anbende

I am a clinical psychologist and did research related to empathy and compassion.

Often in clinical work I have seen almost the exact opposite distinction between empathy and sympathy with empathy being understanding and sympathy being shared feeling.

In the research, definitions are muddy and one of the main problems with empathy research (IMO) is that each research group seems to use their own definition and these definitions are often incompatible. My own preferred definition defines cognitive and affective empathy, with cognitive being the understanding and affective being sharing in the emotion.

I personally don’t care for the way the article defines these things. It seems to contrast sharply with more or less all scientific and clinical uses of the terms AND the everyday use of sympathy which does NOT commonly mean understanding but usually something like pity or just “feeling for”.

It almost seems like the author accidentally switched empathy and sympathy throughout the article.

Interesting, I've never thought about it in terms of % of years lived and when. I recently saw that 7% of all humans who ever lived are alive today. Wild. And I agree that it really does show the dominance of recent history.

Small point, a life expectancy of 10-12 years does not necessarily mean that the majority of lived years were as children. It depends on infant mortality, which I believe drives those numbers pretty substantially. Example: if three infants die at age 1 and one person lives to 45, average life expectancy is 12 (48/4), but the majority of those years were not lived as children (one full childhood plus 3 additional years of infancy).

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I am a clinical psychologist (PhD, RPsych) with a research background in mental health measurement and the evaluation of questionnaire measures. I have a private clinical practice and do mental health and data science consulting. I founded a mental health software startup (now defunct). I am at my best working at the intersection of mental health professionals, data scientists, engineers, and leadership/management.

Current consulting work includes: (1) the evaluation and creation of mental health measurement plans for public or internal use, (2) designing and implementing internal testing and data collection to evaluate mental health or mental health products, (3) research and review of existing literature to support current or future mental health products or practices, and (4) acting as a managerial liaison among leadership, engineering, and clinical/mental health stakeholders.

I have experience working on large scale (7 and 8-figure) government-funded mental health initiatives.

Is it? The difference is in 2-4 year range for most of the chart. Is 2-4 years of life expectancy drastic? I didn't read it as such, but I'm not really sure how to assess how big that difference is, honestly...

While that's true, the difference may still be enough to explain the 2-4 year difference in life expectancy that is shown on the chart.

When I was in Peru, they kind of prescribed antibiotics for everything. Persistent cold? Antibiotics. Like that.

Source: lived there with Peruvian partner for 18 months.

It's not that deliberate practice isn't a big factor and very important. It's the idea that it's massively and overwhelmingly decisive.

For example, this meta-analysis of sports performance found that deliberate practice was important but not overwhelmingly so, accounting of 18% of performance on average.

It seems like there is a lot of plasticity in human performance, and it may be the case that many of us can get pretty good at a lot of things, but there also appear to be many factors distinct from practice that make substantial contributions to performance.

https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/174569161663559...

That's correct. He ignores and sometimes intentionally misconstrues the evidence in order to tell a compelling story. He makes bold claims that are not really backed up by anything.

Take the 10,000 hours claim? Based on very little. There's nothing special about 10,000 hours. And the research roundly rejects the idea that deliberate practice is as big a factor as Gladwell claims.

Right, except that gold has inherent value. Historically we thought it was pretty and made jewelry out of it. It’s important for a variety of technology products. It’s a value store because it is consistently valuable first. Bitcoin skips that step.

The hard version of this, sometimes called Strong Whorfianism (after the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis) is relatively easy to discredit. Imagine a system of gears. Turn them and adjust them in your mind. You’re thinking in images rather than language.

The soft version of this, that our thinking is influenced by the limits of language is almost certainly true. To give a very HN example, think about the work done in different programming languages or stacks. The way you think about a problem and how to solve it will be influenced by the language and tools you use (and know). You learn to think in a particular language or tool set. That doesn’t mean that you can’t think outside of it, but it does mean that there is a tendency to stay inside of it, inside the structures you know.

In the same way, some languages lend themselves more readily to certain culturally prevalent concepts. More nuanced words for snow or love, different color boundaries, different emotion words or nuances, etc.

I ran into this often when learning French as an emotion researcher. I’d try to express a scientific conception of a mood or emotion from English, and the French speaker would suggest a translation but it clearly didn’t mean exactly what I was going for. And the way the French speaker would push back was interesting, “we wouldn’t say it like that, we’d say it like this”. But the “this” and “that” were not exactly the same. I was watching us both be constrained by our language context. It could be pushed through, but the tendency was to just move forward as if we’d reached common ground but hadn’t fully.

> No longer distant, traditional patriarchal father figures, dads can use jokes to bond and interact with their children, using simple humor that is most often appreciated by children earlier on in their development.

I think this is a big part of it, and I've heard this before. Parents use very simplistic humor with their kids, because more sophisticated humor or humor with adult themes isn't appropriate. Over time this becomes the habit for the parent, so they keep doing it even as the children age out of it.

I think the prior comment is pretty spot on. It's hard for me to think of anyone I might ask for something and not feel annoyed or even disrespected if I was given absolutely no explanation. Even if I had reached out to someone I don't know, basic politeness would dictate some sort of reason even if it's a "sorry I don't have time for that right now" or even "I'm just not interested in participating".

If I actually knew the person, a "no" with no explanation would virtually always have negative consequences. To a boss, it would likely be insubordinate. From an in subordinate, the same and would likely elicit a "I beg your pardon?" From a friend or colleague, it would cause me to question our friendship.

In the modern world, politeness is largely built on a willingness to explain and give verbal consideration. Not doing so will often (if not usually) feel disrespectful or like some sort of power-play.

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I was just watching a GM Hikaru video (bullet speed run) and be briefly talked about this. He said her recommends people stay away from bullet until they have an “over the table” elo of about 1800 (1900 or 2000 online). He said you could probably play 5|0 blitz once you have an elo of 1200 in rapid.

It was an eye opening comment for me. I play a lot of 3|0 blitz and should really just be playing rapid as my elo isn’t 1200 there yet… :/

This is really interesting. I’ve been thinking of getting into a VR setup for productivity and collaboration. Would you mind sharing some details about your hardware/software setup? Any pitfalls or difficulties you’ve run into? Motion sickness?

Right, so this doesn’t hit real estate or private companies (yet), but it would hit many very wealthy people who have large holdings in publicly traded companies (often ones they founded).

Looking at you Bezos…

And it’s true stocks are quite liquid, but if the person never sells to realize gains, they will never be taxed…

I’m not sure this solves the current problem of the wealthy living off loans against unrealized capital investments. One of the issues that this plan is trying to address is that these gains are forever unrealized, but the person still has access to billions of dollars as a result…

Or have I misunderstood your point?

I have mostly skeptical about tax plans like this one that tax non-liquid assets. It seems odd to me to tax a person’s illiquid holdings in a company for example. Do we force people to sell pieces of their property to pay the taxes on that property? (In short, for many types of property, yes, but it still has always seemed strange to me)

That said, the more I read about the low or no interest loans against investments that seem to be the primary “income” of the mega-rich, it seems more and more that something needs to be done here.

Or am I wrong? Thoughts?

They likely won’t take any of their acquisitions down with them. They’ve been pretty good about keeping them mostly separate. They’ll be spun off in any eventual liquidation.

Unless you think they are being mismanaged or mismarketed now?

Hi, psychologist here. Cognitive decline is not my specialty but I’ve taken doctoral level courses in it.

The problem with the “shorter higher quality life” position is that diet, exercise and health affect EVERYTHING. Exercise and diet are majorly implicated in both physical health decline and onset of dementia and Alzheimer’s. In fact, maintaining a healthy and active lifestyle is often found to be the number one protective factor against cognitive decline.

Unfortunately there’s no health strategy that reliably produces a shorter higher quality life. There’s only increasing health span through lifestyle.

Note: there are medical choices that increase lifespan but not health - medication and surgery that prolong unhealth. But that’s a whole different game than healthy lifestyle.

Yes, and if a software engineer writes a piece of software on their own time and it becomes a hit and/or gets purchased by a large company, they can make a lot of money too.

But if a writer is hired as a salary writer for a show, they're very likely to just get a salary. Same for a programmer.

Big name writers can negotiate a better deal for themselves and are a different story.

Right but as has been pointed out elsewhere, the linked article does not say to avoid speaking. Instead it says to avoid a strong focus on forced speech in a classroom, which likely means the sorts of repetition exercises that many of us remember from adolescence. That is very different from not trying to use the language productively at all.

Thanks for your response. I'm trying to understand your position here, and I'm really not getting it.

Aside from the obvious problem of their being living people who experienced the holocaust (so they still exist), this example seems to imply that I'm saying that there's no need for empathy and respect for the people who came before us. I don't think that anything I've said implies that. Instead what I'm saying is that the dead need no protection and can receive no pain or insult. Anything we do for "them" is really for "us", because they do not exist.

>Because it’s a simple matter of recognizing other human beings and respecting their cultural achievements and desires. Just because they don’t exist anymore doesn’t mean they weren’t humans worthy of our empathy.

You seem to be implying that not honoring the wishes of the dead is an empathic failure. How so? I can empathize with someone's wishes, understand where they are coming from, and even respect who they were. None of that implies that I owe their desires a place in the world now. And in fact as modern people we MUST make choices about what pieces of the past to revere, revise, or pave over. Otherwise the world becomes a mausoleum to the past.

Those people are also gone and no longer have any beliefs or ideas that can be violated.

Nothing we do today affects those people or their beliefs in any way. Those people no longer exist and cannot be harmed or protected. Ideas about respect and proper behavior around their landmarks only affects people who are alive. It is only important to the extent that it is important to us. It is clearly important to you but not others. So why should it matter to others if it doesn’t?

Except that the mummy in the museum isn’t a person. It’s a collection of inanimate organic matter. There are no beliefs there to respect. They ended with the person’s life thousands of years ago.

I could see an argument made for modern remains as there are living people/descendants who have a strong connection with the burial beliefs and practices. But make no mistake, even in that case it is about the living and not the dead.

Regarding (2), now that there are on the order of a billion non-native speakers of English who often talk to each other, we will see more and more changes to the language from THEIR mistakes. English will belong less and less to native speakers as time goes on. Wild!

So a cursory google search shows this definition of “native speaker” in several places:

“a person who has spoken the language in question from earliest childhood”

And this makes sense, because “native” as an adjective means:

“associated with the place or circumstances of a person's birth”

So native speaker literally means a speaker by birth. Where are you getting the “fluent only by immersion” definition?

Are you instead talking about “native fluency,” which is typically used to mean fluency at the level of a native speaker, which is technically achievable by anyone (though realistically impossible after a certain age)?

It sounds like you're reacting strongly to the word delusional, and it may be my mistake for using a word that often comes with such strong negative connotations.

My intended meaning was that there are beliefs here that aren't and can't be grounded in reality. Not necessarily more than other people tend to hold, but in the context of this article, which I thought romanticized the man's viewpoint a bit, it seemed relevant to pick up on.

Saying that bringing up the word delusion is delusional seems a little unkind in this context, though I think you're right that a milder term would fit better.

Thank you. My more recent work has focused more on mental health constructs used to track clinical progress over time. The parts I like the most are more concerned with the activation of emotion systems than behavioral tendencies or personality.

I really like the Jaak Panksepp's affective neuroscience view of emotion systems and Paul Gilbert's work on social safeness as an often overlooked emotion system.

Interestingly, emotions can be measured and viewed very similarly to personality traits (really the propensity to experience a particular emotion) and in fact positive emotionality forms a subcomponent (sometimes called an 'aspect') of extroversion and negative emotionality more or less IS neuroticism.

It's not the fact that he doesn't leave that's delusional, it's all the ideas he has about leaving that can't be based in reality as he has not experienced them.

It's similar to anyone who has strong opinions about something that they don't have evidence (scientific or experiential) to support.

Again, the delusion isn't that he's happy with what he has, it's that he appears to have some strong opinions about what it's like to, for example, live in London having never been there. A more evidence-based position might be "I'm happy with what I have and have no inclination to see or do anything else".

Also again, his delusions seem pretty mild.