What the heck? He did reply to the argument. He didn't call anyone in the community names, and the beliefs and position held by the author absolutely DO matter in this context.
Dang you need to really revaluate your decisions on when to post or call people out for "rule violations".
I don't see any reference to beliefs or positions in the GP comment, nor replies to arguments. "Luxury columnist" is obviously being used as a dismissive label in this thread. If you toss in "Yale" as more or less a bad word, then the entire comment reduces to name-calling. This was not a borderline moderation call.
(Btw the guideline against calling names isn't limited to people in the community.)
The fact that it's considered a epithet is more revealing than anything else.
Him being an elite - someone who knows he's intrinsically superior to everyone else by virtue of selection - is 100% relevant to his opinions being flawed.
Where did this idea come from that we cannot see what exists outside of ourselves and our experiences?
I can empathise with people who are nothing like me. I can understand silly things that people like me do, and how they must look to people who are not like me.
It is only infant humans that can’t understand that anything exists outside of themselves.
I'd like to chime in on one very narrow issue that's a personal axe.
I'd appreciate your consideration.
Due to some widely shared youtube videos and other new and zeitgeisty trends, empathy has been put on a pedestal and sympathy and been thoroughly denigrated.
The problem is that people are not that capable of real empathy in complex or strongly divergent experiences, this modern "synthetic empathy" generated in peoples imaginations is actively harmful, is not empathy, and is worse than sympathy (which was always a serviceable emotion and the most accurate framing for many circumstances.)
As someone born with a heart defect that almost killed them and forced me into formative and constant meditation on death starting at 4 years old, and then had my parents die young and my family financially ruined by medical bills so I had to quit highschool and start working fulltime I have personally observed that empathy as a mental model has a strong failure mode.
I doubt at 15 you could have had empathy for me, (unless you shared a similar experience) I doubt older wiser you could still empathize with 15 year old me in any meaningful way, certainly no peer I ever met at the time could (agqin, unless they had dealt with the same.)
I think peoples ability to empathize has been far oversold, so while you can understand and empathize with "silly things", outside of that I'd settle for some good old fashioned (and real) sympathy.
Sympathy has a certain acknowledgment of lack of understanding and thus intellectual and emotional humility, and I think humility is what is missing in this modern synthetic empathy.
Experiences in general and certainly extremely divergent ones do not have the same qualia and empathy is a false siren.
People don't understand as much as they think, they should show sympathy to those whose experiences are far outside their own and help them tangibly when possible.
Psychologists recognize that a surprisingly large percentage of people have no little to no ability to visualize abstractions or engage in mentally taxing feats of empathy.
These people are more prone to believe that it’s only possible to obtain insight about a circumstance from only those individuals in said circumstance.
When people comment about this, it generates confusion for people like you. :)
He went to Yale, yes, but he doesn't have the typical Yale graduate background of wealth and status. He had a drug addict mother and was sent to foster homes until he was adopted. He experienced the various levels of society first-hand.
Not typical - he's a veteran. I admire that. But he still got in. Therefore, he's superior (nearly intrinsically, on almost every dimension) to 99.5% of the American population and has the privileges that come with it.
Once you're in, you've got the same privilege as everyone else.
Homeless to Yale isn't that different from Cisco-engineer-parents to Yale. You're still at Yale. You're still hobknobbing with the elites, and you are one of them.
He is part of the problem, even if he doesn't get it.
Right. He's someone that went from low to high class; he's writing about high-class beliefs from the perspective of someone who has first-hand knowledge of how they play out for the lower-classes.
You may not owe luxury columnists better, but you owe this community better if you're participating in it.