On many occasions, I have been told to “be more empathetic.”
When I ask why, I typically get this reaction:
This is a ridiculous question. I am not going to answer it because it is so ridiculous.
Empathy is the right thing to do! You should feel bad for that person. We’re humans, after all.
These explanations never really helped.
*
Even after reading this, I am not sure the author really gets what is behind the request.
From FBI negotiator Chris Voss' book, Never Split the Difference:
> There is nothing more frustrating or disruptive to any
negotiation than to get the feeling you are talking to
someone who isn't listening. Playing dumb is a valid
negotiating technique, and “I don't understand” is a
legitimate response. But ignoring the other party's position
only builds up frustration and makes them less likely to do
what you want.
> The opposite of that is tactical empathy.
> In my negotiating course, I tell my students that empathy
is “the ability to recognize the perspective of a counterpart,
and the vocalization of that recognition.” That's an
academic way of saying that empathy is paying attention to
another human being, asking what they are feeling, and
making a commitment to understanding their world.
Notice I didn't say anything about agreeing with the
other person's values and beliefs or giving out hugs. That's
sympathy. What I'm talking about is trying to understand a
situation from another person's perspective.
---
The respondent to the author is ironically showing why empathy is so important. By being non-empathetic and shutting down the question as "stupid", the author is bound to feel the respondent doesn't care to understand their position. If the respondent really cared about having the author understand their position, they would have first shown that they will try to understand the author's, even if they don't agree with it.
This is also the driver behind so much of the toxicity of modern politics. All the snark, condescension, and contempt just sets up a feedback loop that drives people even further away from each other.
Those seem like particularly bad reasons. I'm not sure if they are the arguments that the author has been given or if that's what he perceived those arguments to be.
My take on it is to remember that the people you are talking to are real people with reasons for doing things. Very few people do things that they think are wrong at the time of doing them.
I would guess that the single most common cause of bad faith arguments comes from people jumping to the conclusion that the person they are dealing with is acting in bad faith.
Reflecting on it some more perhaps you can boil it down to the implications of dealing with real people.
If you don't act with empathy you can hurt people. Is it your intention to hurt people?
If it turns out your motivation is, in fact, to hurt people then the issue isn't empathy but your own motivations. Reflecting on your motivations and what you feel like you should be doing as a person is the path to take here.
>Those seem like particularly bad reasons. I'm not sure if they are the arguments that the author has been given or if that's what he perceived those arguments to be.
I think this might have to just be axiomatic. At the bottom of every system is an axiom, whether it's identity in mathematics or "we hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal" in USican politics or "empathy is good and to be pursued" in interpersonal relationships.
>If you don't act with empathy you can hurt people. Is it your intention to hurt people?
I dare say that if your mission is actually to hurt people as much as you can empathy will help you a lot in that goal because it lets you define strategies tailored to hurt the target based on their feelings. Without empathy you're limited to thinking about what would hurt you and then applying it to other people.
I believe the point they are making is that they believe the original author still does not "get it". I'm inclined to agree.
Recognizing that when people say one lacks empathy and rejecting what one believes they might mean by that and instead reinterpreting empathy to mean something they want it to mean is fundamentally a demonstration of a lack of empathy in what was likely the original context. Even if new interpretation technically aligns with the dictionary definition.
I want to be clear that recommendations that the post make are helpful and seeing the world as best one can from some others point of view is worthwhile.
At a fundamental level though saying I see your definition of empathy and reject it for my definition which I'll be happy to try to live by, while noble, likely is directly contrary to both parity's use of the term.
Impossible to say what was behind any specific request, but what is generally meant by “Have a little emapathy” and its kin is : “Stop criticizingjudging/etc. or communicating with the individual being discussed that sharply, because we feel the individual has good reasons/a good excuse/a good justification for sympathy and/or some leniency here.”
I think the author understands that "have a little empathy" is a request to modify their behavior, but expresses their frustration that the request is unclear and (in the author's experience) the requestors won't clarify the request.
Contrast this with the conversation we're having now where I requested clarification on your initial comment, and you thoughtfully provided it.
But to your point, there's an innate "getting it" where your level/expression of empathy is roughly in-line with people you interact with, and if you don't have that, you need to do work to "get it", which is what the author did.
We can compare empathy to other practices that can benefit from innate understanding. Some people "get" poetry, math, music, long-distance running, etc. and we can all work to "get" them, but in my experience, it's never quite the same.
I _don’t_ think that empathy has anything to do with it though.
Behaviour modification yes, but that is “stop talking so critically”. Or “don’t be so harsh” or “give this person special treatment”. WHEN to do that might be key here—perhaps the colleague’s husband has cancer, or their child missed school 3 days this week with the flu, or their project wasn’t productionalized/their new to the role/etc—and so a blanket “don’t talk so harshly” isn’t called for—instead what is really desired is social calibration.
But instead it seems everyone is getting caught up on the literal interpretation of this figure of speech instead.
_May_ be a case for extending out what has been explored by theory to cover more useful ground (or not, depending on whether real-world usecases like yours are too heterogenous for effective general techniques).
100%. Not sure why you’re downvoted here, there’s nothing controversial here even if you disagree with the framing.
I would go on to say that thisminteraction between ‘holes’ exposed by LLM expectations _and_ demonstrated museerbase interest _and_ expert input (by the devs’ decision to implement changes) is an ideal outcome that would not have occurred if each of the pieces were not in place to facilitate these interactions, and there’s probably something here to learn from and expand on in the age of LLMs altering user experiences.
How is it unethical? Say you ask whoever what's being asked and they say you need to sort a string in place and then discuss how a random forest gets trained... You still need to answer those questions AND know enough to answer the follow up questions. If you're no good you'll be still found out. It just means you'll have a head start over someone without those kinds of contacts. So what level of utilizing your professional network crosses a line? Does a recommendation cross a line because I know for a fact that internal recommendations are moved to the head of the queue in most companies.
Presumably the value in knowing "you need to sort a string in place and then discuss how a random forest gets trained" is that it impacts your answers - for instance, by allowing you to look this up before the interview while appearing to the interviewers to he operating unfer the dame conditions as the other candidates, who did not know to. Your performance then appears as a signal of broader inwoledge and capability than you possess - you have, as is the entire point here and which I should not need to spell out, gained an advantage over other candidates by virtue of the information which was intentionally leaked.
If the point of the interview were "answer those questions AND know enough to answer the follow up questions" _once told what to expect and prep_, they’d be sharing those questions with all candidates. If you feel that saying to the interviewers "by the way, I did know this because [X] told me they’d be here" wouldn’t impact outcomes, then great. If you feel you’d need to hide that, then you’re aware this involves dishonesty - and if you still struggle to see how that’s unethical, lets just make sure we never need to work together.
> lets just make sure we never need to work together
Seeing as how you seem to prefer to let everyone else steal a march on you in interviews in the interest of "fairness", that's not likely to happen anytime soon.
This is correct—I do not engage ethics only when it won’t cost me, nor take convenience into account when determining where my lines are. Perhaps I’m privileged to have that option.
I thought where you were going with his was "that realized the best way to dispose of their nuclear waste was to dump it in the deep past." I’d read that novel.
Curious if anyone has thoughts on going even further: eschewing soft-ware based inference in favor of a purely ASIC approach to a static LLM. Cost benefits? Software level additional, fine-tuneable layers to allow a degree of improvement and flexibility? We are quickly approaching ‘good enough’ for some tasks—at what point does that mean we’re comfortable locking something in for the ~2-4 year lifespan of a device if there _were_ advantages offered by a hyper-specialized chip?
1. For tasks like autocomplete, keyword routing, or voice transcription, what would the latency and power savings look like on an ASIC vs. even a megakernel GPU setup? Would that justify a fixed-function approach in edge devices or embedded systems?
2. ASICs obviously kill retraining, but could we envision a hybrid setup where a base model is hardwired and a small, soft, learnable module (e.g., LoRA-style residual layers) runs on a general-purpose co-processor?
3. Would the transformer’s fixed topology lend itself to spatial reuse in ASIC design, or is the model’s size (e.g. GPT-3-class) still prohibitive without aggressive weight pruning or quantization?
Yes they did. He made it very clear that he wanted massive tariffs which by necessity would mean that people would have to pay massive taxes on everything they want to buy. Before the election experts were very clear that those tariffs would cost the consumer and importer. People were told that he wanted to go crazy with tariffs, they were repeatedly told that tariffs would take money out of their pockets, and they voted for that. Nobody should be surprised by that now.
> He made it very clear that he wanted massive tariffs which by necessity would mean that people would have to pay massive taxes on everything they want to buy.
He also falsely claimed - and his supporters, as is typical, accepted those claims - that other countries would eat that cost.
They voted for tariffs. They were willfully ignorant on their being a tax.
> Everyone was really quick to call out that lie though.
Not on the channels they watch.
There's an entire separate Fox News Cinematic Universe safe space you can immerse yourself in exclusively.
Even when they bring on a sacrificial lib to yell at, humans in general are phenomenal at ignoring or explaining away clear evidence their strongly held beliefs are wrong.
Are you pretty young? The narrative when it was happening was pretty catastrophic. I remember reading about people not being able to get prescriptions, for example, because no one knew how imports worked.
I don't know how things panned out, but the discussions in the early days around Brexit were absolutely on par or even worse than what we're seeing in these two days of discussions around tariffs.
I don't know what 'pretty young' is, apart from condescending, but I voted in it, so I remember as well as you do I imagine.
Regardless of contemporaneous comparisons, the up-thread comment I initially replied to suggested there was some ongoing worse 'crisis' in the UK than the current situation in the US, if they meant to refer to Brexit it was not clear at all, regardless of whether anyone things that's an ongoing worse situation. (Except that the fact it's not clear really suggests it isn't...)
Sorry, the implication is that this is far worse than Brexit, but that this is the US’s Global Exit, riffing off the strong negative connotations in te US. I saw it from on Bluesky, but that linked here https://theradicalfederalist.substack.com/p/the-neoreactiona... - so, being framed as much worse than Brexit.
No worries, yours was clearer, it was the first indication I had that anyone meant to compare to Brexit, I just asked to clarify. 'up-thread comment' I meant was the bdelmas one I replied to that referred only to 'crisis like the UK is going through' without elaboration.
What? The didn't happen, or it's not how it happened. Are you pretty young to remember Brexit?
The UK voted for Brexit in 2016, but it was up to the UK itself to invoke it with the EU. They took almost 4 years to do it in January of 2020 after 4 years of arguing about it with a transition period and trade talks with the EU until the end of 2020. It wasn't a surprise and "no one knew how imports worked". Yeah people online made all sort of wild hyperbolic scenarios, but trade was unaffected until the end of 2020. There were shortages in the UK around that time, but I wonder if you remember what happened shortly after January 31st of 2020?
The prescription drug shortages is still a problem in the UK. It's not because no one still knows how imports work in the UK, 5 years after Brexit. It's because the overall imports and exports in the UK has been falling since Brexit. Because the UK economy hasn't been doing great. Brexit, COVID, and then Ukraine/Russian energy dependency came in a pretty bad time for the UK.
> They took almost 4 years to do it in January of 2020 after 4 years of arguing about it with a transition period and trade talks with the EU until the end of 2020.
Currently, Trump’s tariffs have kinda broken the stock markets, and caused some difficult-to-measure economic damage (investments will have been delayed or cancelled, that sort of thing). If, tomorrow, Trump chokes on a well-done steak, or Congress puts him back in his box (remember, his ability to do _anything_ with tariffs is entirely within the gift of Congress), or otherwise the tariffs go away, then the markets will pretty much spring back, and the economic hit will be small enough that it’s hard to measure.
While estimates of the damage done by Brexit are of course very politically sensitive, nearly everyone agrees that some substantial damage has been done, particularly to trade and jobs (one estimate has the UK with _over 2 million_ fewer jobs today than it would otherwise have, Goldman Sachs says that the UK economy is 5% smaller than it ‘should’ be, etc etc)
Even after reading this, I am not sure the author really gets what is behind the request.