army1987 comments on Babies and Bunnies: A Caution About Evo-Psych - Less Wrong

52 Post author: Alicorn 22 February 2010 01:53AM

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Comment author: [deleted] 22 January 2013 05:28:25PM *  3 points [-]

Interesting. My empathy seems to be working in a weird way.

  • TV set: it doesn't sound mean at all -- it's an inanimate fucking object. (I'm assuming the old TV set will be sold or given away, rather than disposed of or destroyed, otherwise it would sound somewhat mean -- towards the hypothetical person who could otherwise use the TV set, not towards the TV set itself.
  • Baby: not mean at all if the baby is too young to understand, very mean otherwise. By this point, I was thinking that “can they understand?” must be it.
  • Sexy person: somewhat mean. So far, so good; but...
  • Bunny: okay, this does sound kind-of mean, and the bunny most definitely doesn't understand English, so my heuristic was broken. (I'm not sure whether me feeling empathy for a bunny is a bug or a feature.) Next:
  • Cute girl: slightly mean.
  • Cute boy: not mean at all. (But the fact that in certain ways I'm probably more feminine than usual for males might have something to do with that.)
  • Hyena: wow, that does sound somewhat mean (more than for the bunny). WTH? Some part of me must be an Azathoth worshipper.
  • Shampoo bottle: not mean at all. Can't feel empathy for a bottle even if I try to force myself to. (And, as I once already mentioned, I do feel a sliver of empathy for the molecules in this picture when they're hit particularly hard. What's the difference? The fact that I've done moshing which is analogous to thermal collisions but I've never done anything remotely analogous to being a shampoo bottle about to be thrown away?
  • Old man: OMG, telling him that in front of his wife? 'The hell is wrong with you, Mr Spock?
  • Creepy old man: the “You give women the creeps” part doesn't sound mean at all, the “you won't have sex again between now and when you die” sounds extremely mean (but the fact that I'm involuntarily celibate myself probably has something to do with this).
Comment author: [deleted] 23 January 2013 03:51:01PM *  1 point [-]

(I'm not sure whether me feeling empathy for a bunny is a bug or a feature.)

I still don't know, but the fact that I can feel sorry for someone talking to it is definitely a bug. I don't think words should have any non-zero terminal value, they only matter insofar as they have an effect in the listener (and if Omega told me that there's an M-Disc with $literary_work somewhere in intergalactic space where no-one could read it, and offered to give me $10 and destroy the disc, I would totally accept); and (pace certain new-agey bollocks) telling a bunny “In a year's time, you will be harvested and your muscles will be cooked in a soup” won't hurt it any more than telling it anything else.