My Empathy Is Rarely Kind

[-]cata3mo12183

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.

9Ben Pace3mo

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.

[-]RationalElf3mo3725

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.

[-]MinusGix3mo104

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.

4Ben Pace3mo

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).

[-]RationalElf3mo2720

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

2Ben Pace3mo

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.)

[-]johnswentworth3mo140

(And he did give the other example of the teammates at the elite university who did none of the work.)

To be clear, they did substantially more than zero of the work.

3SpectrumDT2mo

It is likely that they felt they did more useful work than John felt they did.

2Jasnah Kholin1mo

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.

1SpectrumDT1mo

Sure. My point was that maybe John felt like he did more than he really did.

1Jasnah Kholin1mo

and yet again, you say "felt". what I'm trying to do is to point at that.

1SpectrumDT1mo

Say more words?

1Jasnah Kholin1mo

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?

1SpectrumDT26d

1. 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. 2. 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. 3. 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.

1Jasnah Kholin25d

1. 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. 2. 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. 3. 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.

1SpectrumDT25d

Can you please point out the relevant part?

1Jasnah Kholin25d

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.

1SpectrumDT24d

Sorry, I am not going to read through the comments to look for it.

1Jasnah Kholin24d

Yeah, legit, i avoided do it second time myself :-)

-14kave3mo

4johnswentworth3mo

I mean, yeah, the empathy is how I notice the value differences, and then I'm disgusted or disappointed by their values.

[-]jimmy3mo327

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 t... (read more)

9Dweomite3mo

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?

8jimmy3mo

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

[-]Dweomite3mo259

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 som... (read more)

1jimmy3mo

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", an

9Dweomite3mo

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?

-4jimmy3mo

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 foru

[-]Dweomite3mo1412

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.

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.

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"

I find it quite plausible they would have... (read more)

2jimmy3mo

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 peo

5Dweomite3mo

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 p

3jimmy3mo

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

2Dweomite3mo

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

2jimmy3mo

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 :)

2Dweomite3mo

Guess we're done, then.

2jimmy3mo

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.

7MinusGix3mo

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.

7jimmy3mo

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?

8MinusGix3mo

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

3Logan Riggs3mo

I do take a hard deterministic stance, so I'd like to hear your thoughts here. Do you agree w/ the following? 1. People literally can't make different choices due to determinism 2. Laws & punishments are still useful for setting the right incentives that lead to better outcomes 3. 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? 1. ^ 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)

4MinusGix3mo

1. Yes. But also that people are still making those choices. 2. 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 3. 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 1. basic empathy: knowing their own standards and feeling them, understanding them. 2. '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. 3. 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

1jimmy3mo

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 Th

4MinusGix3mo

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

1jimmy3mo

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, yo

3MinusGix3mo

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

0jimmy3mo

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.

1johnswentworth3mo

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.

[-]jimmy3mo3211

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)

-6Said Achmiz3mo

[-]Thane Ruthenis3mo*9764

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)

[-]johnswentworth3mo11-11

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. [...] They're best modeled not as an agents who are being willfully obstinate, but as people helplessly trapped in the cognitive equivalents of malfunctioning motorized exoskeletons.

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".

[-]Caleb Biddulph3mo2413

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 wi... (read more)

[-]Raemon3mo103

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))

7MinusGix3mo

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.

3Jasnah Kholin1mo

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.

[-]Thane Ruthenis3mo143

@Caleb Biddulph's reply seems right to me. Another tack:

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

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 ... (read more)

8Thane Ruthenis3mo

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 t

[-]Linch3mo*5141

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.

[-]Simon Pepin Lehalleur3mo5135

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.

[-]Dweomite3mo144

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).

[-]Trevor Hill-Hand3mo*150

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."

3Dweomite3mo

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.)

2Trevor Hill-Hand3mo

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.)

[-]johnswentworth3mo150

(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.)

-9Said Achmiz3mo

5MinusGix3mo

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.

4johnswentworth3mo

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.

7the gears to ascension3mo

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".

[-]johnswentworth3mo100

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.

[-]dirk3mo4643

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.

[-]quetzal_rainbow3mo3121

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.

[-]Parv Mahajan3mo*3130

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.

6johnswentworth3mo

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?

[-]Parv Mahajan3mo2321

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.

6James Camacho3mo

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: 1. Where does "moral worth" come from? 2. 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: 1. From the ability to take mutually beneficial actions (e.g. a honeybee giving me honey in exchange for food and shelter). 2. Well, it shouldn't matter too much as long as every weight is positive, eh?

1Parv Mahajan3mo

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.

1MichaelLowe3mo

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.

2James Camacho3mo

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).

[-]Elizabeth3mo3015

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

8johnswentworth3mo

I do not think that's the typical case more broadly, but it's definitely a thing which happens and which I sympathize with.

[-]tslarm3mo2821

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.

[-]p.b.3mo2218

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.

6johnswentworth3mo

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.

7Tobias H3mo

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?

[-]johnswentworth3mo100

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.

6JenniferRM3mo

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

6Afterimage3mo

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.

2the gears to ascension3mo

is there more to this than is described by something vaguely like agents and devices? (most of the point is in the abstract)

[-]sapphire3mo215

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.

[-]Caleb Biddulph3mo1711

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)

[-]johnswentworth3mo1612

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.

[-]Caleb Biddulph3mo1914

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

6johnswentworth3mo

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.

3MinusGix3mo

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.

3shawnghu17d

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.)

2johnswentworth17d

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.

[-]leogao3mo*168

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)

[-]johnswentworth3mo103

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 ... (read more)

[-]Richard_Kennaway3mo163

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,

... (read more)

[-]Karl Krueger3mo157

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.

3James Camacho3mo

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).

[-]Seth Herd3mo143

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.

2Said Achmiz3mo

This seems like a pretty damning thing to say about empathy and kindness. I’m not even sure that I’d go this far!

8Seth Herd3mo

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.

[-]David Lorell3mo132

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.

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 ... (read more)

[-]quanticle3mo128

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.

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?"

[-]David Lorell3mo120

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?

4johnswentworth3mo

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".

9David Lorell3mo

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 :)

[-]Ulisse Mini3mo114

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.)

4Ulisse Mini3mo

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.

[-]Raemon3mo110

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."

[-]Raemon3mo2635

(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?)

3johnswentworth3mo

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.

4Raemon3mo

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).

3CronoDAS3mo

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!

4johnswentworth3mo

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.

2CronoDAS3mo

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.)

2Hastings3mo

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.

2johnswentworth3mo

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.)

[-]Johannes C. Mayer3mo103

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.

[-]Sinclair Chen3mo10-2

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.

[-]JenniferRM3mo90

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... (read more)

[-]seed3mo92

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)

1Said Achmiz3mo

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. ---------------------------------------- 1. Although many people are in fact idiots, and have in fact not tried the ob

8Archimedes3mo

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.

1Said Achmiz3mo

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).

2Archimedes3mo

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.

[-]MinusGix3mo84

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 comm... (read more)

[-]Ben Pace3mo82

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)

[-]Raemon3mo2322

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)

5Ben Pace3mo

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.

2CronoDAS3mo

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.

[-]Ape in the coat3mo70

Don’t go bullshitting me about how a kind and compassionate life of mediocrity is a “different kind of strength” or some such cope.

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 va... (read more)

[-]James Camacho3mo7-1

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 e... (read more)

[-]Adam Zerner3mo70

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.

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.

[-]Unnamed3mo70

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 empat

... (read more)

[-]Adam Zerner3mo60

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)

5MinusGix3mo

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.

[-]DirectedEvolution3mo60

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.

[-]β-redex3mo65

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.)

2Said Achmiz3mo

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…?

3β-redex3mo

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.

2Said Achmiz3mo

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.

4β-redex3mo

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.)

[-]tailcalled3mo60

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.

5dirk3mo

Autism and schizophrenia are positively correlated.

[-]Svyatoslav Usachev3mo*60

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.

[-]J Bostock3mo60

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".

[-]Johannes C. Mayer3mo50

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... (read more)

[-]β-redex3mo50

if I were next to her, I could role-play as a supportive friend or partner.

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.

[-]Nina Panickssery3mo50

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)

1James Camacho3mo

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.

[-]leerylizard3mo51

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)

[-]Said Achmiz3mo104

“This person, like me, is trying to do the best they can with the knowledge, ability, and responsibilities they have, just like I am. …”

But many (maybe most) people are not, in fact, trying to do the best they can with what they have.

1leerylizard3mo

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.

[-]ryan_b3mo50

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

7johnswentworth3mo

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.

[-]chasmani3mo54

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

7johnswentworth3mo

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.

4chasmani3mo

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?

[-]Adele Lopez3mo52

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.

[-]Vladimir_Nesov3mo50

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).

[-]Douglas_Knight3mo4-3

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.

7Ben Pace3mo

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.

4Douglas_Knight3mo

But John is also flinching away from acting on his disgust. He is not communicating it to the other people.

7Ben Pace3mo

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.

[-]Drake Morrison3mo41

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

7Ben Pace3mo

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.

[-]WillPetillo3mo40

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... (read more)

[-]David Gross3mo40

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.

[-]Aprillion3mo*4-2

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 - ... (read more)

[-]Jasnah Kholin1mo30

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.

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... (read more)

[-]krs3mo30

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 actuall... (read more)

[-]Myron Hedderson3mo30

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)

4johnswentworth3mo

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.

6Said Achmiz3mo

Would it be reasonable to map to this taking the intentional stance toward people (as opposed to the design stance or the physical stance)?

2johnswentworth3mo

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.

1Myron Hedderson3mo

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 c

8johnswentworth3mo

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.

4Myron Hedderson3mo

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 r

[-]Aldo Acevedo3mo30

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)

4Viliam3mo

This can be a true statement and you can be disgusted by the thought of "being (like) them".

[-]metachirality3mo30

I think I my empathy tends to be kinder because I used to be like nail-head.

[-]asher3mo3-17

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... (read more)

7johnswentworth3mo

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.

4asher3mo

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.

[-]Celarix3mo30

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 i... (read more)

[-]anaguma3mo30

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.

Which university did you attend?

5johnswentworth3mo

Harvey Mudd

[-]RationalElf3mo30

(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 mistake... (read more)

1RationalElf3mo

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.

[-]Jonas Hallgren3mo30

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 mo... (read more)

2johnswentworth3mo

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!

3Jonas Hallgren3mo

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?)

[-]ZY3mo*30

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.... (read more)

1ZY3mo

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.

[-]Al V3mo30

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... (read more)

[-]azergante3mo30

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 stron

... (read more)

[-]ekaterimburgo7353mo30

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.

[-]stavros3mo30

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 aut... (read more)

[-]Said Achmiz3mo-1-26

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.

7Three-Monkey Mind3mo

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.

5Said Achmiz3mo

Please see this discussion.

2Mo Putera3mo

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:

3Said Achmiz3mo

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.

1Isha Yiras Hashem3mo

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)

5tslarm3mo

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.

1Isha Yiras Hashem3mo

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.

[+]hunterglenn3mo-10-8

[+][comment deleted]3mo10

LESSWRONG
LW

LESSWRONG
LW

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My Empathy Is Rarely Kind

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