please do not pretend that you know what other people are feeling
Is this a thing any human can really do? I mean, we evolved to quickly recognize emotions in others. I agree that in the context of an Internet discussion, the sensorial bandwith is so low that miscalibration is frequent, and so we should strive to achieve “non empathy”. We have though a whole section of our brain devoted just to that, so I guess that this particular bias is hopeless.
Is this a thing any human can really do? I mean, we evolved to quickly recognize emotions in others.
I agree that in the context of an Internet discussion, the sensorial bandwith is so low that miscalibration is frequent, and so we should strive to achieve “non empathy”. We have though a whole section of our brain devoted just to that, so I guess that this particular bias is hopeless.
You can certainly use the part of the ‘empathy’ modelling capacity to realise that telling other people what they feel tends to piss people off when you are wrong (and sometimes also when you are right). Failing to adequately account for such likely reactions isn’t an inevitability, it is a social skills failure and a fairly blatant one at that.
Most people learn not to do this after embarassing themselves a couple of times when it backfires. (An except is when attempting to deliberately provoke or one-up another (“U mad bro?”)).
Failing to adequately account for such likely reactions isn’t an inevitability, it is a social skills failure and a fairly blatant one at that.
That’s not what I was noticing: telling other people how they feel might surely be a social failure, but not pretending to know how they feel? That seems much harder, since we have evolved to base our social interactions on the ability to guess the emotions of the other members of the pack.
Your comment would be better without the first paragraph.
You are not a Legilimens; please do not pretend that you know what other people are feeling. It’s both epistemically and conversationally rude.
“please do not pretend that you know what other people are feeling” should be emblazoned in giant glowing text above every internet forum.
Is this a thing any human can really do? I mean, we evolved to quickly recognize emotions in others.
I agree that in the context of an Internet discussion, the sensorial bandwith is so low that miscalibration is frequent, and so we should strive to achieve “non empathy”. We have though a whole section of our brain devoted just to that, so I guess that this particular bias is hopeless.
You can certainly use the part of the ‘empathy’ modelling capacity to realise that telling other people what they feel tends to piss people off when you are wrong (and sometimes also when you are right). Failing to adequately account for such likely reactions isn’t an inevitability, it is a social skills failure and a fairly blatant one at that.
Most people learn not to do this after embarassing themselves a couple of times when it backfires. (An except is when attempting to deliberately provoke or one-up another (“U mad bro?”)).
That’s not what I was noticing: telling other people how they feel might surely be a social failure, but not pretending to know how they feel? That seems much harder, since we have evolved to base our social interactions on the ability to guess the emotions of the other members of the pack.
We also evolved the capacity to suspect that a thought we have might be wrong, and to develop notions of confidence.
Don’t strive for ‘non empathy’. Strive for ‘not being overconfident’. Also, keep in mind Scalzi’s maxim, “The failure mode of clever is asshole”
Also keep in mind Voltaire’s maxim, “A witty saying proves nothing”. ;)
Did it look like I was trying to prove something with that? Once you’ve seen it, you can judge it for yourself.