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kleinbl00  ·  2931 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: No, You Can’t Feel Sorry for Everyone

Dude who is this choad?

    Adam Waytz is a social psychologist and professor at Northwestern University’s Kellogg School of Management. He studies humanization, dehumanization, and the moral implications of these processes.

Oh, of course. He's a pointy-haired-boss trainer. That's how you come up with shit like this:

    A data-based approach to identifying and ranking universal values is ambitious to be sure. But, crucially, it calls on us to make use of the limits on morality that are inherent to all of us as human beings, rather than lamenting them.

"If you don't feel bad enough about someone else's plight, it's okay - we've created an algorithm to tell you what to do."

I mean, the dude did a post-doc at Harvard so he can't be a total idiot. But I'm not sure how a guy with three psych degrees can skate right over Dunbar's Number. I'm also not sure how this is allowed to fly as an unchallenged maxim:

    The endpoint of the liberal humanitarian project, which is universal empathy, would mean no boundary between in-group and out-group.

Anyone read the Universal Declaration of Human Rights? It's actually pretty goddamn good. But what it hammers home again and again is that "boundaries between in-group and out-group" can't be used for persecution, not that they need to dissolve. Hey, check this out, Article 21 (2):

    No one may be compelled to belong to an association.

The "endpoint of the liberal humanitarian project" isn't some hivemind it's universal self-determination. It's a protection of individual expression and liberty. All 30 articles of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights basically boil down to "nobody can fuck with you unless you fuck with someone else." That's a tacit acknowledgement of a lack of universal empathy, a recognition of the reality of socialization and a framework by which you don't have to treat everyone nicely, but you do have to treat them fairly.

And fairness is fuckin' easy. Chimps get it. I think it takes a management school professor to determine that The Golden Rule needs to be more algorithmic.

I'll just leave this here because it's an actual exploration of the actual problems suggested, as interpreted through monkeys and Cracked.