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Comment by mathgradthrow | Hacker News Reader

"empathy impairment" is a fundamental feature of autism. It's not stigma. It'a not universal, but it is a major part of why it's a disorder in the first place.

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As someone with autism, I lack empathy for (most) fake situations. Once I realized therapists and their ilk were lying about sad stories, I stopped having empathy for those sad situations.

Ditto for fake news stories.

Only mentally unfit people can pass a therapist's tests and be empathetic for people they know do not exist.

I'm not saying what you're saying is invalid, but I do have empathy for people that don't exist. It's called fiction and I find it quite enjoyable.

True.

I should have added: I also dislike being manipulated. I fail silly tests at work because I find them demeaning. If you want to know what I do on the job, drop by and watch.

This is relevant to psychological evaluations because the tests are so silly and contrived, and go on for so long, that I lose patience with them.

And that's fine. Does it make anyone less empathetic if they don't though? At least where it matters - where someone else's feelings are involved vs. literally no one else's (since they don't actually exist).

Oof, hopethis makes parent think.

Let's flip this around: think about what you just said.

you seem to be implying that feeling empathy for characters in work of fiction is clearly "normal" if somebody doesn't think that way it should give them pause. What you said may be construed as "hey you freak, if you only think for a moment you'll obviously notice that it's perfectly normal to feel empathy for fictional people, after all story telling is such a fundamental human feature that if you're not feeling that way there must be something wrong with you or at the very least it's you're fault because you're not thinking hard enough about that".

Of course, I'm not saying you actually believe that or accuse GP of that, but words and tone matters and can hurt. Think about that

Ummm feeling empathy for fictional characters is something that should be considered normal. If you find yourself not able to do that, you should understand that you may not be neurotypical and should get a diagnosis to understand what other blindspots you have in life that you should be aware of.

TL;DR: that's an outdated idea with an ever-growing body of research refuting it

Autistic and neurotypical people can empathize with others like them, but have trouble between the groups [1]. This is called the "double-empathy problem" by the paper which proposed the idea [2]. More recent papers explore subjects such as information transfer accuracy [3] with the same results: autistic participants understand each other perfectly well when allowed to use their preferred means of communication, as do neurotypicals. However, the two groups have trouble understanding each other. Further work extends this to a generalized model with extremely unsurprising results: people tend to be closer with people who think like them [4].

[1] https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10803-015-2662-8

[2] https://kar.kent.ac.uk/62639/

[3] https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/1362361320919286

[4] https://academic.oup.com/scan/article/16/1-2/222/5940490

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