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.

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. 

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 situa... (read more)

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. 

my so-called fellow humans

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. 

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".

1. ^{^}

   it's me, I'm people

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. 

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.

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 co... (read more)

If I were in her shoes, behaving the way she behaves, I would feel disgust toward myself.

(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 havin... (read more)

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 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.

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.

Have you in fact received sympathy from others over situations where you, on reflection, were not really trying to fix the problem?

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.)

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."

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 ... (read more)

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.

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 hon... (read more)

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 strategicnes... (read more)

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.)

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.

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 mo... (read more)

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 sign... (read more)

So what happens when you move towards empathy with people you are more aligned with in the first place? Around here, for example?

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

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.

Kudos for bravely posting, despite knowing how it makes you look/how people will misunderstand. 

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 ... (read more)

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 wh... (read more)