How to Avoid Empathy Burnout

Re:How to Avoid Empathy Burnout by JohnBooty on Saturday April 09, 2016 @10:50PM (#11464611)

   > One important bit of learning for engineer-types to do 
   > is to recognize that most people aren't like them. The 
   > more I treat other humans as emotionally driven markov 
   > chains (rather than intelligent thinkers) the better my 
   > life outcomes are.

Consider that a lot of "irrational decisions" made by others are only irrational from your perspective.

The people making those decisions may simply value vastly different things than you do. A lot of people would say us engineer types are completely irrational for wanting to spend large portions of our lives staring at computer screens.

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Re:How to Avoid Empathy Burnout by yummyfajitas on Saturday April 09, 2016 @11:15PM (#11464708)

I'm aware of differing utility functions and this is not what I'm talking about. I get better results by assuming most people don't maximize any utility function but merely respond to stimuli in a probabilistic manner (with emotional state as a hidden variable).

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Re:How to Avoid Empathy Burnout by mchaver on Sunday April 10, 2016 @02:24AM (#11465162)

I think that's the right line of thinking. To me it seems that people build and update rationality models and base the rationality of their decisions and thoughts on their personal model, not on some universal model. Conflict occurs when people's models don't intersect. People with good social skills probably recognize this. Unfortunately I have no data to refute this.

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