A couple of things recently have got me thinking about socialisation and empathy.
The first is the recent set of posts on Yvain's Blog about gender relations. Many of the posts and comments express a level of frustration with the complications of male/female social interactions which I used to share, but don't any more. It doesn't seem that complicated to me any more, but I can very clearly remember a time when it did.
The second is a semi-formal debate I recently attended, where I was one of the speakers for a motion supporting the unconditional right of pregnant women to terminate at any time up until birth. My actual beliefs on this subject are informed by elaborate arguments on personhood, the conflictive nature of moral intuitions and a smattering of politically-oriented game theory (which LWers would probably be in a better position than most to appreciate), while my fellow speaker for the motion came at it from a more nihilistic angle.
We both realised our own personal arguments for the motion would be highly unpopular with the audience, and so we had to construct a more generally appealing set of arguments. There was a time in the past where this would not have occurred to me, and I would have spent ten minutes holding forth on arcane subject matter, trying to deliver a resistant audience to a repugnant but incontrovertible conclusion.
In both cases, a previous version of myself did not understand the social ramifications of certain types of behaviour. I'm trying to decide whether this is more the result of slowly accreting many different pieces of information over time, or of a general increase in my ability to empathise with/simulate the reactions of other people.
If it's mostly the latter, I don't really need to do anything special to improve this capacity. If it's mostly the former, I'm not sure how to go about directing a search for more of them.
It doesn't seem that complicated to me any more, but I can very clearly remember a time when it did.
Why did you change your mind?
This is the public group instrumental rationality diary for the week of September 17th. It's a place to record and chat about it if you have done, or are actively doing, things like:
Or anything else interesting which you want to share, so that other people can think about it, and perhaps be inspired to take action themselves. Try to include enough details so that everyone can use each other's experiences to learn about what tends to work out, and what doesn't tend to work out.
Thanks to everyone who contributes!
Previous diary; archive of prior diaries.
(Sorry for being late, I don't even have an excuse at all! Oh well.)