[eszed]

> we can all be like this

Yes. Most definitely. Personal experience has often changed my approach to, or the salience of, or - more rarely, because I genuinely try to be both empathetic and rational - my entire opinion about, oh gosh... An embarrassing (in hindsight) number of things.

This is inevitable, isn't it? Like, we all learn best through experience. No one can perfectly (however empathetic) assimilate another's point of view. And, anyway, exercising empathy is dangerous, because it makes us more vulnerable to manipulation by people who cynically evoke it.

Where I land with this is to self-limit the scope of my own judgment. If I have not experienced something, then as far as possible I defer to those who have. If something matters a lot to someone else, and only a little bit to me, I defer to them. My model of the world will never be perfect, so I'd like to minimize the consequences of my own limitations.