Oh, you’re scaring me now. That’s pretty much how I am; and when I was in the States a few weeks ago, I found myself using my [all-purpose standard-issue BBC Radio 4] accent explicitly as a “I’m definitely not from round here, and I don’t know the rules of this social interaction” shortcut, and I was very comfortable with that.
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Difficult to summarise a long Proust passage in a BBS post, but I’ll have a go. When one of the family’s serving maids was having a long and agonising birth in the top room of the house, their senior servant Françoise was grimly unsympathetic, and unhelpful: “She brought it on herself, after all. And I’ll bet she enjoyed herself enough when she was starting it…” A doctor was called, and Françoise was sent downstairs to the study to fetch the medical encyclopedia upstairs, so it could be consulted. When she didn’t appear with it, someone was sent after her: they found her in the study hunched over the encyclopedia, reading the entry for the complication which was causing the maid such agony upstairs, and moaning “Oh, the poor girl! The poor thing!”
And when I read that, I thought, Yeah, that would be me, kind of; I’m not proud of that.
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Ugh, why would he do that?
Because the common trope of the insensitive boyfriend is quite effective at emotionally manipulating female viewers and increasing engagement with the main female protagonist?
I’m lots of fun to watch romantic comedies with.
Early Game of Thrones seasons:
But why do they have to…
BECAUSE BOOBS.
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41. I'm middling.
Why the heck doesn’t the 4 render? It’s supposed to be 41, but I had to add a bunch of spaces to make it show up.
It thinks you’re trying to make a numbered list, and numbered lists are hard coded to start at 1.
For instance, if I put 56., 43., 72., and 56.:
- Test
- Test
- Test
- Test
Maybe use a colon instead of a period? It’d have approximately the same grammatical effect, but won’t trigger the numbered list formatting.
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There are a few ways to get past Markdown’s list predilections. Technically a slash should do it but I’ve yet to find an implementation that didn’t display the slash. The one that I’ve found that looks neatest is to throw ‍ at the start of the line.
I should probably write a guide to using Markdown “in the real world” but … 
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Yes you should!
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I think I found one (by accident, actually):
41\.
75\.
89\.
22\.
41.
75.
89.
22.
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Enter the apath.
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I scored a 21. Kinda thought I’d be in the 50’s or 60’s.
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Twin! I should have a mild fellow-feeling towards you, though I probably won’t express it in direct or easily recognisable form!
… though quite a lot of that may be about being English.
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I considered saying something, but then I decided not to bother 
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I just pulled a 19, then did some reading and things are starting to make sense - depressing, depressing sense. I mean, WTF do I do with this?
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Where people are clearer and you recognise the issue, I don’t find it has to make that much difference. I would think of it as a disability like poor hearing or eyesight, but on another level empathy itself can be a disability (just look at the OP, for example).
I still think empathy is a poor term - there are no true empaths in the sense of actually being able to perceive the mental or emotional state of another individual. Some people can read signs better than others, and generally they’re much better at reading the signs of those who are similar to them. Often empathy is a nicer word for projection or ingroup bias, and it is directly linked to lower levels of empathy for people outside of the group and to racial bias. Those of us with less natural empathy should recognise the disadvantages and risks this brings, but also the possible advantages of having a more egalitarian outlook (not that this is necessarily going to be the case, and ‘egalitarian’ could mean equally bad as well as equally good). Those with more empathy should recognise its very real weaknesses.
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I disagree that having a lot of empathy is a weakness. I can read people, that is not a weakness. I can tell if someone is happy or sad or discomfited, even if they try to hide it, I cannot see how that is a weakness. That study is more about inherent and learned racism than “empathy”. I have many thoughts and feels on this matter apparently!
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On the whole, I agree with you. I’m not claiming that the distribution of advantages is equal, but rather that those with greater levels of empathy:
- Can be manipulated by others in certain ways - you can read people, but some people know how to ‘write’ false messages
- Often have less empathy for groups they don’t identify with
Perhaps ‘limitations’ would have been a better term than ‘weaknesses’. Knowledge of these issues can reduce their negative effects and expand the positive aspects of human empathy, in the same way that knowledge of a low level of natural empathy can lead to more explicit communication and more practical ‘empathy’ where there’s more respect for everyone’s value beyond socially constructed boundaries.
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Again, I disagree with this. That study was testing the average person’s empathy for race related responses. I do not think that was testing if people have empathy - to me it seemed to be testing racism. I mean, we can have a conversation about racism vs. empathy, but thats a different conversation.
LOL - I think I’m bristling and your seeming implication that people with empathy (ie - not you) tend to racism. And I disagree with that. We’re all racists. Even babies. Even people lacking empathy. (ie - you too!)
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Definitely - I mean that people who feel empathy for their own group may well feel less empathy for an outgroup, i.e. natural empathy fails at important points and can support racist sentiment. It could be one vehicle for racism, but it certainly isn’t the only one (and yes, I can attest to the fact that I and other people with low empathy also need to deal with our racial, gender and other bias).
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No, we’re not.
We’re all innately prone to judge other people places and things prior to having any experience with those people places and things; that’s true. It’s how we are socialized.
Anyone can be a bigot.
But racism itself is an institution which requires a modicum of political and monetary power at the very least; resources that are dedicated to the exploitation, denigration and subjugation of an entire race of people.
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I dunno - racism, misogyny etc. can refer to individual bigotry or unequal treatment as well as cultural influences. Xeonophobia doesn’t have to be supported by the wider society, although obviously it’s influenced by it. While the cultural force of bigotry is often much more powerful than an individual’s own biases, it just seems needlessly reductionist to say that racism is one or the other. We are innately prone to have an in group/out group distinction. This is something that has strong evolutionary advantages and isn’t egalitarian. We are socialised to follow society’s definition of which group is which, but our own sense of identity will have an influence on which we see as the in group.
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