We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11551000 and marked it off-topic.

It is still empathy, no matter the source.

No, it's not. It's sympathy. Empathy involves a bit of imagination that most people lack.

edit:

"Empathy is the capacity to understand or feel what another being (a human or non-human animal) is experiencing from within the other being's frame of reference, i.e., the capacity to place oneself in another's position."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Empathy

It's just the way that these words happen to be defined in English. They stand for different, but related concepts.

You don't know the judges experience, or life, which makes your point impossible to prove.

Why are you being so combative?

It's because he's better at empathy than us. :)

Your argument is with English, not me.

Our argument is with your specific views on the meaning of words.

Other sources[1] define empathy as "feeling what another person feels" and sympathy as "having compassion for a person without necessarily feeling what they feel". In that case, the judge is clearly empathizing with the defendant, and not merely sympathizing.

[1] http://grammarist.com/usage/empathy-sympathy/

Can you see any dramatic irony here?

People use words in a variety of ways - communication: a search for a language that is also yours!

Their username may contain a hint...

Ascribing my disagreement to "combativeness" is both combative and presumptive. I've said exactly what I meant, and why.

is the act of describing something as combative itself a combative thing?

It is.

does this mean people are "inable" to call something combative when it's combative?

Trolling is a art.

No, if anything the shared experience makes the judge more able to be empathetic. Most people would only be able to sympathize.

Empathy doesn't exclude shared experience.

I think it's empathy only because of the shared background; I don't think you can truly empathize with somebody who has PTSD unless you've had it as well.

That's not empathy, that's memory. Poor kids growing up in crime-ridden neighborhoods have PTSD; does this judge sit with them, or bury them under the jail?

edit: To be even a bit more contrarian here, sympathy in judges is something that I actively dislike, and why I'm a progressive in support of mandatory minimums, which is pretty much blasphemy. Sympathy in judges is why an affluenza defense can work, and why rapists sometimes get sentenced to probation.

Which you have absolutely no proof of so why serve speculation as if it's facts.

Also the US has one off the most harsh sentences of any western country yet still one of those with most crime.

Even if a judge was softer because of sympathy he would still be much harder than most other european judges.

So not exactly anything that backs up your claims.

What am I supposed to be proving again? I don't know this judge, or his career, and never claimed to. What I said is that it was disappointing that a story that, to me, seemed like it was about someone finding compassion for someone in a vastly different circumstance was a vet relating to another vet.

Your claim about the sentencing.

The distinction you're trying to make does not exist. Memory of a similar experience is a potential part of empathy. It, in no way, invalidates or precludes an empathetic response.

And empathy in one situation does not automatically mean empathy in all situations. Humans are funny like that.

I agree with you. Not really so sure why you're being downvoted other than raining on a parade.

It's not very hard to empathize with someone who you share similar life experiences with.

Real empathy would be, as you said, giving a shit about all the other felons that the judge cannot already identify with.

It's a pointless signalling thread where people are falling all over themselves to say "Awww, that's nice. Oh, it gives me hope for the world." It's akin to a story about a cop who adopts an abused dog that they found at a crime scene and nurses it back to health. Hence, people are falling all over themselves to disapprove of my disapproval as if it were a competition. It's the kind of thread that "attracts low quality responses" as dang would say - but HN is more tolerant towards low quality threads that don't devolve into ideological wars.

Here's my stance: I don't believe in cruel or unusual punishment. I believe that defendants who "remind me of my son" or "remind me of me, when I was a kid" or "me, if I had made one wrong choice" get better treatment than the heartless superpredators that don't look like the judges son.

The difference between empathy and sympathy is that the former requires putting yourself in the other person's shoes. That requires some sort of shared background.