How to Avoid Empathy Burnout

Re:How to Avoid Empathy Burnout by qb45 on Sunday April 10, 2016 @05:48AM (#11465573)

> The more I treat other humans as emotionally driven markov chains (rather than intelligent thinkers) the better my life outcomes are.

I think all humans are emotion optimizers, trying to maximize the good ones while avoiding the bad ones. But:

  1. Some do it by hacking the world to make it feel better.
  2. Some do it by hacking their perception of the world to make it feel better.
  3. Some do it by trusting others to make them feel better.

The people you call "markov chains" are probably number 3. They tend to live in reasonable consensus with majority of their peers, which means that people help them and things usually turn good enough for them, to great frustration of some elitist engineers who can't imagine how such dumb people manage to survive :)

Number 1 are your garden variety nerdy engineers, 2 are clinically insane and probably somewhere in between is where genius lies.

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Re:How to Avoid Empathy Burnout by wwweston on Sunday April 10, 2016 @05:09PM (#11468173)

> 2 are clinically insane

Or buddhists.

> Number 1 are your garden variety nerdy engineers, 2 are clinically insane and probably somewhere in between is where genius lies.

There is definitely genius in realizing the distinction between number 1 and number 2 is finer than it might initially look.

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Re:How to Avoid Empathy Burnout by qb45 on Sunday April 10, 2016 @06:19PM (#11468449)

I was under impression that Buddhism is about giving up on 2.

By "hacking perception" I meant things like hiding thoughts from your consciousness so that other can't learn about them, masking unwanted emotions with others, forcing yourself to feel particular emotions in order to achieve some external goals - pretty un-Buddhist things to do, if my understanding of Buddhism is worth anything.

The distinction between 1 and 2 as I meant them is influencing emotions directly vs. influencing external factors which those emotions have evolved to benchmark, if that makes sense. I'm a (recovering) nerd, not a Buddhist :)

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