[r-w]

It's so weird to see empathy-speak be regularly co-opted by habitual mass manipulators. "I don't know if this will make you feel better... but we're concerned with manipulating the reactions to the reactions as well! See how much we care?" It makes me do a double-take every time someone shows actual empathy, because it's used so often as a manipulative tactic to shield oneself against critiques of soullessness.

[thinkingemote]

Manipulation is emotional more than it is logical, about feelings than ideas, more in women than in men, and therefore for the majority of the audience of tiktok etc

[syphia]

Do you have any objective data for this? In my experience, most subjective claims about men vs. women are unresolvable as either true or false. At best, the discussion degenerates into a Jung-like discussion of anima and animus.

[heavyset_go]

Men confuse their feelings, and especially what soothes their egos, with "rationality" all of the time

If you start from a position of assuming objectivity, you are putty in the hands of anyone who "tells it like it is"

[nathan_compton]

"more in women than in men"

This is not true, in my experience. Men are just as, if not more, emotional and impulsive. Most women I know think way further ahead than the men I know, and improvise much less often. The idea that men are the rational ones is just a silly fantasy to make men feel better, I would argue. Rationality is much more correlated with socio-economic status than gender, I would bet.

[jmcqk6]

I think many men don't even understand what emotional regulation looks like. They tend to spend much of their time disassociated and thinking that it's normal. I tried speaking to my father about emotional health and he thinks it's about being happy, while simultaneously being unable to consider the possibility that he got it wrong, thus demonstrating the point.

There is a lack of emotional health across genders, but on average, I think women are further along than men, simply because they're able to recognize that they are emotional beings much more often than men are.

[wahern]

If talking about a topic made one skilled at or reflected skill, millions of men would be star quarterbacks.

At a macro scale men and women often have different interests. They often cluster around different skillsets because their interests channel them into different activities. But emotional self-awareness isn't an activity, it's an aptitude that fundamentally both men and women exercise (or don't exercise) with similar frequency in day-to-day life. But because women tend to pursue more interpersonal relationships and discussions, they are more adept at the vocabulary, the way men know the vocabulary and rules around football. But, again, it doesn't follow that talking about something makes one more skilled at it. You can juggle tons of relationships and engage in endless discourse about emotional and mental health without having much if any meaningful emotional self-awareness. People with vulnerable-type NPD do this, and at the extreme end the condition is basically predicated on lacking the capacity for a self-awareness most other people, including isolated men, take for granted.

Relatedly, after adjusting for income and social status, it's notable that not even psychologists and therapists have significantly lower divorce rates. That really highlights in my mind that not even an in-depth, systematic, rigorous study of something necessarily makes one more adept at it's exercise, nor, apparently, more likely to meaningfully pursue and develop the skill. Though, presumably they're more adept at judging and analyzing others' emotional awareness and skill given it's the skill they actually apply in their occupation.

[jmcqk6]

I don't see how we are disagreeing. Emotional self-awareness is an aptitude, one that is fundamentally experiential, and so talking about it is inherently difficult. I agree that many people who talk about it are not necessarily experiencing it, including therapists and psychologists, especially if they are using lots of abstractions.

I'm a man who has worked on my own emotional health very intentionally as an adult. I've found there are lots of ways to understand and engage with your own emotions, and they can seem contradictory if you're not thinking experientially.

But I've never found someone who behaves with high emotional awareness that doesn't have any language for describing their experiences. They can talk about it very differently from other people. There is a huge multidimensional possibility space for that.

[wahern]

> But I've never found someone who behaves with high emotional awareness that doesn't have any language for describing their experiences.

There's potential selection bias here, though. It's more difficult to identify people high in self-awareness who aren't inclined to discuss their own emotional experiences, unless you happen to have frequent, close interactions with them. It's like when people assume learning languages is easy based on their experience meeting people from around the world who speak their language. But you're much less likely to interact with immigrants and travelers who don't speak your own language, if only because those people aren't inclined to engage with people with whom they can't or aren't interested in communicating.

My experience (often unfortunate) tells me that there are many behaviors that masquerade as self-awareness and other reflections of inner state, but don't actually reflect what we presume it does. For example, the stereotype is that women are naturally more nurturing. Nurturing is a concept that encompasses many dimensions, and it conflates internal motivations and feelings with outward behaviors and practice. We presume nurturing implies empathy and selflessness, but there are of mothers who by all appearances (and in fact) are great nurturers, but whose internal mental experience is bereft of those qualities. They're good nurturers because ultimately we can only judge nurturing by the outcome, and it's easy to presume a naturally patient person adept at applying good parenting practices possess the inner state we associate with nurturing. Even children of such people may not realize this, depending on their own capacity for emotional discernment.

Concepts like empathy, guilt, etc, are tricky. Is a person quick to apologize driven by guilty feelings and concern for other's internal state, or are they merely adept and eager at identifying social cues and applying social norms?

In principle women could be, as a group, more likely to possess a greater capacity for and to develop self-awareness. But history and feminism and racism tells me to be highly skeptical of something like this. While biologically it's possible (and I wouldn't at all be surprised), it's not self-evident to me that self-awareness is any more valuable a skill evolutionarily for women than for men, just like intelligence isn't likely to be more valuable a skill for some ethnic groups over another. For example, generally speaking, and from an evolutionary perspective, analytical intelligence is no less an asset for a group performing less stereotypically intellectual activities (e.g. hunting) than for a group centered around stereotypically intellectual activities (e.g. accounting).

[toraway]

They specifically mention using video game playthroughs for rap songs as an example of targeting based on the audience. I'm somewhat perplexed how or why you turned this into a gendered thing to begin with.

[plastic-enjoyer]

> Manipulation is emotional more than it is logical, about feelings than ideas, more in women than in men, and therefore for the majority of the audience of tiktok etc

I don't think this is necessarily true that manipulation is more emotional than it is logical. On the contrary, I believe that academics and well-educated people are very susceptible to it, especially the STEM crowd. All it takes to be manipulated is someone you trust and who is like you, who is in the same peer group and who speaks the same language as you. It makes no difference whether language is “emotional” or “logical”; enough scientists have reasoned themselves into the most ridiculous bullshit and it were mostly men.

[toraway]

I'm really not seeing the "empathy-speak" you're referring to in that quote or the rest of the interview?

If you're referring to the quote from OP's post, "I don't know if this will make anyone feel better" isn't really appealing to empathy at all, it's basically just preemptively acknowledging what he said may sound bad and so tries to soften it a bit.

It's a rhetorical cliche that has very little to do with anyone's actual feelings.

They're certainly manipulating people with their astroturfing but via slop content like video game playthroughs for rap songs so their actual strategy doesn't seem to uniquely rely on emotional manipulation either. Just following content trends whatever they may be.

Weaponizing "empathy" just seems like a complete red herring that makes for an irrelevant tangent in this context.