There’s nothing in the context of this quote or Elon Musk’s that suggests they’re talking about empathy being taught in schools and it making boys weak. In both cases it’s more a response to Democrats using the word a lot in their political speech to try to bring coalitions of people together.
I would encourage people to read the Wikipedia page on George Floyd. He was a complicated and flawed individual, who definitely did some bad things and didn’t make very good decisions all the time. But he tried to improve later in his life with mixed results (at least with regards to drug addiction), and that counts for something, I think.
Derek Chauvin and Charlie Kirk, by comparison, tended to get worse as their lives went on. Chauvin may well have framed Floyd for a drug crime and Kirk espoused factually false information to millions of people just to gain fame and power in conservative circles.
These people are not the same.
Then please explain the quote above.
The man simply didn’t understand the word at all. Empathy is our capacity to understand the minds of others. It does not convey approval or agreement, simply understanding. Psychopaths have empathy; it’s how they’re good at manipulating others. You have to understand someone to manipulate them effectively. All humans possess some degree of empathy, as do most animals.
There is an affective (emotional) component to empathy that effectively causes your mind to conjure the same emotion you perceive another person (or animal) to be feeling. This is why you cry when watching an emotional scene in films sometimes. Psychopaths do not have this component, which is why they seem emotionally cold to people sometimes. Psychopaths have to fake this in order to blend into society, and they learn to do so over the course of their lives.
Charlie Kirk simply didn’t know what the fuck he was talking about in this instance, and Elon Musk doesn’t either. As someone on the autism spectrum, I’m not surprised Musk has some difficulty with the concept (no disrespect to autistic people, btw, just stating facts).
Not trying to dismiss you here at all, but my genuine advice is to get some therapy and not take advice about serious stuff like this from strangers online.
I don’t think this is difficult to understand at all. You want to have a tool to scoop liquid, hold it in your hand, and allow you to pour it into your mouth. So, you invent a cup or a bowl. Then, you want a tool that allows you to do this in mouth-sized bits. So, you invent a spoon. Or, if you’re really smart, a straw.
This really isn’t that hard.
Yes, there are certainly good things to come of it, I never denied that. But we’re also the cause of the latest mass extinction event on the planet, so there’s that too. I’d call that “mixed results at best.”
Others ITT have already mentioned people as a source of hope. For me, this is something of a paradox, as I’m fairly misanthropic. I believe most people are—on balance—good or at least prosocial. They want to get along with others and not cause harm. However, I also think we’re inherently tribal and self-centered. Our capacity for empathy within our closest social circles is quite high, but outside of them it barely exists. We tend to make good choices when it comes to those we know, but beyond that we tend to be fairly apathetic and callous.
So, I am hopeful based on people’s desire to be good and make the world a better place for all. But our historical record demonstrates a failure pattern at scale that is anything but inspiring. Overall, I think we tend to hit at the middle of the road or slightly below it. I see the history of human civilization like a corkscrew: progress is made, but only very slowly and through many repetitions of past mistakes.
Ultimately, I don’t have much hope. Humans perform best in small groups; in large ones (10,000+ people) we splinter and start treating each other very poorly. We evolved to function in small groups of just a few families. When we settled down and started developing our civilization (only 15,000 years ago—no time for evolution to change us), we struck out into territory we were not prepared for. Human civilization is effectively an experiment, and I would argue it’s returned mixed results at best.
EDIT: I also think one of the chief problems with us as a species is that we are innately myopic. That is to say, we don’t truly recognize problems until they start to affect us directly. We had all the information we needed to predict the impacts of human-driven climate change in the 1950s, if not earlier. But people trying to draw attention to them were dismissed as alarmists. Only when we began truly witnessing the impacts around the turn of the century did we acknowledge the problem and start acting on it. I think the same will be true for AI, but much worse. We intellectually understand the threats that AI poses to our species, but won’t start acting on them until they actually start to take effect, and by that point, it will be too late.
I liked the movie, but could have done without the messaging. I dislike political messaging in media even when I agree with the message, because I’m going to said media to escape reality. I don’t need a reminder about it, and I particularly don’t need some allegorical moral instruction, like I’m some sort of child.
I think there’s a place for political messaging in film—like when it’s the explicit purpose of said film—but I don’t like it being wedged in just anywhere.
Then she too wasn’t using the word correctly. She may have meant the affective portion of it, which she probably didn’t have.