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Comment by kordlessagain | Hacker News Reader

It's the specifics that give it away. "Take 5 poor children from your neighborhood to Pizza Hut."

Screaming kids at Pizza Hut aside, we can't make other people have empathy. They have to find it and explore it themselves, perhaps by seeing others do the same.

It's especially ironic that someone with lowered empathy would be demanding someone else show fake empathy publicly before giving them back control of their own computer.

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I just can imagine how I'd convince 5 kids to go to lunch with me, without outright kidnapping them. This sounds like Black Mirror material.

Convince or not, I'm thinking you might attract some really personal attention from law enforcement by the time you made your pitch to the 5th kid.

Or maybe you happen to be a 97-year-old retired nun, who everyone in your neighborhood knows, and it'd be fine. Not trying to be judgemental or anything.

The demand is indicative of where the author lives: think where in the world it would be acceptable for a stranger to approach children under 13 and invite them to lunch at a restaurant.

Not necessarily even a stranger per se, but poor communities are often "closer" to each other. They (sometimes) depend on neighbors for help more than rich neighbors do. Many of the kids play outside because they don't all have ipads and playstations keeping them inside, many adults walk to the bus/subway and interact with the kids in their neighborhood every day. So, I can see how a well known neighbor might splurge on a treat for some of the kids in their neighborhood to brighten their day.

wouldn't taking 5 poor kids to a pizza hut be an act of sympathy and not empathy?

I think the approach is clumsy and overly constrained, but I would hope the idea was that by being forced to actually interact with neighbors and their families it would increase social cohesion and empathy.

I don't think that's particularly incorrect, isolation from neighbors and the invisibility of the poor makes it a heck of a lot easier to ignore their problems.

I'm not sure in this case it's sympathy or empathy, it sounds like mere facilitation of the potential for future relationships and dialog between poor kids and people well enough off to own their own computer.

Imagining these hackers trying to individually determine whether someone has done a good enough job of pretending they're nice and whether a victim is themselves too poor to do this stuff... pretty amazing that they'd declare themselves the arbitrators of whether something is sufficiently repentant.

And posting it on social media? What, are we doxxing ourselves now to get out of ransomware attacks? I don't even have twitter or facebook or instagram or whatsapp... for good reason! Why make it performative, someone could just send them receipts if the goal was to help regardless of publicity.

Pretty sure that being forced to do things typically increases resentment, not social cohesion and empathy.

Sure, sometimes. Certainly against the people applying force.

I am definitely not suggesting this approach will help, it seems like a ridiculous solution that's all about exploiting performative compassion for the sake of the hacker's egos...

But I also disagree with your statement as a blanket claim. Kids are forced to go to school and while they'll be resentful of the system or their parents or their teachers I haven't really seen kids being resentful of each other and certainly their peer group develops social cohesion and empathy for one another.

Everyone forced to do community service doesn't necessarily resent the people they are helping, they resent the judicial system.

At least, that seems like the rational response to me, it would be incredibly petty to resent some kids you take to dinner just because you're doing it due to blackmail. Resent the blackmailers...

Can't make people have empathy, but you can make them carry out empathetic acts over and over again through blackmail with this ransomware.

Is it empathetic if you don't mean it?

Yes, an act can be empathetic even if the person doing it doesn't feel empathy. For example, smiling at another person is an empathetic act. Sociopaths do this all the time without feeling actual empathy for people. It makes it easier for them to blend in if they seem to have empathy via empathetic acts however disingenuous they may be.

-- to nitpick -- empathy is the ability to put yourself in someones position & truly feel what their reality must be like -- compassion is acting on that empathy --

It doesn't actually require having empathy to commit empathetic acts which are acts that display empathy. For example, smiling is an empathetic act, but it doesn't require having any actual empathy to do it. Sociopaths can smile and commit other empathetic acts to appear to have empathy without having any true empathy behind it.

-- not disagreeing with you! - just talking to the linguistics - the distinctions here are interesting :=) --

https://greatergood.berkeley.edu/topic/compassion/definition

That’s just charity not empathy

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