see the footholds.
While not neccesairly wrong, I think this is a downstream effect of having the right “I am gonna do whatever it takes, and not gonna give up easily” attitude.
I think this might be why John’s SERI MATS 2 project failed (in his own judgement). He did a good job at communicating a bunch of useful technical methodologies. But knowing these methodolies isn’t the primary thing that makes John competent. I think his competence comes more from exactly the “There is a problem? Let’s seriously try to fix it!” attitude outlined in this post.
But this he didn’t manage to convey. I exect that he doesn’t even realize that this an important pice, that you need to “teach” people.
I am not quite sure how to teach this. I tried to do this in two iterations of AI safety camp. Instead of teaching technical skills, I tried to work with people one-on-one through problems, and given them open ended tasks (e.g. “solve alignment from scratch”). Basically this completely failed to make people significantly better independent AI alignment thinkers.
I think most humans “analytical reasoning module” fights a war with their “emotion module”. Most humans are at the level where they can’t even realize that they suck because that would be too painful. Especially if another person points out their flaws.
So perhaps that is where one needs to start. How can you start to model yourself accurately, without your emotional circuitry constantly punching you in the face.
In situations like this I might tell them something like “you probably know that if I were in your shoes I would have a straightforward solution to this, but I understand that you don’t like my solution, and I am willing to just listen if that’s helpful to you”. Basically you are telling them upfront that you will be role-playing the supportive friend.
Interestingly, I don’t remember a single instance where someone got mad at me for this, which is somewhat surprising to me.
The definition of empathy involves actively sharing the other person’s emotional state. If you’re not doing that (and in fact feeling something very different, like disgust), you are not successfully empathizing. The title of this post should be “I rarely empathize” rather than “My empathy is rarely kind”.
In any case empathy is not a prerequisite for relating to people well. Empathy with someone very different from you is very difficult, and it’s hard to even know whether you’re actually feeling the same thing. It seems to me that most empathy is of the most coarse kind—they are feeling something happy/sad/painful and you feel something happy/sad/painful because of that. But the type of happy/sad/painful feeling may be entirely different.
Well, it could be that the other person is deceiving themselves. E.g. they claim to themselves they care a lot about other people, but then choose actions they know lead to more suffering because it requires thinking or effort. If they were being honest with themselves, they would delineate how much care they will attend to others before they won’t bother.
The disgust/disappointment you describe sounds to me like contempt. In this context the opposite of contempt is compassion, which I would consider the point of empathizing with someone.
In the past, I’d feel the same kind of contempt when observing people demonstrating lack of skill in an area I had ability in, particularly when their lack would impact me in a (slightly) negative manner. That changed when I learned to have more compassion for myself despite my own weaknesses. Once I did that, the feelings of contempt for others seemed to diminish significantly.
The pathway, as best I understand it, was “This person, like me, is trying to do the best they can with the knowledge, ability, and responsibilities they have, just like I am. I have (different) failings of my own that I deserve compassion for. Having contempt for them is hypocritical of me.”
Having compassion for oneself is something that makes you stronger and more mentally resilient. Compassion for others seems to come along with it.
But many (maybe most) people are not, in fact, trying to do the best they can with what they have.
By ‘best they can’ I didn’t necessarily mean ‘self-actualize’ or ‘contribute as a net positive’ but more like ‘navigate the difficult demands of life.’
By that understanding, I think most people I encounter fit this description.
Apologies for the imprecision.
So what happens when you move towards empathy with people you are more aligned with in the first place? Around here, for example?
That works fine. Generally speaking, when people are in fact trying to grow and improve, I can empathize with them without feeling the disgust/disappointment, and it’s usually a pleasant experience.
Do you have compassion for yourself? What are you bad at that you are unable to make yourself good at? Do you feel disgust for yourself in those situations? Compassion begins with humility, which is something that you might want to work on
I generally do not feel disgust insofar as people are unable to make themselves good at something. If e.g. someone has an untreatable genetic disease, I certainly do not feel disappointment or disgust when empathizing with them.
But in practice that is an extremely rare case, despite everyone and their grandmother having some narrative about how they can’t possibly do anything about their shortcomings.
I would say that a part of compassion, and empathy, is to recognise that indeed those narratives are valid, or else there is some valid reason that people are as they are. Also, not everyone shares the moral value of optimising themselves or making themselves good at something. Disgust implies judgement that implies a lack of compassion.
Since you seem to be motivated at making yourself better, which I agree is a good motivation, why don’t you challenge yourself to increase your compassion and humility?
I think there’s an aspect to empathy where you not only imagine being in the situation they are in, but also having the values they have. Not just noticing the delta between your own values, but being able to dig past the caricature and understand deeply why they react and feel the way they do (including what sorts of things could plausibly change their mind). It makes you stronger to have it because it means you can better predict and infer people’s motivations and intentions.
This aspect of empathy isn’t necessarily kind either: consider a sadist imagining how best to devastate their victim.
Empathy-for-kindness is advice, and so it helps some people while its opposite might be useful for other people (“suspension of disbelief” being the relevant opposite of empathy). Perhaps it’s helpful in its usual non-reversed form to most of these people you aren’t experiencing kindness towards (when being more empathetic).
There are several separate issues here. First, the people saying that you would have compassion if you understood them are lying. Second, you are bad at understanding people. Do you understand cats, or do you just condescend to them?
Your disgust is not productive. It is not helping you deal with the people. Your solution to this problem is to flinch away from reality. Maybe understanding people is is not worth the effort, but flinching away is not making a calculation. It sounds like you are wallowing in your ineptitude. Maybe you could learn something about yourself by comparison.
Or maybe the disgust reaction is productive: maybe it is a fear of contagion, that you can’t understand them without becoming them.
Disgust and disappointment are useful for providing a negative incentive for incompetence and ineptitude. It is hard for me to read this and not feel like there is an attempt to reject ‘having standards’. People do not wish for others to feel disgust and disappointment in them, and this will motivate them to behave differently.
But John is also flinching away from acting on his disgust. He is not communicating it to the other people.
Not quite sure what mistake you think he’s making. I don’t think he’s making one. I think he is avoiding trying to hold other people to these standards, because he is not particularly invested in helping them grow stronger. Increasing his empathy would either be an investment in their growth, or add a bunch of internal psychic friction for little gain.
Kudos for bravely posting, despite knowing how it makes you look/how people will misunderstand.
I was so surprised! When I first read I thought “this relatively innocuous post will probably not get very many comments”. And yet a wave of over 100 comments arrived and there are almost 70 votes on the first comment, with most comments disagreeing (and sometimes being – IMO – a little condescending toward John)!
I think the level of pushback partially stemmed from miscommunication due to John’s using a caricature as his first example, but still, I am now more strongly entertaining the hypothesis that the broader culture has much stronger cultural antibodies against being judged than I had previously thought.
My takeaway from this post is that there are several properties of relating that people expect to converge, but in your case (and in some contexts) don’t. With empathy, there’s:
1. Depth of understanding of the other person’s experience
2. Negative judgment
3. Mirroring
I mention 3 because I think it’s strictly closer to the definition of empathy than 1, but it’s mostly irrelevant to this post. If I had this kind of empathy for the woman in the video, I’d be thinking: “man, my head hurts.”
The common narrative is that as 1 increases, 2 drops to zero, or even becomes positive judgement. This is probably true sometime, such as when counteracting the fundamental attribution error, but sometimes not: “This person is isn’t getting their work done, that’s somewhat annoying...oh, it’s because they don’t care about their education? Gaaahhh!!!” I can relate to this.
Regarding relating better without lowering standards, the questions that come to my mind are:
1. Is this a case where things have to get worse before they get better? As in, zero understanding leads to low judgement with suspension of disbelief, motivational understanding leads to high judgement, but full-story understanding returns to low judgment without relying on suspension of disbelief. Is there a way to test this without driving yourself crazy or taking up an inordinate amount of time?
2. Can you dissolve your moral judgement while keeping understanding constant? That is: “this teammate isn’t doing their share of the work because they didn’t care enough to be prepared...and this isn’t a thing I need to be angry about.” If this route looks interesting, my suggestion for the first step of the path is to introspect on the anger/disgust/etc. and what it’s protecting.
Some (actually, Much) additional nuance about empathy and its components that might add some context to this discussion at this link: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/SMziBSCT9fiz5yG3L/notes-on-empathy
In particular, as other commenters have already pointed out, there is something about “perspective taking” (the shift from considering how you feel about what they feel to considering how they feel) that may be resulting in the OP’s frustration.
The way how LLMs can larp following instructions and “reason” about stuff seems structurally similar to this description of empathy (though funny enough, LLMs usually larp empathy from the opposite side—causing disgust in me when they do it, not they being disgusted by me, but that’s another story about sycophancy)...
When I emphasize with someone (or some thing), the task is to imagine that the 2 of us run on basically the same software, so what is the minimum set of parameters that are different in our configuration that would make me act in that way—what would I have to believe, what environment would I have to perceive, what path would I have to experience different from my own past, what wisdom would I have to never have gained to act in the same way as I can see my other copy acting that would keep me environmentally rational? It normally takes a fraction of a second to imagine that, it’s automatic. It’s only when I feel surprise that I have to dive deeper.
But only then can I know whether to be sad for a homeless teenager who fried his brain with drugs, whether to help an old lady with collecting spilled items from a torn shopping bag, whether to walk to the other side of the street away from a screaming couple, whether to tell a junior dev about flexbox froggy, whether to ignore my husband when complaining about our neighbours on a phone call or to rescue him when I hear plates falling from a cupboard even though I’m at important zoom call..
I was in Facebook discussion, when someone described problem he encountered not long ago. I answered with advance that i believe can solve his problem. and got answered by woman who claim that I’m not sensitive and it’s cruel.
and it’s look so backwards to me. describing his error and explain how to solve the problem is cruel,because I blame him for his problem. it’s better be “compassionate” and “sensitive” and commiserate and let him have the problem, then solve it. wtf???
and, like, there are legitimate counter-arguments. but they are from the form “you solution is wrong” or more generally “your model of the problem is wrong”. In the same way that my counter-argument to the video is “there is no nail, you just write story when you right”. although, maybe if i had more interactions like this, I would have been more sympathetic to it.
I think there are times for commiseration and sympathy. but. like. when solving the problem judged as cruel, the judging algorithm is totally fucked up!
( I don’t feel disgust, and I don’t sure it help you, but also not that in hinder you. but if I would feel disappointment i would see it as a problem to fix—it mean I expected more and was negatively surprised, and I try to be calibrated. being repeatedly surprised by the same thing is the sort of things I try to fix, and I probably try to become stronger less then you are.)
This post mostly doesn’t resonate with me, and I’m coming from a place where I really value the advice put forth in the excellent blogpost “To Listen Well, Get Curious” by Ben Kuhn. It was frustrating for me to watch “It’s Not About the Nail” because I couldn’t help but think about how poorly this video characterizes common misunderstandings that happen during conversations where one person is helping another. Kuhn argues that the common advice to not offer help during helper conversations is bad, since it presumes that the one being helped doesn’t actually want their problem solved. He explains that this advice seems good on the surface, since many people offer fix-it advice based off of incomplete or inaccurate knowledge which isn’t helpful, so the alternative to offer kind words instead of solutions tends to be received better. However, kind words are also suboptimal, and Kuhn argues that instead of offering emotional support, you should be genuinely curious to build an accurate model of the person’s problem in order to offer the best possible solution. To quote Ben Kuhn’s article:
“It turns out that reality has a surprising amount of detail, and those details can matter a lot to figuring out what the root problem or best solution is. So if I want to help, I can’t treat those details as a black box: I need to open it up and see the gears inside. Otherwise, anything I suggest will be wrong—or even if it’s right, I won’t have enough “shared language” with my friend for it to land correctly.”
From the outside, good listening can look a lot like emotional support. But the key difference here is that the goal isn’t to merely support someone emotionally; it’s that you need to understand a problem well so that you can actually offer up good practical advice in the first place.
I get the perception from that John Wentworth is engaging in the kind of superficial “good listening” that doesn’t move anyone towards a productive solution. It’s understandable that he’d feel a disconnect between kindness and empathy under this mode of communication, and reframing his assumptions about these types of conversations could fix this problem for him.
I’ve read all the comments that have been made to this point before making one myself—I was going to make one very much like @Simon Pepin Lehalleur’s. With the resulting conversation-thread as context, I’m still confused by something. When you say having fun with your college group-members involved “suspension of disbelief”, what are you suspending disbelief in, exactly? What is your belief-state when disbelief is suspended, vs. your belief-state when disbelief is not suspended?
Another thing: You mention that imagining what if you were like other people including all relevant psychological and emotional factors puts you in the position of “treating them like cats”, which yes, was a bit misleading in the original post, as you later clarify that you do empathize with cats, in pretty much the way I’d say it may be helpful to empathize with humans. I’d like to disambiguate a few different ways other people can be “like cats”.
1. Cats think very differently than you.
2. Cats are (according to many) of less moral worth than you.
3. Cats are nonhuman.
You also say in your post “my so-called fellow humans”, which is part of what makes “treating people like cats” seem more objectionable than just “treating people as beings who think very differently than I do, generally speaking”. Specifically, “Like cats” coupled with “my so-called fellow humans” gestures indirectly towards treating humans like nonhuman animals, which pattern matches to “what people say before genociding the outgroup”. I’m not suggesting you were thinking or intending anything along those lines, just pointing out why this combination may be distracting from the point you were trying to make, for some.
Does putting yourself in the shoes of a cat involve “suspension of disbelief”? I don’t think it should, you just have accurate understandings of some aspects of cat-psychology, and an awareness that there are many things about cat-psychology and what it’s like to be them that you don’t understand. And similarly with other humans—you may be very different from some of them in some ways, but there shouldn’t be a disbelief you have to suspend in order to interact with them in productive and potentially enjoyable ways? There’s something I’m confused about here.
A key thing, though, is that while 1 may be true of many humans, and arguably from your perspective 2 may as well, what makes someone human is not a certain level of intellectual capacity or drive. So the “so-called” in “my so-called fellow humans” is inaccurate. Even very lazy humans are of the same species as you, and more a fellow to you than a cat is. Maybe what you meant is “my so-called ‘fellow’ humans”, where you feel little fellowship with people very unlike yourself in terms of drive to self-improve, but recognize shared humanity with them, in which case that seems better than the alternative interpretation, and selecting friends who are similar to you in your deeply-held values (such as things that would cause a disgust reaction if someone doesn’t share them) is a thing many people do.
On reflection, I think the thing-in-which-I-suspend-disbelief is moral agency? That’s not how I natively frame things in my head, but I think it’s basically equivalent. Like, I stop thinking of the human as a type-of-thing which it makes sense to assign responsibility to (and therefore stop thinking of them as a type-of-thing one would rely upon as a fellow agent in a group, or give any real voting weight in a group). I can still relate to them as a fun creature, or as a tool, or as a feature of the environment.
Would it be reasonable to map to this taking the intentional stance toward people (as opposed to the design stance or the physical stance)?
Approximately yes. I don’t think that mapping is lossless, but I don’t have a good example off the top of my head of what it loses.
Ok, well, one thing is, there are double and triple negatives in your post, which are tripping me up. If you suspend belief in their moral agency in order to have fun with them, that makes sense. If breaking your suspension of disbelief in their moral agency was an issue that prevented you from having fun with them, I’d be (and I was) confused, and start to wonder if I’d mixed up a negation somewhere.
X: I believe most humans have moral agency. If they don’t meet a fairly high standard of behaviour, I’ll be disappointed.
!X: I disbelieve most humans have moral agency. I can have fun with them even so.
!!X=X: I suspend disbelief that most humans have moral agency. A no-fun zone.
!!!X=!X: My suspension of disbelief was broken by the conversation with the professor. Fun again?
Anyway, “I can have fun with others when I don’t treat them as moral agents” is clear and makes sense from what I imagine your perspective might be, let’s move on.
Agency isn’t a binary property which humans have and cats and environmental features don’t. A more nuanced perspective allows for gradations of moral agency. For example, we don’t expect young children to be full moral agents or reliable as a fellow agent in a group doing something important, but we do expect them, once they have reached a certain age, not to bite their siblings and to use good manners and otherwise follow most foundational social expectations on good days when they’ve had a nap recently. Our expectations for cats are lower, but we still expect to be able to cooperate with them more than we can with mindless tools or features of the environment such as rocks and trees. So: If you genuinely put your college teammates and anyone who doesn’t meet your high standards for yourself in the same bucket as cats, I think you would be treating them as if they have less agency than they in fact do. They may not be on your level, but they aren’t tools or environmental features or cats or children.
It’s entirely appropriate to conclude you can’t rely on someone to work with you on something important if the evidence shows this is true. But you could probably rely on most people to do some helpful things, and often the “this person isn’t reliable” tag is only applicable to a given person in some situations/contexts—it is very rare for a person to be completely useless for everything. The better you understand a given person, the better able to evaluate their reliability in different situations and for different tasks you will be. Often people are reliable about the things they care about, and not about the things they don’t.
As for voting weight, that should likely be a complicated mix of factors depending on the situation. I think it is a good idea to give people voting weight in a decision if the decision impacts them, for example. Even to the extent of allowing them to vote in favour of what seems clearly like something that will harm them, as long as it doesn’t harm me or have other large externalities. If they need to touch a hot stove to learn it’s hot because they’re not willing to listen when I say “the stove is hot”, as long as it’s not going to kill them, OK then, carry on and learn your lesson. (side note, I’m not always right, sometimes someone’s preferences make sense in a way I don’t appreciate at first, which is another reason to give their vote for something I disagree with weight). I also up-weight someone’s vote (to the extent I have the power to make that decision) if they have some related expertise (I could be conscientious and they could be mostly very flaky, and yet they know more about something I know very little about—I can’t know everything about everything, much as I might try).
I think this misses the distinction I’d consider relevant for moral agency.
I can put a marble on a ramp and it will roll down. But I have to set up the ramp and place the marble; it makes no sense for me to e.g. sign a contract with a marble and expect it to make itself roll down a ramp. The marble has no agency.
Likewise, I can stick a nonagentic human in a social environment where the default thing everyone does is take certain courses and graduate in four years, and the human will probably do that. I can condition a child with rewards and punishments to behave a certain way, and the child will probably do so. Like the marble, both of these are cases where the environment is set up in such a way that the desired outcome is the default outcome, without the candidate “agent” having to do any particular search or optimization to make the outcome happen.
What takes agency—moral agency—is making non-default things happen. (At least, that’s my current best articulation.) Mathematically, I’d frame this in terms of couterfactuals: credit assignment mostly makes sense in the context of comparison to counterfactual outcomes. Moral agency (insofar as it makes sense at all in a physically-reductive universe) is all about thinking of a thing as being capable of counterfactual impact.
Ok, I see your point and acknowledge that that is a good and valuable distinction. And, the reality is that most people are just responding to their environment most of the time, and you would class them as non-agents during those times, morally speaking.
But, unlike if people were literally marbles, you can sign a contract with most people and expect them to follow through on most of their commitments, where in practice there’s nothing preventing them from breaching contract in a way that harms you and helps them in the short term. So they don’t have no agency. And in small daily choices which are unconstrained or less-constrained by the environment, where the default option is less clear, people do make choices that have counterfactual impact. Maybe not on civilization-spanning scale (it would be a very chaotic world if reality was such that everyone correctly thought they could change the world in major ways and did so) but on the scale of their families, friend-groups and communities? Sure, quite often. And those choices shape those groups.
So my opinion is that humans in general:
a) Aren’t very smart.
b) Mostly copy those around them, not trying to make major changes to how things are.
c) When they do try to make changes, the efforts tend to be copied from someone else rather than figured out on their own.
d) But are faced with small-scale moral choices on a daily basis, where their actions are not practically constrained, and whether they cooperate or defect will influence the environment for others and their future selves. It is in those contexts where they display moral agency, to the extent that it is present for them.
Very few people are doing things like thinking through the game theory or equilibria effects of their actions, or looking at the big picture of the civilization we live in and going “how is this good/bad, and what changes can we make to get it to a better place?” in a way that’s better than guessing or copying their friends, with the end result of a civilization that thrashes around mostly blindly. If you’re disgusted with anyone who is not actively trying to remake the world in at least some respect, you’re going to be disgusted with almost everyone. But back to moral agency not being binary: the small-scale stuff matters, and standard adult humans are more morally agentic even when using your understanding of “moral agency” than cats are. I would also say, it’s good for people who are unable to accurately predict the long-term consequences of their actions to just copy what seems to have worked in past and respond to incentives, just play the role of a marble unless they’re really sure that their deviation from expected behaviour is good on net. And there are very few who are good enough predictors that they can look at their situations, choose to go uphill instead of down, and pick good hills to die on. Most of them will have grown up in families not composed of such people, and will need to have it pointed out to them that they have and should use more agency.
As an example: It is not at all difficult to talk to your elected representative. They frankly like it (in my experience) when an engaged citizen engages with them. This is a thing anyone can do. When I suggest to someone that this is a thing that might help solve a problem they have (for example, let’s say their interaction with a government agency has gone poorly and there’s clearly a broken process), it is often clear that this is not something they have even considered as being inside their possibility-space. This doesn’t make these people the equivalent of human marbles by their nature. A simple “hey, you can just do things to make the world different, such as this thing for example” is often enough for them to generalize from. Sometimes the idea takes a few examples/repetitions to take root, though.
Now that I’m clearer on what you mean by moral agency, I’m not sure why you would ever expect that to be widespread among the population, and have to suspend the belief that the person you’re interacting with is a moral agent. It’s just straightforwardly true that almost nobody is trying to achieve a really non-default outcome. Any society composed mostly of people trying to change it “for the better” according to their understanding of better, which involves achieving non-default outcomes, rather than just going along with the system they were born into, would have collapsed and gotten invaded by a society that could coordinate better. At our current intelligence levels, anyway. A society composed of very smart people (relative to the current baseline) could probably come to explicit, explained, consciously chosen agreement from each individual on a lot of things and use that as a basis for coordination while leaving people free to explore the possibility-space of available social changes and propose new social agreements based on what they find, but the society we’ve actually got, cannot. So we’ve got to use conformity as a coordination mechanism instead.
Taking this back to empathy for a second: It is usually correct (has better effects) for most people not to swim against the social current. Yes, our society is an evolved system with many problems that would not exist if it were (correctly) intelligently designed instead, but that doesn’t mean most people can just start trying to make changes, without breaking the system and making things much worse. Those who do the default thing, shouldn’t be the subject of disgust, even if they’re one of the rare people who wouldn’t break things by mucking about with them. If understanding that someone just went with the flow provokes disgust in you, I think it’s reasonable for you to ask whether, in that person’s case, they really ought to have done otherwise, and also, whether it’s reasonable for them to have known that, given the society we live in doesn’t teach or encourage the kind of moral agency you respect to its members (for obvious reasons of social stability).
I don’t remember where this phrase is from, but as someone who struggles with conventional empathy, it made me finally “get it.”
> If you were them, you would be like them.
I interpret it as “why judge someone by your standards when they stem from your mind, from your brain, which is in your body.” Another person has a different body, thus a different brain, mind, electrochemistry, habits, wants, needs and proclivities. If you were born in their body, and subject to their exact life experience, there’s (very debatably) no reason other than chance as to why you would turn out differently. If you were them, you would be like them.
In some way, this point can be interpreted as fatalist or deterministic when talking about people who are victims to their own mental patterns, implying that *how* they are is tied to *who* they are, and that they cannot modify their mind through agency. However, at the same time, the reason behind why that person still hasn’t developed the self-awareness and willpower necessary to do this, is because they are them, and not you, who *already has* the ability to do that.
I think I’ve been at my happiest at the times where I’ve (morally) judged the least, and empathized the most. I haven’t yet noticed any problems with optimizing for minimal judgement. By moral judgement, I mean the emotion-generating kind, be it disgust, hate, or smugness.
PS: I’ve never worked in a group where I’ve felt a sense of camaraderie and fair teamwork in group projects. where each member genuinely contributed and put in near-equal effort, instead of the usual me doing 90% of the hard work. But I don’t blame my teammates. The course had to be taken, groups had to be formed, and a project had to be delivered. We just didn’t have the same priorities, and why judge them based on mine? I don’t have the same priorities, because I’m not them.
This can be a true statement and you can be disgusted by the thought of “being (like) them”.
I think I my empathy tends to be kinder because I used to be like nail-head.
First, a warning that I think this post promotes a harmful frame that probably makes the lives of both the OP and the people around him worse. I want to suggest that people engage with this post, consider this frame, and choose to move in the opposite direction.
On the object level, it is possible to look at unambitious people and decide that while you do not want to be like them in this way. They may not be inherently ambitious, have values that lead to them rejecting ambition, or have other reasons for being unambitious (eg, personal problems). Regardless, I’m confused why this is what the OP is choosing to focus his empathy on, rather than the wide variety of other traits and feelings that a person can posses. I’m also confused why this is the metric someone would use to judge a person, value them, or seek to understand them by.
Tbc, the problem isn’t that the OP is disappointed when considering lack of ambition (if you care a lot about being ambitious yourself, maybe this is the right reaction, though you should still seek to understand why others are not). The problem here is that the main thing the OP sees when he tries to empathize is a lack of ambition. And not, you know, any of the normal things that would make you more compassionate towards someone, like their emotional state, desires, personality, good-heartedness, etc.
I don’t focus on ambition per se; I bring up ambition later in the post because I think it’s an underlying driver. What draws my attention is people who suck in various big ways, and just kinda wallow in it rather than do anything about it. That’s what triggers my reaction.
This is mostly the thing I mean when I use the word ambition above. I think you’re using the word to mean something overlapping but distinct; I’m trying to capture the overarching thing that contains both ‘wallow in it’ and the ‘underlying driver’ of your disgust/disappointment reaction.
Small note that is probably pretty simple by the standards of this excellent comment section, but strong emotion is, itself a problem that needs to be solved, often first. It’s like snowfall on the driveway. Some people get a little with the vagaries of life, others get a lot. Sometimes it melts quickly, sometimes you have to shovel it.
To be less metaphorical, people need to feel believed, cared for, and like they’d be listened to. Nail-in-head woman might be a bit silly to not take the nail out of her head, and I used to believe something closer to that in the general case. These days, though, when someone is having trouble with something and their head is clouded to obvious solutions, I might like to:
Hug them if they’re willing
Listen for awhile, and hold in mind that my initial advice might be wrong, insufficient, and that they’ve probably already tried some of my ideas early on
Ask questions and iterate to try to find what the underlying problems is (LessWrong and Rationality helped me a ton in trying to debug my own mind and find better ways to formulate the problems I face)
Feeling seen, feeling heard, believed—it seems pretty important for a lot of people in ways that I may not fully understand yet. I know politics is the mindkiller, so I won’t dive too deep, but I will say that it seems a lot of online political discussion doesn’t get past the “this issue is real and mostly like we say it is, your lack of belief hurts” stage.
That first, and then we can talk solutions.
Which university did you attend?
Harvey Mudd
(similar to what other people have said, mostly trying to clarify my own thinking not persuade John) I think a more useful kind of empathy is one meta level up. People have different strengths, weaknesses, background, etc (obviously); their struggles usually aren’t exactly your struggles, so if you just imagine exactly yourself in their position, it generally won’t resonate.
So I find it more helpful to try to empathize with an abstraction of their problem; if I don’t empathize with someone who e.g. has adhd and is often late and makes lots of mistakes on detail-oriented tasks, can I empathize with someone who struggles with something that most people find a lot easier? Probably, there are certainly things I struggle with that others find easy, and that is frustrating and humiliating. Can I empathize with someone who feels like they just can’t get ahold of aspects of their life, no matter how hard they try? Who feels like they really “should” be able to do something and in some sense it’s “easy”, but despite them in some sense putting in a lot of work and creating elaborate systems, they just can’t seem to get those issues under control? Absolutely.
I’m not saying this always works, and in particular it frays when people are weak on things that are closest to my sacred values (e.g. for me, trying in a sincere way to make the world a better place; I feel most disgust and contempt when I feel like people are “not even really trying at all” in that domain). For John, that might be agency around self-improvement. Then I find it helpful to be even more meta, like “how would it feel for something I find beautiful and important to be wholly uninteresting and dry and out-of-reach-feeling? well there are certainly things others find motivating and important and beautiful that I find uninteresting and dry and out of reach… imagine if I were trying to pursue projects loaded on one of those things, it’d feel so boring and exhausting”.
I get the vibe that John thinks more things are more “in people’s control” than I do and a lot of other commenters do (probably related to hightly valuing agency). Like yeah, in theory maybe the people on your team could have foreseen the need and learned more ML earlier, but they probably have a lot of fundamental disadvantages relative to you at that (like worse foresight, maybe less interest in ML, maybe skill at teaching themselves these kinds of topics), like in theory you could be better at flirting but you have a lot of disadvantages relative to e.g. George Clooney such that it’s unlikely you’ll ever reach his effectiveness at doing it.
I’m not saying everyone is equally skilled if you think about it or all skills are equally important or you shouldn’t trying to use keen discernment about people’s skills and abilities or some other nonesense. I’m saying I think empathy is more about trying to look for the first opportunity to find common ground and emotional understanding.
I also don’t think “you should always be more empathetic” or “more empathy is always good”, I’m just trying to explain what I think is a useful definition of empathy and how to do it that carves reality at its joints.
The vibe I get is that putting yourself in their shoes makes you feel: “holy fuck why am I so stupid, what?”
So why does doing that even make sense in the first place?
Empathy is good for your feelings they say yet feels are feels and utils are utils and if it ain’t helping with utils then why the fuck would you do it?
I think the question comes down to whether you need to be strong to be loved? You to some extent need to be strong to be respected yet this is not about action policies, this is about world models?
Free will comes in degrees and you would put more responsibility on a chess engine with mean depth 12 to see the 13th move than you would a chess engine with mean depth 10 (Dennett’s definition of will). Empathy allows you to see at what depth their chess engine is behaving so that you can improve your world model.
If they’re only at depth 10 and can’t solve it as a consequence then compassion is warranted. It’s a wolrd modelling tool so that you know what can’t be changed in your environment and if you truly, fully accept it you will become less frustrated with people being stupid because they never had the option to not be stupid?
I mean, yeah, but that’s basically just the “suspension of disbelief” option. I stop thinking of them as the same kind-of-creature as myself, stop trying to put myself in their shoes, and feel compassion toward them the way I feel compassion toward a cat. I have no trouble feeling compassion toward cats!
I think there are levels between cat and human and that there are different agent classes. It’s more about picking the right refrence class than it is anything else I think?
To what extent are they able to do intelligent and agentic actions? If they aren’t then you can be more kind to them because they’re not as able to act? Or you can start figuring out how to explain something to change things for the better?
(not to call people dogs but sometimes I can feel like what it feels like to be a dog, it’s pretty awesome so why not?)
I would agree the mindset of “I can fix things if I were you” could prevent “empathy”. (I was also reading other comments mentioning this is not true empathy but simulation and I found it insightful too.) The key problem is if you would be able to tell if this is something they are able to fix, and what part of this is attributable to what they can do, and what part is attributable to lack of privilege. For example, a blind person cannot really type easily without special equipment. They or their family may not have the money to buy that special equipment. The parents were not able to get a college degree without some form of generational wealth. The same is true for intelligence level. (For example.)
Even growth mindset, is something that is developed through our education, environment growing up, experience, or even something like visa status. This is probably where empathy starts to develop further.
I was just reminded of a story I saw online that is related to this and wanted to share since it was positive and reflective. The story OP shared an experience when walking behind a family; they encountered a homeless and the father turned to the kid and started with something like “study well and after you grow up…”; the OP thought maybe the father wanted to say “don’t end up like the homeless” which is what the poster’s father used to say to them. Instead the father said “help these people to be in better situations”. And the OP found it beautiful and I found it beautiful too. It seems the two fathers both “understood” the pain of being a homeless, but had different understanding on the “how”, and decided to act differently based on that understanding.
Your point could be made even stronger by including people for whom it’s even harder to feel compassion, i.e., someone who is deliberately cruel, rather than just someone who is dumb and isn’t trying to fix that. However, even then, I don’t think your “disgust” is entirely fair.
If we accept certain uncontroversial assumptions from cognitive science and biology, do we not come to conclusions, that for every person on Earth, if you were born with their genes, into their environment, you would be them?
I’m not trying to start a free-will debate, but this seems to me trivially true.
That’s where kindness can come from. You don’t have to excuse anyone’s actions/stupidity/failures in their responsibilities, but instead of feeling “disgust”, you could think of ways to help them from where they stand, or just let them be.
To improve, you may want to start by sketching out what an ideal interaction with a person that has a nail in their head looks like for you, and figure out how to get closer to that.
To me such an ideal interaction could be:
removing the disgust (because it has low valence)
feeling at ease with the fact that there are people in the world that have nails in their head (remembering that you, them and the nail are the natural unfolding of physics might help)
feeling joy when people (or myself) improve (the joy keeps the incentive to help them and become stronger myself)
I think the gist is removing low valence internal events and replacing them with high valence ones, while keeping the incentives to be functional.
I am not sure how much it’s possible to shift on the valence axis while retaining functionality (given the human reward circuitry) but some people do look much happier than others (be it because of genetics, meditation or other) and they usually say it makes them more productive so I’m rather optimistic.
What you’re describing doesn’t seem to be empathy in its fullest sense; it seems more like a projection of your own biases and anxieties onto others, disguised as empathy. Real empathy generally involves trying to understand what it’s like to be the other person—including their fears, their desires, their biochemistry, their traumas, and their particular worldview—not simply imagining yourself in their place by applying your own frame of reference and then looking down on them for not sharing it.
I think tabooing empathy would be productive—it’s a sufficiently vague label attached to a bucket of emotionally charged things; it’s a recipe for ugly misunderstandings.
So, emotions/feelings are internal bids for salience/attention.
But there’s a thing whereby we sometimes need others to pay attention to our emotions/feelings—maybe to validate them (‘you’re not crazy / that’s a totally reasonable way to feel’), or to ease their insecurity / social anxiety (‘you’re cared about / you’re not alone’).
And there’s (at least according to Steven Byrnes) an autonomic version of this paying attention to others emotions/feelings—reflexive, subconscious, behaviour that tends to be absent/underdeveloped in autistic people.
I’d weakly claim it also malfunctions between neurotypicals of sufficiently different cultures.
And this is the thing I think most neurotypicals mean when they use the word ‘empathy’.
Right, now we get to the Nail in the Head—and it’s plausible that in the mix of feelings, what feels most salient isn’t the nail. Instead it’s some mix of social isolation, disconnection, and frustration at not being able to process/resolve these feelings because no one will take her seriously.
And then just contextualize that in terms of the ‘median western cultural memetic inheritance’ - the package of beliefs, epistemics, models etc that most normies are walking around with—and, yeah, of course it’s not about the nail.
Whether or not we should be kind/gentle/compassionate to others seems separate to how/if we empathize with them; to me that boils down mostly to ‘in general, with exceptions, seems like a good deal in terms of cost:benefit’; seems like an optimal default, kinda like ‘tit for tat with forgiveness’ in the prisoners dilemma.
Empathy is in any case bad on the margin. It is, unironically, responsible for many of the bad things in the world today. We really shouldn’t want more empathy.
Anyhow, excellent post.
I think this comment would be made way better with the inclusion of a concrete example or two. I know there’s at least one book out there that can get compressed to a sound bite like this, but a concrete example or two would help explain why.
Please see this discussion.
Your comment reminded me tangentially of Mario Gabriele’s now-paywalled essay Compassion is the enemy, published in mid-2020 during the height of BLM, which had this passage I saved:
Well… it’s not that any of that is exactly wrong, but… as a criticism of “compassion” (or “empathy” or whatever), this sort of thing has a “fifty Stalins” flavor. My view is that what we have (empathy-wise) is too much (specifically, too much of the wrong thing), not that it’s not enough.
You might be surprised to find that I actually agree with this take. I think that most of what people consider empathy nowadays i a performative thing to make themselves feel good, or to drop responsibility. It doesn’t really do me much good if someone sits around feeling bad for me. I don’t want them to feel bad either. I have empathy for them.
I don’t want my kids to walk round feeling bad for people and thinking that that’s some sort of noble actions. I want e them to actually look at what they can do for other people. And how they can help a situation and how, you know, sometimes when you can’t help a situation, what’s the second best the third best thing you can do. And uh, sometimes you have to act against your empathy like, you know, someone is gonna be annoyed at you for doing something, but you still think it’s the right thing to do.
( It won’t allow me to edit on my phone. And the original comment was voiced to text. So I’m going to submit this and then edit it, hoping that the interface will improve somehow in the process)
Performative ‘empathy’ can be a release valve for the pressures of conscience that might otherwise drive good actions. (And it can just be pure, empty signalling.) That doesn’t mean empathy is playing a negative role, though—the performativity is the problem. I’d be willing to bet that people who are (genuinely) more empathetic also tend to be more helpful and altruistic in practice, and that low-empathy people are massively overrepresented in the set of people who do unusually bad things.
It’s the association you note, of empathy = good, that I object to. And anyway you’re just measuring social sensitivity, no one who wants to be well liked isn’t going to pretend they’re super empathetic.
And that’s the point. It turns int pretend when it becomes its own goal.
You’re right, but for the wrong reasons. And only partially right, and the error vindicates your victims, so it’s a wash.
The reason she won’t fix the nail is that the nail is a Chesterton’s Fence nail. It’s a feature, not a bug. It’s what’s LEFT OVER of pathology, after she’s found a way to vanquish the rest. It’s admirable that she’s found such a banal way to sublimate her weaknesses, such a trivial way to torture us.
The story goes that there’s a dragon terrorizing the village, right? And it captures the best girl and the best boy has to go beat the dragon and rescue her. So the problem is the dragon, right? WRONG
The dragon is WHAT’S LEFT of the insanity of nature and chaos, after the village has managed to order infinity down to a relatively tame shape: a dragon.
A dragon is nothing. A dragon is a blessing. An actual BOY can beat a dragon. Only the sleepiest of beauties even get taken by the dragon. Please let it be a dragon, and not the end of the world...
So in the nail girl world, she and her actually kinda cute little insanity are the great blessing of the little torture: The torture of infinity, brought to order, with only a small remainder for the right boy to contend with.
But it’s not about the nail. The right boy is not the great nail-remover; she could do that herself. But the nail dilemma is a pretty story, a way of looking sideways at the blinding light of the truth, a sun too bright to stare into too straight.
No one knows how to plug the crack where the light gets in. So you can either let it pour in unbearably, or you can pound the round nail of everything into the square hole of truth, take a deep breath, and have a little pride in your suspension of disbelief. Praise to the nail that gives us a second of space to breathe in, and praise to the man who can Indiana Jones switch the nail with some better solution.
But you are still right. I’m saying that this is a valid game of tradeoffs between blinding truth and blind pragmatism. But just because the actual nail game is valid does not mean it can’t be played better and worse, beautifully and uglily.
Some people already have better nails, and are just using the validity of the nail game as an excuse to keep using an inferior nail tale to pretend they’re a more Beautiful Sleepyhead than they are. There are other failure modes.
In short, the game of tradeoffs is deeper and more complicated than you express in this piece. There is wisdom in the silly insanity, the nail, the story of the world that needs a boy to save it. But there are still better ways to play the great game of tradeoffs, and many are failing more than they need to, failing others, too. They fail for pride and other “sins”. As you note, many of them are not even trying. Perhaps most people, I don’t know.