This article makes the mistake of assuming that things like the national debate of encryption and privacy sparked by e.g. the San Bernadino iPhone ordeal are actually about the moral themes they are characterized by.
They are not about those moral themes. They are just status and in-group vs. out-group games like everything else. We don't use data-driven approaches to them for the same reason why people continue to hire underperforming assest managers or why they hire over-priced management consultants.
With encryption, immigration, climate change, finance reform, etc. etc., you pick a side of the debate and that identifies Who You Are and What Team You Are On for purposes of letting other people know that you're either their implicit ally or implicit enemy, that you would submit to them or resist them, that you intrinsically respect their credential or that you treat their credential with skepticism.
I was hoping this article might be about scope insensitivity and would speak about how we have to intelligently use legislation and law enforcement to protect human rights because, even for the best of us, it's not cognitively feasible to feel the morality you would wish upon others.
Instead it seems like a meandering groan that we aren't more data driven -- but of course we aren't!
And even when we are "data driven" it's generally just an excuse to use politically manipulated notions of data-based reasoning to only enhance the degree of coalition politics, not to defeat it.
Take software for example. We claim that systematic hiring via commoditized task examinations (like IKM or HackerRank), or the use of dumb shit process management like Agile/Scrum, are supposed to represent a shift into "objective" and "data-driven" evaluation. But it's unequivocally not. These are just ways of letting middle management and political gatekeepers engineer whatever subjective metrics they prefer, while being shielded from complaints that they are not being objective.
If we can't even get this right for something as small as project management or software hiring, it's beyond realistic hope that we could actually develop a moral calculus at a national level and use data-driven principles to actually inform the national debate over privacy vs. safety.
> e don't use data-driven approaches to them for the same reason why people continue to hire underperforming assest managers or why they hire over-priced management consultants.
i've got a data-driven solution for evaluating potential business partners, contractors, anything:
> it's beyond realistic hope that we could actually develop a moral calculus at a national level and use data-driven principles to actually inform the national debate over privacy vs. safety.
i think the key here is record taking, with really simple metrics.
>That means that, in principle, if we eliminate out-group hate completely, we may also undermine in-group love. Empathy is a zero-sum game.
Oh rubbish. Look at Buddhist monk types and angry political extremist types. They do a pretty good job of loving everything and hating most things respectively.
I mean the article has a point that universal human empathy is not widespread and we should design systems accordingly but that's been common knowledge for centuries.
Confucius said, "Is there anyone who can even for a day give their full strength to being humane? I haven’t met anyone who lacked the strength. But if anyone has done this, I haven’t seen it."
Stan Lee has said he created the X-Men (and others) in part to tell a story about racism without talking about race. Instead of it being skin color, it was the (often invisible) genetic aspects that people used to define the in/out-groups.
The Watchmen, Ender's Game, and Starship Troopers all work for this one too.
Ender's Game also showed what happens - blame and recriminations - after the external threat is removed.. people go back to their old struggles, fights, etc.
ender's game is a photocopy of the haldemann book 'forever war'. EG is maybe better-liked by kids but it gets war wrong. Haldemann wrote forever war after coming back from vietnam.
> ender's game is a photocopy of the haldemann book 'forever war'.
No, it really isn't. Certainly they deal with many of the same themes, and if you want to say that Haldemann does a much better job then I can probably agree with that, but accusing Ender's Game of being a mere rip-off just because they address similar topics is silly.
similar topics, at similar settings, in similar order. especially if you remember that speaker for the dead was written first; OSC created EG as a prequel, liked it better, and published first. Speaker for the dead probably comes from card's life experience being a mormon missionary (hint: the piggies are the brown people he went to convert). Ender's Game comes from his life experience reading haldemann.
(OSC is also a weird and outspoken homophobe; easy to see him (a) misunderstanding forever war and (b) liking it for the wrong reasons).
Look, card is clearly the better writer between the two of them. He added a lot. But if you want to put forward war fiction as a case for empathy, it's irresponsible to look at EG before FW.
You can certainly say that Ender's Game makes a poor case for empathy, and you can make a case that it was inspired by The Forever War. But that's very different from saying it's a "photocopy".
> Ender's Game was written specifically to establish the character of Ender for his role of the Speaker in Speaker for the Dead, the outline for which he had written before novelizing Ender's Game.
Forever war goes a lot less into the psychology of the individual and more into the societal psychology, but only barely because it takes place over such a huge timescale.
The continuation of enders war do go into much more societal factors.
Yeah, but not one of them would be able to put up a fight if we ever really wanted to kill it. We could murder every tiger inside a week if we really wanted to.
I'm not sure anyone can say they truly empathize with anything. When you put yourself first, you immediately are not fully empathizing with everything.
Rather, I'd say I have a healthy respect for all living beings.
I can smack a mosquito and respect it was doing what it needed to survive, while also putting myself first in my desire to not catch dengue fever.
Life and death are natural. Empathy may not be complete unless you're willing to sacrifice yourself. Respect may or may not be limited to humans.
Fiction is not detached from reality. Authors who write fiction base it on their experiences, studies, believes. Grounded in, taken from and influenced by bigger forces of religion, social decorums, culture. Amplified to an unrealistic dimension. Lots of advances in science and push towards technology can be attributed to fiction that recent generations have consumed. So although fiction cannot be authoritative, I am uncertain that it would be wrong to draw inferences from it
In group and out group is just a conceptualization of competition. That's how we improve ourselves and how we evolved. It's the basis of capitalism and so many other things.
I have no trouble "extending equal compassion to foreign earthquake victims and hurricane victims in our own country". I might not donate equally but that's not a proper measure of empathy. There is no accurate measure for that. The scientists of Nautilus will never understand that because they've been trained to only publish things based on collected data. "world’s leading thinkers" [1] my butt!
I guess once we have thrown away universal empathy we may as well throw away the natural numbers, the concept of a line or using categories to designate things we have never seen. I mean what's the point of calling a table a table if I will never be able to hold all existing tables in my head?
More seriously, infinite concepts are usually really simple to conceive for most human minds, it's much more complicated to look at real life objects clashing with mental objects and extract new meaningful concepts that may help solve those inconsistencies.
>And then the pendulum swung back. People do care, newspaper editorialists and social-media commenters granted. But they care inconsistently: grieving for victims of Brussels’ recent attacks and ignoring Yemen’s recent bombing victims; expressing outrage over ISIS rather than the much deadlier Boko Haram; mourning the death of Cecil the Lion in Zimbabwe while overlooking countless human murder victims. There are far worthier tragedies, they wrote, than the ones that attract the most public empathy.
>[...] If we recognized that we have a limited quantity of empathy to begin with, it would help to cure some of the acrimony and self-flagellation of these discussions. [...] We must begin with a realistic assessment of what those limits are, and then construct a scientific way of choosing which values matter most to us.
For example in the above paragraph the author seems to extract that the meaning of those criticism is that we should feel bad about ourselves. I don't think that's the point, I agree that self-flagellation is improductive, but we can rationally examine those kinds of inconsistent beliefs and emotions. Is the way we look at those other people influencing how we act towards them? Do those actions affect how they act towards us? Is there any chance of reconciliation?
The author also seems to blindly accept the belief that personal intervention is the only way to reduce misery, with no place for cold restructuring of society in a way that avoid generating that misery in the first place, done in a cold calculated way, with no need to deplete our precious, finite, empathy.
ok, sure, the idea of empathy ignores the limits of human psychology... because it's an "idea". human psychology is not an idea, nor is are its constituent parts ideas. so what?
if there is scarcity and competition, no doubt human psychology will kick in. but the idea of empathy would live on anyway.
This says that 'Absolute universalism, in which we feel compassion for every individual on Earth, is psychologically impossible' because we need to be able to hate on out-groups to love on in-groups. If we discover aliens might this not hold?
It's not impossible but it requires a long sincere practice to peel off the layers of false identities that we associate ourselves with. These are gradually created starting right from our birth.
However one way it's true because once compassion for all beings (not just humans) becomes our nature, we no longer remain human – we become divine.
That's the goal of all paths of Yoga (Karma/devotion/meditation/wisdom)
The above isn't something theoretical jargon – I know at least one individual living at this moment who has reached to that state by following the meditation path of yoga [0].
As an antidote to this echo chamber effect, I invite proselytizers to discuss their ideas in a non-proselytizing way, so that we can meet on common ground instead of assuming vague terms like "divine" etc. If we can't get to that point, it's just one echo chamber talking to another.
Yoga comes under psychology and spirituality, not religion. it's not related to rituals but introspection within – examining and experiments with your mind (habit patterns, emotions and thoughts). Just like a scientist does with nature externally. Only tools of the trade are different.
You may wish to read yoga sutras on swamij.com to see for yourself the profound insights of mind and its working expounded by the author Patanjali.
For instance, Yoga sutras starts with:The goal of Yoga is to regulate the modifications (tendencies) of mind,So the seer rests in its true nature.
The true nature of our consciousness (the seer) is existence-knowledge-bliss.
Hating someone or a group/race of beings is just a negative tendancy which has been adopted, often unconsciously, due to certain experiences in life. With stillness of meditation you can invite such thoughts witness them and remove clinging of mind toward them [0]. All methodologically.
Of course telling people how to attain special divinity through holy practices is proselytizing... sure, we can call it spiritual proselytizing!
Since you give me life recommendations and profound wisdom, here's my advice offered in return: forget about all this stuff and just live your life as an ordinary human on earth.
Through this simple practice of letting go of attachment to religious hope, you can find a sweet kind of freedom and simplicity—maybe even some kind of wisdom!
Predictably, you set off a ridiculous flamewar with this ridiculous aside. Then you kept adding more fuel to it. You also violated the HN guidelines, which ask you not to call names in comments here. Please don't do these things on Hacker News. They're destructive of the discourse here.
Sorry dang, I had no idea people were so touchy. I was raised by a feminist and live in a foreign culture, so probably have a contorted view of casually acceptable discourse these days.
Nor does the pain of low status or unattractive people, or out-group members. And for that matter, the pain of 100 = pain of 100,000 - human emotions just don't scale.
I'll take principled moral philosophy any day.
The main purpose of empathy is to (often hypocritically) signal to our in-group that we will face a high psychological cost if we behave disloyally and are therefore more trustworthy.
The empathy you and everyone else are talking about is not what a clinical psychologist / psychotherapist / competent psychiatrist means by empathy. Yours is more akin to what they would call sympathy / pity / compassion.
It's unfortunate, because while I agree with you, the lesser-known version of empathy is actually useful with respect to dealing with pain. The characteristic in common is a sharing of emotion, but therapist empathy also includes intelligent analysis to overcome things like racial prejudice, dialog with the recipient to check for understanding, and well it's basically just hard work that pays decently if you're good at it.
It doesn't scale though, it's really only good on a 1-1 basis but some group situations can work. Supposedly parents are supposed to do it naturally with their children but everyone is so self-centered these days that I never see it.
I think cognitive empathy (knowing what others feel) is the technical term for what you call "therapist empathy", as opposed to affective empathy (feeling what others feel).
Cognitive empathy would be more about recognizing that the pain felt by racists is real pain. Of course, then an unpleasant moral dilemma arises - should we take such pain seriously? Traditional appeals to empathy say no, since we have no affective empathy for racists (they are far more out-group than blacks). But is that correct?
Hmmm, ok, so I think cognitive empathy probably subsumes affective empathy, with safeguards to stop you from getting overwhelmed by it. [edit: Or at least therapists do both of these things.]
Good question. I think therapists have an obligation to treat racists without prejudice. I've read a few papers written about the treatment of repulsive clients. Many times just by listening to and validating pain, the pain will shift and the defense - which may well be racism - will fall apart. So then I think the question is, is malignant racism only ever acceptable as a symptom of a deeper problem? I probably would be okay if the answer here was yes. (Unlike homosexuality, for example, because unlike racism, even if you construed homosexuality to be a defense, it's much harder to show that it's an unhealthy defense that actually hurts anyone.)
We've asked you many times to stop breaking the HN guidelines, and instead you've turned to outright personal attack. That's not allowed here, so we've banned this account.
Consider an alternate comment on an alternate topic: "Sorry Mrs. black female, but on the limits of multiprocessing vs multithreading I'd far prefer to trust a skilled systems engineer who came from old school computer architecture traditions that are scientifically demonstrated to work."
This is an appeal to authority which fails even to cite the authority. Additionally, it's racist/sexist and an ad-hominem because it implicitly assumes that the author - by virtue of their race/gender - cannot be a systems engineer/meditation practitioner/etc.
I totally agree. Although I must add, that I've recently shifted more towards the much more ancient and even much more prominent Astrology. Astrology is both far older and has a solidly proven track record, particularly in the field of finding compatible couples (as still used frequently in India).
I believe the poster was making the fair point that something being ancient doesn't provide evidence of its efficacy. The point was being made in very much the same brashly satirical spirit as my initial aside.
I have a seriously hard time reading this comment while knowing what Orson Scott Card is actually like. In the frame of who he really is, everything about Ender's game seems like a reflection of an idea of parody or hyperbole of the personality types in the book. That said, it's one of my favorite books.
Indeed. Perfect, noble, misunderstood and misused little boys are recurring protagonists in Card's work, and given the way that his public homophobia comes off more like a self-loathing closet case than anything else, that fascination takes on a rather different and decidedly creepy cast.
Wow, OSC is a gay child molester, nobly suppressing his individual desires for the benefit of society, other humans and his moral code? We need more men like him in this world.
It might be noble, if he wasn't also calling for gay people to be put in prison while incorporating his fetish into his stories. Either one alone would be problematic; both at once is pretty damn creepy.
I got a lot of downvotes on the last post--do people think I'm making up or exaggerating Card's homophobia? Here's a few quotes. These are his own words, publicly published; look it up if you don't believe me:
"Laws against homosexual behavior should remain on the books, not to be indiscriminately enforced against anyone who happens to be caught violating them, but to be used when necessary to send a clear message that those who flagrantly violate society’s regulation of sexual behavior cannot be permitted to remain as acceptable, equal citizens within that society."
"If we accept the argument of the hypocrites of homosexuality that their sin is not a sin, we have destroyed ourselves."
"Regardless of law, marriage has only one definition, and any government that attempts to change it is my mortal enemy. I will act to destroy that government and bring it down."
(You'll note I'm not calling for him to be censored. Disagreeing with someone's opinions is the same as saying that they should be outlawed.)
Your characterisation is simply not supported by those quotes in their full context, as far as I am aware. Did you ever seek the context?
Claim: OSC wants states to keep sodomy and anti-homosexual laws on the books.
Quote in Context: The Supreme Court had declared in 1986 (Bowers vs. Hardwick) that a Georgia law prohibiting sodomy even in the privacy of one's own home was constitutional. OSC wrote an essay in 1990 (23 years ago) to a conservative Mormon audience that, at the time, would have felt no interest in decriminalizing homosexual acts. In that context, his call to "leave the laws on the books" was simply recognizing the law at the time. In the same article he called for them not to be enforced. Within that context this was the liberal and tolerant view - for which OSC was criticized in conservative Mormon circles as being "pro-gay." The law was not overturned by the Supreme Court until 2003. Now that the law has changed, OSC has no interest in criminalizing homosexual acts and would never call for such a thing, any more than he wanted such laws enforced back when they were still on the books.
> In the same article he called for them not to be enforced.
Except "when necessary to send a clear message that those who flagrantly violate society's regulation of sexual behavior cannot be permitted to remain as acceptable, equal citizens within that society." What's he talking about there? Not rape, or child abuse, or public indecency; those are already illegal. He's saying that consensual gay relationships can be grudgingly tolerated as long as they're aware that what they do is shameful and wrong, and don't start thinking that they deserve the same rights as normal people. See also the next paragraph: "The goal of the polity is not to put homosexuals in jail. The goal is to discourage people from engaging in homosexual practices in the first place, and, when they nevertheless proceed in their homosexual behavior, to encourage them to do so discreetly, so as not to shake the confidence of the community..."
This is still bigotry and discrimination. Don't expect me to praise a man who punches me in the face just because he refrained from shooting me.
But all right, that was 36 years ago. (Not 23; the paragraph that you copy-pasted from Card's website is from 2003.) How do you explain the 2008 quote where he calls for the overthrow of any government that legalizes gay marriage? What context did I miss there?
The context of the second quote is that he's using the voice of a hypothetical future citizen who will threaten to rise up against a government which is enacting too much change, too fast against the will of the majority.
I don't agree with OSC on these points but the selection of quotations you gave are designed to paint him as a hateful frothing at the mouth bigot, rather than someone who is generally reasonable and sympathetic despite their anti-homosexual religious values. I don't think this is helpful to anyone, personally.
Perhaps, but you have no evidence that card is a gay person with the desire to molest children. And if he were, then his public stance and behavior (assuming he has not actually molested children) would be noble rather than creepy - resisting urges he considers wrong rather than rationalizing them.
Look - I don't agree with him. He dislikes my womanizing lifestyle as much as he dislikes the gay lifestyle. Doesn't mean he is also secretly a womanizer in addition to being gay (as you seem to want to insinuate). Most likely he is a virtuous person who simply disagrees with both of us.
So he's not a bigot because he believes that he's right? How is that different from any other bigot? Do you think that the KKK, or lynch mobs, secretly know that they're wrong and are really just trolling? Or do you consider them "virtuous people who simply disagree"?
They are not about those moral themes. They are just status and in-group vs. out-group games like everything else. We don't use data-driven approaches to them for the same reason why people continue to hire underperforming assest managers or why they hire over-priced management consultants.
With encryption, immigration, climate change, finance reform, etc. etc., you pick a side of the debate and that identifies Who You Are and What Team You Are On for purposes of letting other people know that you're either their implicit ally or implicit enemy, that you would submit to them or resist them, that you intrinsically respect their credential or that you treat their credential with skepticism.
I was hoping this article might be about scope insensitivity and would speak about how we have to intelligently use legislation and law enforcement to protect human rights because, even for the best of us, it's not cognitively feasible to feel the morality you would wish upon others.
Instead it seems like a meandering groan that we aren't more data driven -- but of course we aren't!
And even when we are "data driven" it's generally just an excuse to use politically manipulated notions of data-based reasoning to only enhance the degree of coalition politics, not to defeat it.
Take software for example. We claim that systematic hiring via commoditized task examinations (like IKM or HackerRank), or the use of dumb shit process management like Agile/Scrum, are supposed to represent a shift into "objective" and "data-driven" evaluation. But it's unequivocally not. These are just ways of letting middle management and political gatekeepers engineer whatever subjective metrics they prefer, while being shielded from complaints that they are not being objective.
If we can't even get this right for something as small as project management or software hiring, it's beyond realistic hope that we could actually develop a moral calculus at a national level and use data-driven principles to actually inform the national debate over privacy vs. safety.