Empathy Quotient

[Edwardo Piet]

I also don't think he's ever said that empathy brings about more immorality than non-empathy in general.

Well... from the intro to his book 'Against Empathy':

Empathy has its merits. It can be a great source of pleasure, involved in art and fiction and sports, and it can be a valuable aspect of intimate relationships. And it can sometimes spark us to do good. But on the whole, it's a poor moral guide. It grounds foolish judgments and often motivates indifference and cruelty. It can lead to irrational and unfair political decisions, it can corrode certain important relationships, such as between a doctor and a patient, and make us worse at being friends, parents, husbands, and wives. I am against empathy, and one of the goals of this book is to persuade you to be against empathy too.

My bold.

Clearer now?

[AFTT47]

I disagree. Bloom (as far as I can see) is arguing for revenge which I personally see as depraved. Please correct me if you believe Bloom is arguing for something different.

He's arguing AGAINST revenge. He's saying revenge is motivated be empathy. Did we read the same thing?

I agree, revenge is completely and utterly depraved and immoral.

Okay, I guess we are on the same page, then. I am drunk as I write this so perhaps I misread him.

The argument that revenge is actually motivated by empathy; hmmmm. I never considered that. It seems counter-intuitive. It would require that a person has a very selective empathy - empathy for the victim but not for the perpetrator but I suppose that is definitely plausible.

So empathy could go both ways. It might make me more sympathetic to the perpetrator while it makes someone else more sympathetic towards the supposed victim. In both cases, we suffer from emotional bias because of empathy.

Well, you just made a good case for empathy having no place in a fair court room.

Still, I find it hard to quarrel with someone whose heart goes out to someone who has suffered an injury and is in pain. I believe we are less worthy of survival if we don't feel such sympathy. What good is an entity who is driven by nothing but cold logic?

[paulpablo]

Being against empathy just seems like a phrase someone would use to be controversial and sell a book.

Its got to be less of a distraction to have no empathy when doing certain tasks. And acting instinctively on empathy with a lack of understanding is obviously disasterous.
I think it's more sensible to say that acting instinctively on empathy can be bad, but that won't sell as many books or get as much of a reaction as saying you're against empathy.
I think there's a good reason why empathy is in the gene pool and it's been selected for in evolution.

I think it would be good for raising a child to be able to understand what that child is feeling, while at the same time you can't act instinctively and obsessively based on empathy and give the child whatever it wants when it cries, or you'll have a child with diabetes from chocolate and sweets. On the other hand I don't see where caring for children or any other human would come from without empathy. Other humans would just be sources of sex, money and food.

[Edwardo Piet]

What good is an entity who is driven by nothing but cold logic?

What's wrong with warm logic?

[ignoramus]

Guys, I watch a great TED talk on psychopaths the other days (before being posted here on AF).

A guy hurt someone pretty bad and was up for 5 years imprisonment. He instead acted craycray (and being a strong sociopath/weak psychopath) he pulled it off. (or so he thought)
He was sent to an institution to be looked after (and not a pleasant one!). He was finally released 12 years later!

As it turns out, anyone who wants to fake crazy in an attempt to cheat the system, is a sociopath to begin with! He had NPD (Narcissistic Personality Disorder)..

[I_am_not_mafia]

For the actual purpose of the quiz thats not a problem.  High self esteem is an indicator of social acclimation..even if the source of that high esteem is a miscalculation.

Interesting.  Being on the autistic spectrum though is not the only reason to have low self esteem. You can start out in life happy and socially well adjusted and if your life turns to shit with most people surrounding hurting you then you can have less capacity to have empathy towards others and a lower self esteem.

---

Interesting quiz. 76.

Wow, that's high.

I was thinking that my score was kind of low (38) but I am seeing people here with much lower scores who never struck me as lacking empathy.

I would be interested to know what the average is though. It occurred to me that you can't assume that 40 is the average.

[The Grand Nudger]

Interesting.  Being on the autistic spectrum though is not the only reason to have low self esteem. You can start out in life happy and socially well adjusted and if your life turns to shit with most people surrounding hurting you then you can have less capacity to have empathy towards others and a lower self esteem.

Yeah, ofc not..but being autistic is known to correlate.  Alot of the questions are correlation based in a particularly longshot sort of way.  For example the "I make meticulous plans" or "I consciously work out the social rules of a group" questions.  At first blush what would these have to do with social impairment or autism?  

Other than compulsively meticulous planners often being oddballs and outcasts that irritate the shit out of people..not much.

It could be the case, obviously, that a meticulous planner who consciously works out the social rules of the group is the queen of the roost. The most popular person in their social group. Hard work gets results!

[brewer]

Are we sure that this is not an ego/gullibility test?

[The Grand Nudger]

You can never know what -they're- collecting the data for. For all we know it;s there to better target our sidebar ads.

[Little lunch]

Are we sure that this is no an ego/gullibility test?

It can't be.
I got 65.