As far as I understand, "empathy" involves correctly modeling another person's feelings about a particular situation, and then taking on those feelings as one's own to some extent. This causes us to feel the same motivations as the other person and generally facilitates alignment of goals, assuming similar models of cause and effect.

When people say they want to be empathized with, I think it's usually mostly about the shared feelings aspect. Humans don't like feeling alone, and just having someone there who understands and accepts them, acknowledges their feelings without rejecting their legitimacy, can be comforting.

But there is definitely often a desire to have others take on their own world model as well, to take those shared feelings and direct them toward a shared goal. "I feel sad or angry about something, and I want this to be done about it!" An empathic person who nevertheless understands reality better and sees exactly why this hurting person's idea would never actually work can still acknowledge their feelings, but they may try to help the hurting person uncover what they actually need rather than what they think they want.

People's needs matter. People's feelings matter. But people's solutions and policy ideas often don't matter (or rather, they wouldn't actually solve the problems that cause the feelings).

Use your empathy to absorb people's needs and feelings, but use your rationality to direct the world toward actual solutions.

I do not suspend my thinking of cats as moral agents when considering their actions, and generally try to treat them as peers in that regard. I have found that treating cats as tools is an unreliable move. I do my best to communicate my intentions to cats, to express structured disapproval when they do something I don't like and try to explain why, etc. I once had an experience where a cat was biting me too hard, so I stood in front of him and bit myself too hard and then cringed; then bit myself very very gently and sighed happily. Then I offered to let him bite me a few times, and turned away from him to show my disapproval when he bit too hard, and slow blinked when he bit nicely. I gave him treats at the end. Reinforcement learning, but I tried to make it easily detectable to a cat brain why there was reinforcement learning happening, in the expectation that he could then use that information to decide what to do. I also never repeated this and for a long time he didn't try to love-bite me, even though he seems to really like lovebiting.

I think there's a way to look at these things which is something vaguely akin to importing both "empathy" and a form of the see-them-as-an-agent thing, something like "helping them to be a good person by both of our lights", which can take the thing that's currently rendering as disgust for you and direct it in a way that can be transmitted to them such that they'll be able to act on it; something like, encode it in a way that is better-lubricated by nature of your not treating them as a tool, and in fact having sympathy for the fact that facing the full brunt of what you want them to be might hurt at first, or some such thing. as well as including in the encoding of the request-to-change that it's not a thing where you claim to be the "true agent" here, that you're a peer not an authority. (well, unless you want to claim to be an authority, in which case, like, alright whatever).

In other words, or maybe just in very similar words again because I don't feel like I've said this clearly yet, I think there's a region between "treat as tool" and "treat as a peer who should already have chosen to do better", something like "present clearly that you'd like to treat them as a tool because you're disappointed in their effectiveness and request that they try to take on some of the effort of agency-towards-morally-good-outcomes that you're having to do through them".

If you were to do this to me, for example, just being disgusted, eg "I'm disappointed in your progress. You've been avoiding the hard work of doing the exercises that would teach you this math, and you're not at my level yet." that would likely make me averse to interacting with you - you're telling me things I already know and part of my brain yells at me about regularly, and the problem is not that I don't think that this is bad, but rather that I oscillate between going too hard at learning to having a feeling of "wow, doing the actual work is hard, can we budget the time spent on it?"; but if you were to say, "I'm disappointed in your progress, and to get best results from you as a contributor, I'd like to improve it as much as possible. What would it take to do that?" then you're asking me to narrate the bottlenecks I know about that are interfering with my ability to go hard.

Maybe I'm a bad test case, though - I already have a lot of motivation to go hard, and getting it to happen is where the problem is. If you're interested in saying this to people where your disapproval is pointed at the fact that they seem to reflectively endorse not caring to save the world even though they know the arguments for it, then I still think it would be a reasoning error to treat them as hopeless, but you'd need to do more things focused on achieving willingness-to-try.

People were talking about how critical the comments were of you, and I noticed that it hadn't stood out to me because the way you write it doesn't seem like it's hard for you. Or maybe it is, but you just don't let it get in the way. Either way, I find that cool, and admirable. I hope others see it too, and work towards the same thing.

Anyway, on the object level what I'd say is that people want to be seen as what they are. Removing suspensions and working towards full engagement does indeed bring teething issues, as you're experiencing, because not everything you learn with be toothless. Sometimes you do have to change behaviors in ways that hold people more accountable, and often that comes with an "oof".

And people really don't want to be almost seen for what they are without the full picture coming through (e.g. You don't want people to see the embarrassing things about you without also seeing why they'd have done the same thing in your situation).

At the end of the day though, full engagement with the kinks worked out does run more smoothly, and kindly, and is a goal worth aspiring to.

Disclaimer: I want to start by saying that, since this is a hard subject to discuss precisely and we might have slightly different vocabulary, I might be going full steam down a side path and at some point in this comment miss my exit. Also, some of the things I say might be annoyingly obvious to you, but I thought they were worth mentioning in case they aren't. 

You said in the original post that you wanted to better relate to other people, which seems vague because you don't specify what you mean by "better" (by what criteria? what are you looking for?). However, assuming you want things from relationships that are similar to what other people usually want from relationships, my guess would be you wish you could more deeply connect with other people and maybe you feel a sense of alienation/loneliness. I can imagine someone feeling similarly unfulfilled if they only hung out with literal cats, even if they liked cats and had access to books.

Usually feeling isolated means feeling like you don't understand other people that well, and/or like they don't understand you very well, but in a specific sense. There are probably some ways in which you understand the average person better than they understand themselves or better than other "normal people" understand each other, but there's a difference between being able to predict their behavior or knowing what factors led them to be the way they are (e.g. having more knowledge of evolutionary biology) and relating to them emotionally.

To some extent that's a difficulty shared by many unusual people (e.g. veterans, expats, people with strange personalities), but I also think it's sometimes possible to emotionally relate to people more if you try to think a lot about them and make analogies between things you feel and things they feel. For instance, I'm not a drug addict, but I have on some occasions stayed up very late playing Civilization V while my inner homunculus tried and failed to get me to go to sleep instead, which is sort of similar in some ways to being a drug addict.

Another approach to relating to other people is to change things about yourself; if you became less ambitious you'd probably feel more emotional resonance with unambitious people. Likewise, if someone thinks of themselves as the victim of their circumstances whereas you take responsibility for rising above any bad things that happen to you, you could relate more to them if you started thinking of yourself as a victim of your circumstances. I think people sometimes do this, but I would guess you are not very open to that sort of thing; I would less confidently guess that you don't want to deliberately become more normal even in ways that don't affect your productivity in order to relate better to other people.

There's also the flip side where other people don't understand you very well, and probably often don't make that much of an effort to understand you better, which I suppose you have less control over. The second one especially seems hard to influence; maybe you could ask people to try harder to understand you, but I don't know that that's likely to work. It's somewhat possible to find common ground where other people can easily understand you (e.g. I like spaghetti and many other people also like spaghetti) and put in deliberate effort to "feel seen," which might work to varying degrees.

I think the upshot is something like, if you are feeling a sense of alienation/loneliness from lack of deep mutual "understanding" (in the sense I described it), there are probably ways to reduce that without compromising your values, but I'm also not sure how feasible it is to make it go away to a fully satisfactory extent. I believe the common wisdom is that it isn't, and that the only real solution is selecting better people to connect with.

Also, I think sometimes when people are talking about empathy they're referring to a sort of emotional porosity that doesn't route through conscious thought (e.g. feeling in higher spirits when you're in a room full of people in high spirits); you didn't mention anything like that, so I'm not sure much you experience it or know about it. I think sometimes this is a quality people like in others, and which enhances bonding. I don't know how much this can be deliberately controlled (to some extent it might be down to neurotype), but I do notice that when I'm at a rock concert I can either choose to get "swept up" in the collective excitement, or to hold myself apart. 

It also seems possible that your relationships with others are less good than they could be because of interpersonal mistakes you make - I wouldn't know, because you don't really go into details on things like how you treat people you view as moral agents vs people you don't; if it's basically the same as how you'd treat a cat I think people might reasonably take issue (also this is sort of a nitpick but "moral agent" seems like a strange word to use in this context because you talk about whether you see people as bearing responsibility for their own happiness, but it seems weird to call failing to be as happy as you could "immoral" - I'd intuitively just call that something like "agency").

Some examples: say Alice and Bob are friends. Bob believes he knows more about Alice's preferences than she does, which may or may not be true. He might sometimes insist that her stated preferences are wrong, and be unresponsive to her claims to the contrary. Alice probably finds this very frustrating, especially if Bob is in fact wrong. Part of the issue is that Bob isn't modeling her very accurately, and I suppose part of it is that Alice wants to be seen as an agent - but it's in the narrow sense of wanting him to believe that she's capable of knowing her own preferences.

It's also possible that, even if Bob has a relatively good idea of what Alice prefers, or a better idea than her of what's "good for her," she'd rather have the autonomy to make her own decisions - even if those decisions end up leading to less happiness for her; she'd rather he didn't override her autonomy whenever he has the opportunity. This is probably a situation where Alice would feel like Bob doesn't "see her as a human" - with the reason maybe once again being that Bob is failing to model her preferences. However, it also seems possible that maybe Bob is well aware that Alice places more value on autonomy than some notion like "welfare" but doesn't see that as important - in which case maybe it's more about what he values. This seems more like something to do with "respecting boundaries."

There could be this additional (perceived) violation where maybe Bob thinks she would benefit from going to therapy for some issue, but she's not very receptive to the idea. She might disagree that she actually has that issue, or maybe she isn't open to therapy for whatever reason. Bob is able to come up with schemes to get Alice to go to therapy without her realizing he's doing so (like, getting her mother concerned about her wellbeing, watching a movie with her that he claims he's interested in purely for its entertainment value but which promotes the idea of going to therapy, etc.). I think if she found out she'd be upset in this "I'm not being seen as a human" way, and it seems similar to this sort of manipulative element to people often treat cats and children (which seems probably fine for dealing with cats but maybe bad for dealing with children - at the very least I sometimes noticed my parents were trying to do this sort of thing to me growing up and I think they probably shouldn't have).

(Also, sometimes people manipulate children or cats not for the child or cat's benefit but for their own convenience, which seems worse.)

There's also an only somewhat related phenomenon where Bob positions himself as the "authority" in some sense and enforces that through a power differential; if Alice perceives this as unjust I think she might feel dehumanized in some sense. To give a clear example, when I was a kid my father would often criticize my taste in movies, video games, music, etc. in a very dismissive way. I wasn't really able to fight back or criticize his taste in turn, even though I think (even looking back on it now) his criticisms were in fact often based on a flawed understanding of the things I liked, and in cases where there were actually issues with my favorite media there were similarly egregious issues with his favorite media. 

This dynamic was enforced through a disparity in how well I could articulate my thoughts vs how well he could articulate his, and through the power he had over me as a parent who could punish me for things like "disrespectful tone"; I found it very upsetting. Going back to Alice and Bob, I think Bob can enforce a similar dynamic solely through superior intellect, ability to think quickly when stressed out, etc. (and sometimes this sort of thing happens in real life), though it would probably be more difficult.  

To be clear, I'm not accusing you of doing any of these things, but it seemed from what you've written in this post and the previous one that sometimes there's an element of interpersonal conflict or other people being upset with you, and the things I listed are broadly elements of how people frequently treat children and cats. It seemed worth mentioning in case you do behave in these ways sometimes, or in case other people perceive you to be. 

My own take on this is that I do think a weak version of this is correct, in that empathy is not equal to kindness or value alignment, and I think a lot of comments on your last post are making a mistake similar to this.

Empathy's connotations need to be decoupled more.

That said, I'm going to slightly agree with the reactions, and a lot of this comes down to you often overestimating how much they are actually capable of changing the situation, and a milder issue is that you overestimate growth mindset.

The obvious example of this is IQ and human traits in general are pretty highly influenced by genetics, which we don't control, and to put it impolitely lots of success or failure is out of your control once we realize how important IQ is.

We can realistically only select, not train people, unless we get lucky with the motivations in their brain working out correctly.

People have some control over their lives, and that control matters, but we have a bad habit of assuming that we control more than we do.

Thane Ruthenis and Kabir Kumar's comments here are relevant:

https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/xPrL2xF9iYWpPmu6B/?commentId=7YscAPfjLYKdMP9qh

https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/KJh2xckmCNAggisuq/?commentId=YLE4ajQfpqTZMsqZm

What traits can you observe in a person that causes you to regard them as a moral agent?

I agree with your first post.

However, I think the part of empathy that people will say you're missing is that you're putting "yourself" in someone else's shoes, which is only half of it. Imagine you were Isekai'd away into someone else's life where you had a history of being ineffective, unaccomplished, and self-pitying, with problems that could be solved quickly with relatively little objective effort. You can probably easily imagine how you'd quickly take actions to at least fix most of the low-hanging fruit in this situation. Clean your room, get a job, do at least some exercise, remove the nail and all that. 

But if you put yourself in the position of that person, including their internal mental state, possible brain chemistry issues, history of failure despite attempts to fix it, and possibly limited inherent capacities relative to yours, the situation they are in would probably seem a lot less fixable. If you put yourself exactly in their position, with the exact mental state and capacities, you would be doing the exact same things they are currently. 

For the woman whose pain is "not about the nail" there has to be something going on in her own head, whether it's some history of trauma, history of repeatedly failing to address the problem to the point it becomes painful to address it, that is stopping her from addressing the problem. Otherwise she would just fix it, no? To empathize with her isn't then to imagine yourself if you were that woman and had a nail in your head, but to imagine what it's like to be her, including whatever it is that's preventing her to solve her own problem. 

This sort of empathy might be more useful in understanding people, which can help you achieve your own goals better. There's always a need to make friends and influence people after all. Otherwise you're right in that putting yourself in other people's shoes (the ones who demand empathy are probably more likely to be pathetic), then seeing all the relatively easy things they could do to make their lives significantly better reasonably results in what you described with your first post. 

Do you view moral agency as something binary, or do you think entities can exist on a continuous spectrum of how agentic they are? From this post and the preceding one, I’m not sure whether you have any category for “more agentic than a cat but less agentic than myself”.

Oh yeah, i do that all the time. if i don't im pretty likely to just start an argument with someone that ends with me crying. there's really not that many people i actually expect to possess moral agency by my standards, to the point where i usually interpret people who want me to hold them to my standards as trying to get me to help them self-harm.

Empathy is a multi-dimensional operation and there are many ways to do it. Here are some examples of dimensions along which you can vary empathy:

• How much do you try to literally “feel their feelings” vs feel your own feelings vs feel no feelings?
• How charitably (or hostilely) do you try to read their situation?
• How focused are you on actions they could take?
• To what extent do you try to understand the story of what took them here vs focus on the present moment?
• How focused are you on what is good for them vs on what is good for both?
  
  You don’t have to do empathy the same way in every situation. But have you ever tried to max out on “feel their feelings” or “charitable read”?
  
  Here is o3’s charitable read of nail-woman:
   
• felt-sense override – pain is embodied confusion. before she can orient to “extract object,” she needs another nervous system to mirror how disorienting the signal is. otherwise her interoceptive map keeps screaming “unsafe,” so any fix attempt feels like an attack on the only reliable data she has left.
• status & competence threat – accepting a drive-by solution telegraphs “i couldn’t notice a metal spike in my own skull.” that’s ego-annihilating. she’s fighting for narrative sovereignty, not against physics.
• pattern-matching past dismissals – likely history of “just calm down” responses. the nail scene retriggers that cached pattern; she’s guarding against another instance of emotional rug-pull.
• speech-act mismatch – she’s broadcasting affective data; partner keeps replying with instrumental commands. protocol violation feels like deafness. she insists “it’s not about the nail” bc rn the channel is meta-communication, not mechanics.

Thank you for the follow-up post. The distinction between empathy and the attribution of "moral agency" is a very helpful update and greatly clarifies the crux of your original argument.

That said, your conflict doesn't seem to stem from simply attributing moral agency, but from an implicit assumption about the *utility function* that all moral agents *should* be optimizing.

If we model humans as self-optimizing agents, we can distinguish between:

1.  Terminal Goals: The final, intrinsic objective. I would argue that for most humans, this approximates some form of "well-being" or "satisfaction" (happiness, to put it simply). It is the utility the system is trying to maximize.
2.  Instrumental Goals: The subgoals an agent pursues because it believes they will help it achieve its terminal goal. This is where everything else comes in: strength (`Tsuyoku naritai`), competence, knowledge, wealth, social connection, validation, security, etc.

Your original post and this follow-up suggest that you have elevated a very specific instrumental goal—competence and personal growth—to the status of a universal terminal goal. The "disgust" or "disappointment" you feel when activating the "moral agency module" seems to be a reaction to agents who are not optimizing for *your* chosen instrumental goal.

The conclusion isn't that you should "lower your standards" for yourself. The conclusion could be that treating someone as a "moral agent" doesn't just mean demanding that they be responsible, but also recognizing that their responsibility is to their own, unique utility function, not to yours.