Also, I thought I should clarify I don’t want to come off like I’m using low empathy as an excuse to behave like an asshole. I can still learn and practice empathy, and I can absolutely strive to be a good person regardless of my ability or inability to “feel what other people feel.”

Empathy is very complex and there’s been a lot of research on it, more than a layperson like me can really understand. I think the clearest way I can put it is I don’t have as much “gut feeling” empathy, but I can intellectually (lol, I feel silly typing that) understand why things are good and bad.

Just out of curiosity and not trying to invalidate anyones experience here but there been a large influx of this type of posts, and we can’t tell whether this is happening because of increased visibility due to Scott putting a stick through his bicycle wheel or anything else - just trying to understand the phenomenon… what drew you here?

As far as the whole lattes and children in slavery and charities thing goes.

Imagine you have a village without money. You are enjoying your coffee at the local gathering place, you hear the Bob down the street has some children in the basement, some people go there get the situation resolved (no need to have everyone drop their coffee, it’s just one Bob, several big guys to help the village cop in case of trouble suffices) and somehow it all works out fine without the village having to forever give up the coffee.

The whole thing where unless you’re a bad person you have to live in a box and donate 100% to charity, is arranged via money. It doesn’t make sense otherwise; apart from certain activities (unnecessarily releasing CO2 by driving an oversized car or mining bitcoin for example), most activities are not exclusive of helping others, and most exchanges between two people (paying someone to make your coffee) aren’t taking form of paying someone who would otherwise be helping the village cop; the physical resources spent on what you are enjoying are not typically the resources necessary for freeing children.

With some important exceptions - take the CO2 releases and global warming worsening everything near the equator. But liberals are already highly concerned with it, and curiously, rationalists generally not as much.

Ultimately the correct solution to children in slavery thing is government action of various kinds, and there’s little that can be done by giving other people money hoping they are able to hire some kind of mercenaries or who knows what mechanism exactly is supposed to convert money into freed children (often, reduced to advocacy for donating more money). On an individual level that may be all you can do, but on the collective level that is the worst way to approach the problem.

edit: The solution to slavery requires the use of physical force, physical coercion, violence even. Buying slaves on the free market and freeing them, that isn’t a solution. Freeing slaves isn’t something you can easily do with . Enjoy your latte, but make sure no slave labor was involved in producing the coffee; making coffee really isn’t taking away from world’s ability or inability to enforce laws. There’s more than enough guns and bullets. There’s more than enough people trained in the use of weapons, doing, in a best case scenario, nothing. The world doesn’t need to be producing a little more cordite instead of a little more coffee to solve that problem. If it was world war 2, you’d probably be giving up a great deal more than a latte, because there wasn’t enough brass, aluminium, steel, but it isn’t WW2.

The way the leading rationalists seem to hook new people in reminds me a lot of “love bombing,” a common cult tactic whereby someone who is socially isolated and feeling down is bombarded with warm fuzzies by the cult group, making a sort of implied promise that the target will get more if they join up. Rationalism, as a movement, seems to have perfected targeting folks with our sorts of backgrounds.

E.g.

“Oh you’re having a bad day? Well we think that you are a genius, and btw congratulations on your huge dong! Would you like to talk about robots and read the pamphl…uh blog posts our glorious founder wrote for these occasions?”

There are several survivor stories in the archives stories here, and they are harrowing. See also how they roped in Scott Aa. after he accidentally attracted the Internet Inquisition. External examples include showing up unannounced at an evangelical church, Scientology function, MLM gathering, etc.

here we sneer at a particular manifestation of tech cult/white supremacist/misogynist thinking, not at their victims. of course, like all cowards, they work hard to recruit the vulnerable and to ensure they bear the brunt of any negative outcomes. it bears remembering. thanks for your post.

ADHD person here.

There are subs that focus on neurodiversity that aren’t as messed up as SSC, or at least, not messed up in the same ways. Likewise, there might be meetup groups in your area. I’m not sure if we can help you specifically, as we’re not really a support oriented social space.

Have you read much Captain Awkward? It’s an advice site. They have meetups. You might find some connections there.

https://captainawkward.com/

Insightful stuff ITT. I think this thread is woven up into a whole array of ideas about the relation between neuroanatomy and thought, and is eminently worth pulling on. Thanks for starting such an interesting conversation, OP

A lot of people right now are confusing polarized, moralistic (black and white) thinking with the kind of literal thinking autistic people have. I’ve heard a lot of people in EA have polarized thinking traits. It doesn’t mean they have personality disorders in the sense of maladaptive coping, but it does raise the likelihood significantly. Ozy Frantz talks about this as scrupulosity and relates it to a kind of moralistic OCD. e.g. https://thingofthings.wordpress.com/2015/02/01/in-which-ozy-despite-not-being-a-scott-a-adopts-their-habit-of-long-blog-posts-concerning-feminism-and-nerds/

Lol…this sub. Being a rationalist isn’t a political stance, it’s just being open to fact based debate rather than the interpretative art of post modern circle jerking. So yeah, some folks are more wrong. Just debate them. If thier stance is actually racist they aren’t being rational as the facts are agianst them. I rarely see anything that is actually racist over there that isn’t challenged. If you think you have found the truth it’s sad you don’t share your rational fact based arguements with the rest of the class.