This is a special post for quick takes by RobertM. Only they can create top-level comments. Comments here also appear on the Quick Takes page and All Posts page.
In general I think it's fine/good to have sympathy for people who are dealing with something difficult, even if that difficult thing is part of a larger package that they signed up for voluntarily (while not forgetting that they did sign up for it, and might be able to influence or change it if they decided it was worth spending enough time/effort/points).
Edit: lest anyone mistake this for a subtweet, it's an excerpt of a comment I left in a slack thread, where the people I might most plausibly be construed as subtweeting are likely to have seen it. The object-level subject that inspired it was another LW shortform.
No? Caring is an emotion, to me; it might affect your actions but it doesn't necessarily follow that it does.
Edit: E.G. you might emotionally care, but intellectually think changing the situation would make it worse on net; you might care about multiple conflicting things another of which takes precedence; you might just not have much of an opportunity to do anything (e.g. they live somewhere else and you can't do anything over the internet, their problem is something unfixable like a loved one dying, etc.); etc. (I also wouldn't take the expression ... (read more)