This article is like a biological description of how muscles grow. People interested in getting stronger will benefit more from an exercise plan. They still have to exercise, but at least they'll know what to do.
If your interest is developing your empathy and other social skills, the answer is through practice, as with any other performance-based skills. You can develop empathy with practice, just like charisma, patience, listening, and so on.
I teach and coach leadership, having had to learn it from scratch after a PhD (physics) and MBA, only taught me theory, not practice, and starting several companies showed me the value of leadership skills, not how to lead. I wrote a book version of the course that gives the exercises to learn the social skills relevant for leading oneself and others. The preface is on my page: https://joshuaspodek.com/leadership-step-by-step, which develops this concept more. As usual posting about my books here, if anyone is interested in reading it or doing its exercises but money gets in the way, contact me and we'll work something out.
I like what you offer, but your website could use some work. The video and annoying (2 times?) sign up dialogs are not responsive on my phone. Meant as constructive feedback.
I consider feedback a gift, so appreciate it. As the podcast has grown into a non-profit, which we plan to spin off to its own site, I plan to simplify my personal site. I expect to resolve such issues in the simplification.
What I'm most interested in is to to what degree the lack of "facial expressions", "speech melody" and the like in internet communication impedes the development of empathy.
We can communicate with more people than ever before, but our ability to empathize with those people is poor.
I wonder if technology won't actually help us ameliorate this issue.
Improvements in video communication — availability, ease of use, quality, ubiquity — make establishing empathetic connections easier. And there's a lot of room for improvement! (Latency is my biggest pet peeve.)
Would be interesting to experiment with a forum that only works with video. Particularly if the video recorder starts when you are playing a 'comment' and captures your realtime reaction/response interaction with the content. Then you have the option to upload or nah.
Then on playback the forum synchronizes all of these clips so that it's one continuous experience. UX could be the active video playing while 3-4 live 'replies' silently stack up to the right and you just mouse over over the one you want to unmute (now) and roll into the conversation
(next). Maybe your video is in there too so you can hover over it to indicate you want to reply.
Lastly the ability for everyone to grab clips and start threads from them would be interesting to help avoid the blab factor.
Still asynchronous threaded conversations, just with video instead of text.
Definitely increases storage/processing/bandwidth costs. The question at hand is what is the value of the additional information that is retained. Text has the potential to alleviate a lot of bias around looks/gender/age/race, so it could even be a net negative, just seems interesting.
I actually do better with text interaction than anything else. It allows me to work asynchronously.
Due to auditory processing and executive function difficulties, I get overwhelmed attempting to communicate in real-time. Remote work has been a huge improvement to my life.
You don't develop empathy - some people have it, some people not so much.
We need both, unless we want other countries to come by and explain to us that their un-empathetic people with guns will now be telling us how to live our lives.
It's not ability to empathize that's poor online - it's motivation to empathize that's absent.
I'd really rather not deal with temper tantrums ever, but if someone throws one and I'm alone with them in a room, I have to deal with it because it could escalate to an even bigger nuisance. If I'm alone with them in an internet chatroom and they can't affect my everyday life, I can express how I really feel - I don't want to deal with your bullshit.
”You don't develop empathy -
some people have it, some
people not so much."
I don't think this is true, for the most part. A counterexample is buddhists who spend years practicing compassion meditation. It seems to work for them. Lots of religious leaders emphasize compassion, and there seems to be a benefit from it. I know people who pray for others, which is a clearly empathetic act, whether or not I believe in the power of prayer.
I don't think that empathy is just a given, as you seem to think. People all over the world, and over vast spans of time have put a lot of effort into developing it.
I don't think that's true at all--not for empathy or for many other psychosocial quantities. While a statistically few people exist who really are biologically missing certain psychological abilities (what we usually call mental health disorders), for everyone else it's totally possible to increase/decrease things like empathy, critical thought, fearfulness, optimism, etc. over time.
Making those changes consciously is just a) hard and b) usually quite gradual/hard to gauge progress, so as a result the position that "you either innately have it or you don't" becomes quite seductive.
This sword cuts both ways: that ability to change is present even for awful or deeply suffering people. However, it's also possible for positive things (empathy, hopefulness and the like) to decrease over time even without conscious effort.
This is one of the reasons that I think everyone, if able, should try to get help in tracking their mental state, even if they're healthy: how you do this might differ (therapy, church, regular mental check-ins with a trusted confidant, journaling, meditation, whatever), but it is a really powerful quality of maturity to be able to watch--and to the extent you are able, manage--your "levels" of these personal/psychological qualities
IMO, for most people empathy is already there. In my own experience what I had to learn about empathy is how to handle it, not how to have it; I already have it, it's automatic.
The only thing that needs practice is extending it to strangers and enemies/rivals.
That is an interesting first part of your comment, "how to handle empathy".
I too find it quite easy to relate to others by taking their perspective as well as easily being able to imagine how they may be feeling. To the point that my point of view and emotions become influenced by others in a sort of sympathetic reaction. EDIT My limited vocabulary skills made me unaware of the fact that this is known as "compassion" Very similar to how when someone yawns I find myself wanting to and normally yawning also.
In most cases I feel this is to my social benifit but at certain times it has been to my detriment. Typically where I have assumed the wrong perspective and feelings, or possibly my own ego has projected my perspective upon others in a sort of pseudo empathy. In my own experience this has been particularly damaging when entering personal relations with sociapathic type individuals.
Empathy is not automatic for everyone. My emotions are so unreliable and unpredictable that they are useless for understanding other people.
All of my social skills are based on logical analysis and a lot of trial and error.
I enter every conversation with a goal of what I wish to communicate and how I want the other person to feel. I then attempt to do the proper things to make that happen.
Society tells us that this way of handling interpersonal interaction is manipulative and evil. For many people, this is the only way we can function in a society that doesn’t think the way we do.
It is far more common than you think. Nearly half of everyone acts this way. More than 3/4 if you add "to some extent". But many of most of them can be "rationally compassionate".
Not sure which part of my comment is “more common than I think” but I’m pretty sure 3/4s of the population doesn’t have autism or a similar developmental issue.
As a note, I don’t personally have autism, my issue is different, but I share a significant number of traits with those who do.
> I then attempt to do the proper things to make that happen. Society tells us that this way of handling interpersonal interaction is manipulative and evil.
I'm wondering why empathy is such a hot topic... , I don't think our goal is to empathize more with other people.
Really liked the point Paul Bloom made with his book about Rational Compasion:
https://www.amazon.com/Against-Empathy-Case-Rational-Compass...
We should be able to understand how smb feels, not feel the same.
Personally, I'm quite interested in why/when people are synchronizing their movements.
Shameless self plug:
http://kaikunze.de/papers/pdf/gupta2019blink.pdf
Don't know why it happens yet our eye blinks and head nods are synchronizing when we talk face-to-face (versus back to back).
again ... I'm not trying to get rid of emotions.
That's not what I'm proposing.
I just think the idea/concept of feeling the same as somebody else is strange and has its own dangers.
Understand the others feelings, try to understand their point of view (also emotionally) that's great.
Having exactly the same feelings probably not.
"Empathy :: the action of understanding, being aware of, being sensitive to, and vicariously experiencing the feelings" from meridian webster.
Example: you meet a person who has a panic attack ... how is going to experience the feelings vicariously helping you?
I agree. Empathy is painful. It should not be the goal. I think the outcome for civilization would not be optimal if many more people were empathic right now, we still need a mix. But there are degrees of empathic ability. Only a very few people like me ( < 0.01% ) get the emotions of everyone around them without trying.
I think the general population is comprised only less than 20% of people who are "empathic" to the extent whare if they try, or, are relationally close to someone they do feel their feels. Then, more than 85% of people are "rationally compassionate" in that they understand how others feel if they make an effort, yet around a 1/3 of people do that automatically with no effort.
I think only around 10% of people are incapable of understanding how others feel at all. But if those people make some effort that number goes down to 1-2%. But while psychopaths are in that 10% they're not really in that 1-2%. And those people who "don't have subjective emotions nor do feel anything themselves" spread across all groups. The stronger statement, "don't have emotions nor feel anything themselves" are not present in the extreme empaths like me who can pick up emotions from around them.
Finally, people are not "set" in a particular group. It is plastic, to an extent, but not in entirety.
"By becoming “the wounded person,” he vicariously experiences their suffering. " from the grammarly post.
Pain/Painful is in the definition of empathy ...
"he action of understanding, being aware of, being sensitive to, and vicariously experiencing the feelings"
https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/empathy
So you don't have to have any drama. I have a very empathetic friend: it happens to him in any situation (meeting smb happy, sad, angry...). trauma is usually limited to a specific situation from the passed. Does not fit that case.
You don't know empathy (deep into others), what you say is deep into yourself. Not same. Painful is from their negative emotions, plus (for superempaths like me) emotions from all people round you, not you solo.
The idea that our mechanism for understanding how others feel recruits or works through our mechanism for feeling things seems a likelier and simpler explanation than one where those two mechanisms are entirely separate.
Let's say a friend tells you their mother has died. You respond, "You must be very sad. What are you doing this weekend?"
Your friend gets upset. Why? You understood what they were saying and acknowledged how they were feeling. What more is there to do?
Does that hit home? If not, switch roles, so that your friend is the insensitive person who does understand how you feel, but doesn't feel the same way, because it's not their mother. Being able to be sad for a friend, for their loss, not yours, is a basic human capability, and refusing to exercise it when it is called for is indeed callous and insensitive.
What I feel and how I act are two different thinks. You don't have to be emphatic to act in a reasonable way in your example. I would not ask about going out, not because I feel the same pain, but I know that my friend is hurt and I will hurt him more when I ask that. I don't have to feel the same way or similar to him to understand that. That's what rational compassion is about ...
Rational compassion:
You understand the situation the other person is in and you make socially and emotionally the right decision (based on rational assessment).
Empathy: "the action of understanding, being aware of, being sensitive to, and vicariously experiencing the feelings"
emphasis on vicariously experiencing !
Empathy is often used to express that you are feeling the same of similar feeling as somebody else.
From the Grammarly post below (from another poster that didn't understand my point):
"By becoming “the wounded person,” he vicariously experiences their suffering. "
Now imagine two doctors, one is empathic to your pain and one understands your pain with rational compassion.
The doctor who "feels" your pain might not be able to operate on you ... as he emphasizes too much. His feelings towards you hinder him.
Not to say empathy cannot be useful and is interesting. Yet, I feel it's overhyped and there are dangers focusing solemnly on it.
I think I agree with all of that. I will say empathy is a lot "easier" for people, as rational compassion requires life experience that people don't usually pick up until later. But they're different skills and are appropriate and effective at different times.
As for overrated/overhyped, I think those are dangerous words. Totally dependent on how you rate things, how you perceive others to rate them, and how they actually are. It's almost impossible to have constructive communication about something like that because everybody is operating from different sets of facts.
The article underlines my understanding of empathy.
I think Empathy can be counterproductive ... because if you feel like the person (I mean feel like the person ...) you might be less likely to be able to help them.
"By becoming “the wounded person,” he vicariously experiences their suffering. "
A good related book is "How to win Friends and Influence people". Basically its a guide how to make friends, with a realization that we live in a world full of selfish people, that are self centered and don't have much empathy. This is the default state of human beings. I watched an interview with Pol Pot and even he thought of himself as a good guy.
[edit]
I should qualify what I mean by selfish as it relates to the book. Basically humans tend to act in their self interest by default. And will go a long way to justify that behaviour to themselves even when it hurts others, so they can preserve a positive self image. this a common behaviour pattern. The book doesn't claim its universal, and no exception exist. I'm sure there are exceptions. But even modern "saint" equivalents like Gandhi did some messed up selfish things.
While it may be true that there are many selfish people, many aren't. Interpret the world as being packed with wankers and in your mind you deny people the chance to be anything else. I had a relative like that, he wasn't a nice person.
As the saying goes, a thief thinks every man steals. I am very wary of people who are deeply pessimistic in the what they believe about everybody else.
Problem is that only people with bad empathy enjoys it since otherwise you can see through peoples superficiality. So going through the motions and pretending to like each other doesn't work with/for many.
Most people have not read that book nor any like it. Most people appear pleasant because that's the way they genuinely are, not because they went to a seminar or read a book to learn how to fake it.
That's just not true. I often fail to be pleasant when I am in England, because the culture is different enough that when I try to be nice I mess it up in some manner. We can have the intent of being pleasant but fail to appear pleasant.
It also takes a lot of effort/energy to “handle” people with these techniques. Ask them this, ask them that. Give them two compliments, come up with an open ended question.
Can you empathize with genius beyond your comrehension, or is this just a downward relationship, and does doing so make you a peer? Can you empathize with objective evils like sadism or cruelty without becoming a party to it? It raises the question of what it is, really.
The popular emphasis on empathy seems to reduce to a secular political idea, where the more traditional value of compassion is more of a theological concept. When I read appeals to empathy, I see appeals to a secular morality that originates in the material idea of progress, which while not necessarily negative, it's not above criticism either.
> Can you empathize with genius beyond your comrehension
Yes. A 'genius beyond your comprehension' is still a human and will have some experiences that other humans can relate to. Being smart doesn't make you a space alien.
I agree, empathy is a bit fake, you have to guess and I for one will do my very best to guess what others are thinking and feeling, but at the end of the day, being in someone else's shoes is a guess. Compassion is entirely solid though. Both are needed.
My concern with "compassion" is that you can have perfect "compassion" for an adversary you regard as "objectively evil": they may be evil but they're pitiful. Whereas "empathy", to my mind, calls upon you to strive for understanding, however imperfect — making it harder to dehumanize the adversary. But dehumanization tempered by compassion is still better than its pure, distilled form.
Instead of guessing how someone feels and what they are thinking, you can ask people what they're feeling and thinking directly. Sometimes people will tell you what they're feeling and thinking without you having to ask - then you can empathize with them just by listening. I think of "empathy" as a synonym for "understanding".
I'm pretty lousy at asking people what they feel, my job role, thankfully, has an optional people management component, I've opted out. However a mandatory (welcome) part of my role is mentoring, coaching, call it what you will. I need to listen to junior members of staff sharing their woes and it's a two way flow of ideas, they often share, or overshare their difficult life moments, and at that point, I hang up my "mentor" role and just listen, I'm not their manager, I'm just their colleage, in fact, their friend. Empathy, as I said is guessing, but I do everything I can to do my best guess
The first part of this is kinda funny. The problem is that you’re squinting too hard to try to make out the problem and now everything is fuzzy. The real value of empathy — why we’ve been using this social tool for thousands of years — is that you don’t have to become the actor to gain understanding. This tool also has a learning aspect, usually you try to empathize with people who you’re gonna be around a bit, so while you may not be able to check an empathy box right away, you could use empathy to further understand genius than you could without it.
"Being able to feel empathy and to take in the other person's perspective – these are two abilities through which we understand what is going on in the other person's mind."
How about being able to feel oneself and take one's own perspective, for a change. What a strange world, where every one takes someone else's perspective.
Humans are pretty good at taking our own perspectives. If everyone did that instead of empathizing with others, our conversations would all run in circles and we would be an even more polarized society.
I'd say, we converse with others, so that we could be more polarized / differentiated with respect to others. Only then we can have our own perspectives. Until that, we run in circles.
I actually don't think this is true. I've met lots of people who are self-deluding or don't conciously recognize their own patterns. We all have a story we tell about ourselves, but it often isn't the true story.
That said, i don't think any of that conflicts with learning to empathisize with others. Understanding yourself is just as important as understanding other people. Personally i suspect they are related skills.
Hmm. That’s a valid point. I wasn’t thinking from that perspective, but your thoughts make sense. I came at it from the angle of arguing your own side in a disagreement with someone—that’s what I associate with perspective-taking. But the idea of misleading yourself with a fake story is another facet I failed to consider.
"Empathy - the ability to share someone else's feelings or experiences by imagining what it would be like to be in that person's situation"
I'd risk a statement, that it is actually impossible to take someone's else position. What one can do is precisely this - imagining someone's else position, which is a fiction (fueled by so called good intentions).
> imagining someone's else position, which is a fiction
Some people are better at this than others, and yes there's some guessing involved, but it doesn't have to be perfect to work. This is especially effective if the other recognizes the effort and also tries to empathize.
77 comments
[ 3.2 ms ] story [ 136 ms ] threadIf your interest is developing your empathy and other social skills, the answer is through practice, as with any other performance-based skills. You can develop empathy with practice, just like charisma, patience, listening, and so on.
I teach and coach leadership, having had to learn it from scratch after a PhD (physics) and MBA, only taught me theory, not practice, and starting several companies showed me the value of leadership skills, not how to lead. I wrote a book version of the course that gives the exercises to learn the social skills relevant for leading oneself and others. The preface is on my page: https://joshuaspodek.com/leadership-step-by-step, which develops this concept more. As usual posting about my books here, if anyone is interested in reading it or doing its exercises but money gets in the way, contact me and we'll work something out.
We can communicate with more people than ever before, but our ability to empathize with those people is poor.
Improvements in video communication — availability, ease of use, quality, ubiquity — make establishing empathetic connections easier. And there's a lot of room for improvement! (Latency is my biggest pet peeve.)
Then on playback the forum synchronizes all of these clips so that it's one continuous experience. UX could be the active video playing while 3-4 live 'replies' silently stack up to the right and you just mouse over over the one you want to unmute (now) and roll into the conversation (next). Maybe your video is in there too so you can hover over it to indicate you want to reply.
Lastly the ability for everyone to grab clips and start threads from them would be interesting to help avoid the blab factor.
Definitely increases storage/processing/bandwidth costs. The question at hand is what is the value of the additional information that is retained. Text has the potential to alleviate a lot of bias around looks/gender/age/race, so it could even be a net negative, just seems interesting.
Due to auditory processing and executive function difficulties, I get overwhelmed attempting to communicate in real-time. Remote work has been a huge improvement to my life.
We need both, unless we want other countries to come by and explain to us that their un-empathetic people with guns will now be telling us how to live our lives.
It's not ability to empathize that's poor online - it's motivation to empathize that's absent.
I'd really rather not deal with temper tantrums ever, but if someone throws one and I'm alone with them in a room, I have to deal with it because it could escalate to an even bigger nuisance. If I'm alone with them in an internet chatroom and they can't affect my everyday life, I can express how I really feel - I don't want to deal with your bullshit.
I don't think this is true, for the most part. A counterexample is buddhists who spend years practicing compassion meditation. It seems to work for them. Lots of religious leaders emphasize compassion, and there seems to be a benefit from it. I know people who pray for others, which is a clearly empathetic act, whether or not I believe in the power of prayer.
I don't think that empathy is just a given, as you seem to think. People all over the world, and over vast spans of time have put a lot of effort into developing it.
I don't think that's true at all--not for empathy or for many other psychosocial quantities. While a statistically few people exist who really are biologically missing certain psychological abilities (what we usually call mental health disorders), for everyone else it's totally possible to increase/decrease things like empathy, critical thought, fearfulness, optimism, etc. over time.
Making those changes consciously is just a) hard and b) usually quite gradual/hard to gauge progress, so as a result the position that "you either innately have it or you don't" becomes quite seductive.
This sword cuts both ways: that ability to change is present even for awful or deeply suffering people. However, it's also possible for positive things (empathy, hopefulness and the like) to decrease over time even without conscious effort.
This is one of the reasons that I think everyone, if able, should try to get help in tracking their mental state, even if they're healthy: how you do this might differ (therapy, church, regular mental check-ins with a trusted confidant, journaling, meditation, whatever), but it is a really powerful quality of maturity to be able to watch--and to the extent you are able, manage--your "levels" of these personal/psychological qualities
The only thing that needs practice is extending it to strangers and enemies/rivals.
I too find it quite easy to relate to others by taking their perspective as well as easily being able to imagine how they may be feeling. To the point that my point of view and emotions become influenced by others in a sort of sympathetic reaction. EDIT My limited vocabulary skills made me unaware of the fact that this is known as "compassion" Very similar to how when someone yawns I find myself wanting to and normally yawning also.
In most cases I feel this is to my social benifit but at certain times it has been to my detriment. Typically where I have assumed the wrong perspective and feelings, or possibly my own ego has projected my perspective upon others in a sort of pseudo empathy. In my own experience this has been particularly damaging when entering personal relations with sociapathic type individuals.
This is a wise analysis. The temptation to see you want to be there, not what is. One would hope empaths shall avoid sociopaths for their own good.
All of my social skills are based on logical analysis and a lot of trial and error.
I enter every conversation with a goal of what I wish to communicate and how I want the other person to feel. I then attempt to do the proper things to make that happen.
Society tells us that this way of handling interpersonal interaction is manipulative and evil. For many people, this is the only way we can function in a society that doesn’t think the way we do.
As a note, I don’t personally have autism, my issue is different, but I share a significant number of traits with those who do.
> I then attempt to do the proper things to make that happen. Society tells us that this way of handling interpersonal interaction is manipulative and evil.
part
We should be able to understand how smb feels, not feel the same.
Personally, I'm quite interested in why/when people are synchronizing their movements. Shameless self plug: http://kaikunze.de/papers/pdf/gupta2019blink.pdf Don't know why it happens yet our eye blinks and head nods are synchronizing when we talk face-to-face (versus back to back).
Trying to get rid of emotions might be harmful.
Understand the others feelings, try to understand their point of view (also emotionally) that's great.
Having exactly the same feelings probably not. "Empathy :: the action of understanding, being aware of, being sensitive to, and vicariously experiencing the feelings" from meridian webster.
Example: you meet a person who has a panic attack ... how is going to experience the feelings vicariously helping you?
But both are needed, depending on the situation.
I think the general population is comprised only less than 20% of people who are "empathic" to the extent whare if they try, or, are relationally close to someone they do feel their feels. Then, more than 85% of people are "rationally compassionate" in that they understand how others feel if they make an effort, yet around a 1/3 of people do that automatically with no effort.
I think only around 10% of people are incapable of understanding how others feel at all. But if those people make some effort that number goes down to 1-2%. But while psychopaths are in that 10% they're not really in that 1-2%. And those people who "don't have subjective emotions nor do feel anything themselves" spread across all groups. The stronger statement, "don't have emotions nor feel anything themselves" are not present in the extreme empaths like me who can pick up emotions from around them.
Finally, people are not "set" in a particular group. It is plastic, to an extent, but not in entirety.
Pain/Painful is in the definition of empathy ... "he action of understanding, being aware of, being sensitive to, and vicariously experiencing the feelings" https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/empathy
So you don't have to have any drama. I have a very empathetic friend: it happens to him in any situation (meeting smb happy, sad, angry...). trauma is usually limited to a specific situation from the passed. Does not fit that case.
Your friend gets upset. Why? You understood what they were saying and acknowledged how they were feeling. What more is there to do?
Does that hit home? If not, switch roles, so that your friend is the insensitive person who does understand how you feel, but doesn't feel the same way, because it's not their mother. Being able to be sad for a friend, for their loss, not yours, is a basic human capability, and refusing to exercise it when it is called for is indeed callous and insensitive.
Rational compassion: You understand the situation the other person is in and you make socially and emotionally the right decision (based on rational assessment).
Empathy: "the action of understanding, being aware of, being sensitive to, and vicariously experiencing the feelings" emphasis on vicariously experiencing !
Empathy is often used to express that you are feeling the same of similar feeling as somebody else. From the Grammarly post below (from another poster that didn't understand my point):
"By becoming “the wounded person,” he vicariously experiences their suffering. "
Now imagine two doctors, one is empathic to your pain and one understands your pain with rational compassion.
The doctor who "feels" your pain might not be able to operate on you ... as he emphasizes too much. His feelings towards you hinder him.
Not to say empathy cannot be useful and is interesting. Yet, I feel it's overhyped and there are dangers focusing solemnly on it.
As for overrated/overhyped, I think those are dangerous words. Totally dependent on how you rate things, how you perceive others to rate them, and how they actually are. It's almost impossible to have constructive communication about something like that because everybody is operating from different sets of facts.
- Empathy is a term we use for the ability to understand other people’s feelings as if we were having them ourselves.
- Sympathy refers to the ability to take part in someone else’s feelings, mostly by feeling sorrowful about their misfortune.
I think you may have confused the terms.
I think Empathy can be counterproductive ... because if you feel like the person (I mean feel like the person ...) you might be less likely to be able to help them.
"By becoming “the wounded person,” he vicariously experiences their suffering. "
Quick Book Summary
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9qvUYtwASqY
Pol Pot last interview
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CQ9_BMshyiw
[edit] I should qualify what I mean by selfish as it relates to the book. Basically humans tend to act in their self interest by default. And will go a long way to justify that behaviour to themselves even when it hurts others, so they can preserve a positive self image. this a common behaviour pattern. The book doesn't claim its universal, and no exception exist. I'm sure there are exceptions. But even modern "saint" equivalents like Gandhi did some messed up selfish things.
It just feels so fake and scripted. I can easily tell in a business setting when people are just putting on their Dale Carnegie hat.
Those who do it well, which is most of us, just seem like nice, friendly and interesting people.
Most people have not read that book nor any like it. Most people appear pleasant because that's the way they genuinely are, not because they went to a seminar or read a book to learn how to fake it.
The popular emphasis on empathy seems to reduce to a secular political idea, where the more traditional value of compassion is more of a theological concept. When I read appeals to empathy, I see appeals to a secular morality that originates in the material idea of progress, which while not necessarily negative, it's not above criticism either.
Yes. A 'genius beyond your comprehension' is still a human and will have some experiences that other humans can relate to. Being smart doesn't make you a space alien.
For now. Aliens and AGI might complicate that.
Dogs have empathy for humans even though basically every human is an incomprehensible genius to a dog.
How about being able to feel oneself and take one's own perspective, for a change. What a strange world, where every one takes someone else's perspective.
That said, i don't think any of that conflicts with learning to empathisize with others. Understanding yourself is just as important as understanding other people. Personally i suspect they are related skills.
Some people are better at this than others, and yes there's some guessing involved, but it doesn't have to be perfect to work. This is especially effective if the other recognizes the effort and also tries to empathize.