tl;dr

Section 1 presents an argument that I’ve heard from a couple people, that says that empathy happens “for free” as a side-effect of the general architecture of mammalian brains, basically because we tend to have similar feelings about similar situations, and “me being happy” is a kinda similar situation to “someone else being happy”, and thus if I find the former motivating then I’ll tend to find the latter motivating too, other things equal.

Section 2 argues that those two situations really aren’t that similar in the grand scheme of things, and that our brains are very much capable of assigning entirely different feelings to pairs of situations even when those situations have some similarities. This happens all the time, and I illustrate my point via the everyday example of having different opinions about tofu versus feta.

Section 3 acknowledges a couple kernels of truth in the Section [...]

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Outline:

(00:03) tl;dr

(01:01) 1. What am I arguing against?

(05:15) 2. Why I don’t buy it

(05:20) 2.1 Tofu versus feta part 1: the common-sense argument

(07:36) 2.2 Tofu versus feta part 2: The algorithm argument

(10:07) 3. Kernels of truth in the original story

(10:12) 3.1 By default, we can expect transient spillover empathy … before within-lifetime learning promptly eliminates it

(12:10) 3.2 The semantic overlap is stable by default, even if the motivational overlap (from reward model spillover) isn’t

The original text contained 2 footnotes which were omitted from this narration.

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First published:
October 16th, 2024

Source:
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/TprdAhgTvr3tuDJsD/against-empathy-by-default

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Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.

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“Against empathy-by-default” by Steven Byrnes

LessWrong (30+ Karma)