U.S. autism data project sparks uproar over ethics, privacy and intent

“I told you once that I was searching for the nature of evil. I think I’ve come close to defining it: a lack of empathy. It’s the one characteristic that connects all the defendants. A genuine incapacity to feel with their fellow man. Evil, I think, is the absence of empathy.”

      ― G. M. Gilbert, American psychologist who worked on the Nuremberg trials

Didn't someone recently mention that "The fundamental weakness of Western civilization is empathy"?

Sounds familiar...

I didn’t know who that was, so googled. Apparently, Musk said that.

It's crazy we got all those lessons figured out, clear as can be and right in the history books, that every kid is supposed to learn. And yet, here we are, back to square one.

He said that because he couldn't empathize with those defendants...

That quote was massively taken out of context. His argument was that the west has too much empathy, not that empathy is bad, period. He even specifically prefaced that with saying that empathy is a good thing.

This is the paradox of tolerance and it’s pretty cringe.

The problem with being on the public stage, is that Every. Single. Word. They. Utter. has the ability to be reframed. With Deepfakes, they can now have words put in their mouths, in a realistic manner.

That's why so many politicians and C-suite execs are "weasely." They learn to choose their words carefully. The Fed Chair can crash the markets, by wincing at the wrong time.

I empathize with him (see what I did, there?), but he's in a position where his utterances can either do great good, or great harm.

Many of these mega-rich folks keep their mouths shut, and that's for a reason.

Context:

Musk: Yeah, [Gad Saad is] awesome, and he talks about, you know, basically suicidal empathy. Like, there's so much empathy that you actually suicide yourself. So, we've got civilizational suicidal empathy going on. And it's like, I believe in empathy, like, I think you should care about other people, but you need to have empathy for, for civilization as a whole, and not commit to a civilizational suicide.

Rogan: Also don't let someone use your empathy against you so they can completely control your state and then do an insanely bad job of managing it and never get removed.

Musk: The fundamental weakness of Western civilization is empathy. The empathy exploit. They're exploiting a bug in Western civilization, which is the empathy response. So, I think, you know, empathy is good, but you need to think it through and not just be programmed like a robot.

https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/technology/yes-musk-said-the-...

To me, “suicidal empathy“ (if that exists) is a lack of empathy (for self) — not “too much of it“. It’s not zero sum.

You could go as far as to say that empathy only occurs in moments where there is no me or other, just an “us“. Which includes me.

His statements and behavior make me question whether he really experiences empathy or whether he lost that too early in his life to consciously remember.

How does this context somehow exonerate him?

It reads like absolute paranoia to me.

>To me, “suicidal empathy“ (if that exists) is a lack of empathy (for self) — not “too much of it“. It’s not zero sum.

"Empathy" in the form of thoughts and prayers might not be zero sum, but that's probably not the "empathy" that Musk is talking about. He's probably about government spending on refugees or foreign aid, which is zero sum.

>How does this context somehow exonerate him?

You might not agree with his statement even with the full context, but at the very least it's a very different statement than the initial quote of "The fundamental weakness of Western civilization is empathy".

Like l said, I doubt he experientially knows what he’s talking about. Or he means what he says and expresses the desire to paint empathy in a bad light and by that continue to dehumanize the other to justify violence.

Interesting that you talk about “thoughts and prayers“. I am talking about feelings, the foundation of empathy.

>Like l said, I doubt he experientially knows what he’s talking about.

What does that even mean? You can't defund USAID without yourself first going on a trip to Africa to dig a well?

>Or he means what he says and expresses the desire to paint empathy in a bad light and by that continue to dehumanize the other to justify violence.

How did you go from "so much empathy that you actually suicide yourself" to "dehumanize the other to justify violence"? Presumably he's talking about refugees and foreign countries, but there's a pretty wide gulf between putting the interests of your own polity ahead of others, and "dehumanize the other to justify violence".

>Interesting that you talk about “thoughts and prayers“. I am talking about feelings, the foundation of empathy.

I doubt Musk is upset all the people tweeting prayer emojis whenever a natural disaster hits a foreign country, when he's talking about "we've got civilizational suicidal empathy going on".

With the larger context of the quote it still seems like a distinction without a difference.

>distinction without a difference

There's a pretty big difference between "I think the west has too much empathy" and "The fundamental weakness of Western civilization is empathy", even if both are directionally anti-empathy. It's not any different than "I think the US's free speech regulations are too lax" and "The fundamental weakness of the US is free speech". Even though both are directionally anti-free speech, and a free speech opponent would object both premises, it would be wholly irresponsible to paint someone who wants hate speech laws passed as the latter, when their position is more accurately portrayed as the former.

It's a dog whistle for hyper-individualism, radical selfishness, violating Kantian ethics, and stepping over homeless people.

>violating Kantian ethics

???

How does "there's so much empathy that you actually suicide yourself" violate "Kantian ethics"?

Also, if we accept that "dogwhistle" framing, what should we make of the average leftist commenter saying that greed/inequality is a weakness of US's economic system? Maybe that's actually a "dogwhistle" for hyper-collectivism, radical Bolshevism, and stepping over rich people? Or is the "dogwhistle" characterization only a thing you apply to the Other Side?

He literally says "The fundamental weakness of Western civilization is empathy" at one point in the larger quote, while your comment makes it sound like that was a paraphrase of his comment.

>He literally says "The fundamental weakness of Western civilization is empathy" at one point in the larger quote

I never claimed that he didn't say that, only that selectively quoting that part conveys an entirely different message than if you quoted the whole thing.

Are we even reading the same thing? The rest of his statement is simply a justification for this explicitly stated position!

> They're exploiting a bug in Western civilization,

Who are? Did he say?

Sorry for not listening through the whole thing. There's a lot of pointless rambling going, which I guess is something inherent to the format more than it is to him.

Migrants

In Kantian ethics stealing a loaf of bread is wrong even if done by or for a starving person. In utilitarian ethics stealing bread in that context would be justified. The "civilizational suicide by empathy" narrative is rooted in a utilitarian ethics--empathy is good until the negative consequences outweigh the positive; whereas in Kantian ethics if empathy is good, it's always good, and if that possibly leads to civilizational suicide, so be it.

I think that's the point the poster was trying to make. I make no claim about what the practiced ethics are of Musk, of the cultural circles he travels in, or of the cultural circles he opposes (e.g. identity politics, social justice movements, etc); or even that Musk or any of these circles practice a consistent or coherent set ethics.

Republicans and oligarchs for starters

Even autistic people can be jerks. Elon Musk doesn't have empathy because he's an asshole not because he's autistic.

No one I've heard is saying Musk is an asshole because he's autistic. It's Musk himself that's making that claim by attempting to use it as a cover for his asshole moves.

>The "civilizational suicide by empathy" narrative is rooted in a utilitarian ethics

So in actually working ethics, and not some inflexible abstract principles posed by some German philosopher?

As if most college students (never mind kids) know anything about history worth a dime? They couldn't tell you who did what to whom in WWII, never mind getting into any nuance. At best the majority misremembers some stuff they "learned" from movies.

That's one take. A counter argument is that utilitarian calculus is highly subjective, individually and socio-culturally, resulting in movements like Social Darwinism, Eugenics movement, etc. And someone like Musk might even argue the ethics of identity politics and contemporary social justice movements are fundamentally similar to those earlier examples, relying on a present day calculus (whether nominally utilitarian or otherwise) that in time, if not already, will prove no less backward, unempathetic, and harmful. Kantian ethics is one attempt to restrain that kind of unconscious, self-serving discretion.

You can go back and forth, poste, riposte, ad nauseum. Abstract ethical philosophy and discourse are their own kind of tarpit, in some ways worse than the rhetoric behind the modern culture wars. To avoid getting drawn into them--the tarpits, if not the philosophies themselves--it pays to know how to identify them and how they interact.

That is not what happened here. The quote is completely consistent with who Musk is. And is exactly the same in the context. This is not Musk misspoking and experiencing unfair consequences.

It is Musk saying something that is perfectly consistent with everything he does.

I was being generous. Didn't feel like arguing with the stans.

Hence "Western". Makes sense. Same reason why Europe is doomed and the US will flourish. It's never that simple though, is it? There are numerous counter examples all thoughout history.

There I had my money on infinite navel gazing while being completely unaware of the rest of the world

Really ,did we ? The marching morons havw nukes now..

"I believe in empathy, like, I think you should care about other people [...] empathy is good" - Elon Musk

> He's probably about government spending on refugees or foreign aid, which is zero sum.

This is highly debatable. I would say it's not zero sum, because these costs further enrich the country in the long-run, just in not obvious ways. This is especially true for domains that naturally cross inter-country. Diseases don't care about borders, so it's to your benefit to prevent outbreaks outside of your country.

It's only like my opinion, but I think a man who describes his father as a "terrible human being" has enough awareness for self awareness unless the claimed disorder is something self obsessed like narcissism.

Just because we sit them in front of textbooks and lectures for 8 hours a day for 12 years (plenty of kids drop out of highschool or take fairly nonstandard "get to work" programs that de-emphasize education.) doesn't mean they learn anything.

Plenty of kids sat next to me in precalc learning how to calculate mortgage rates and then complain that school doesn't teach useful skills like how to calculate a mortgage. At the end of the day, learning cannot be forced. You can put all the info in front of the person you want, they can just ignore it.

This is especially true after Bush Jr. made it impossible to hold kids back, which was the primary way we worked around a stubborn kid.

We are roughly one generation after No Child Left Behind, and a lot of kids have been educationally left behind. IMO this is not coincidence. Good teachers knew right away the negative effects that program caused.

Obama reformed NCLB a bit, but did not fix the part that incentivizes schools to prefer just pushing kids forward if they are struggling.

To be fair, even though I never had trouble in school and was generally a good student, I had a very poor and surface level understanding of fascism (what it is, what causes it) until I actually decided to learn about it a few years ago. I wonder how much of it is simply due to public education's incompetency (I live outside the US) or because of a willfulness to not engage with the root causes of fascism (material conditions, etc.) from fear of repercussions by the right-wing.