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Lumifer comments on Open Thread May 30 - June 5, 2016 - Less Wrong
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Here's a little example of prisoner's dilemma that I just thought up, which shows how mass media might contribute to modern loneliness:
Let's assume that everyone has a fixed budget of attention and empathy. Empathizing with imaginary Harry Potter gives you 1 point of utility. Empathizing with your neighbor gives them 10 points of utility, but doesn't give you anything, because your neighbor isn't as interesting as Harry Potter. So everyone empathizes with Harry Potter instead of their neighbor, and everyone is lonely.
Does that sound right? What can society do to get out of that trap?
Consider how old and universal story-telling is. Humans felt empathy for fictional characters since forever.
That's a very weird concept of a "story".
Like ancient Greece and Rome are "remarkably recent"?
Nope. You continue to be wrong.
You are mostly familiar with Graeco-Roman mythology and less familiar with the literature of that period. But that literature certainly existed and I don't know on which basis do you make assertions about "most of their stories".
Take Apuleius' Golden Ass -- a story about the misadventures of a man who (spoilers!) manages to turn himself into a donkey. You think most people took it as true?
In any case, which characters are fictional is irrelevant to the original issue of spending empathy. What matters is whether the character you're feeling empathy for is someone you could meet in real life and form a relationship with. If the story, for example, concerns some illustrious ancestors who might well have been real, you're still "wasting" empathy on them because in the zero-sum game postulated by the OP this takes away from the empathy available for you to feel for your neighbours.
I don't think most people understood Aesops fables to be about a real fox at the time they were written.
Citation, please?
Fair point. But did the media always draw such a big proportion of the attention we could've spent on each other?
It's not a media issue. Think about how much empathy and attention did Jesus and his army of saints consume X-)
But generally speaking, I don't buy the "empathizing with your neighbor gives them 10 points of utility, but doesn't give you anything" assertion. That's not how human interaction works.