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Cake day: July 21st, 2024

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  • Affective empathy is the ability to understand someone else’s feelings. Cognitive empathy is the ability to understand someone else’s thoughts.

    Cognitive empathy is really useful for lying, because you can anticipate how someone will think about what you tell them. It’s also good for social deduction and interpersonal problem solving. You might use it at a job interview to intuit that your potential employer values modesty, so you understate your accomplishments to win her approval and get the job. Poker is all about cognitive empathy, the goal is to read the value of your opponents’ cards on their faces. It can help you to recognise unwritten rules and to absorb information by cultural osmosis. If you want to bend a rule, cognitive empathy will help you gauge how the relevant authority will react, and whether you’ll be allowed to bend it.

    In short, cognitive empathy is one of the most essential skills to living life as part of a society in a world full of people who don’t always say what they really mean. Which is an accurate description of nearly all neurotypicals.



  • There are disabilities that involve reduced empathy. Autism for reduced cognitive empathy and ASPD/NPD for reduced affective empathy. They both seriously impair relationship skills. People with ASPD often have criminal records because they did something stupid like shoplift breath mints and then punch out the cop who caught them. Empathy is a form of intelligence, and if you can’t imagine how people are going to feel when you do shitty things, then you’ll tend to do shitty things and get in lots of trouble for it.



  • So you’re saying autism and narcissism (autism spectrum disorder and narcissistic personality disorder) are similar enough that you are certain you can relate to the struggles of people with NPD and you know they shouldn’t be concerned about having a slur used?

    Suppose someone who hated Elon Musk called him a nasty word like “emotionless autist” or “robot sperg”, as examples of anti-autism slurs based on shortening the name of the diagnosis. I think this would be the same as calling your parents the slur you used. If you can honestly say you’d be completely fine having an anti-autism slur used on a bad person, then I’ll accept your use of an anti-narcissism slur on bad people. But if you think one of those two very similar situations would be ableist and would hurt disabled people, then please accept that they’re both ableist and they both hurt disabled people.


  • In 1979, a historian named Christopher Lasch, who had no psychiatric credentials, wrote a book arguing that modern American culture was increasing the prevalence of a particular psychiatric disorder in the general population.

    The book gained a lot of cultural traction, especially among people who call themselves pop psychologists, but whose actual job is writing scam self-help books. They started using this disorder in their books as a bogeyman. They said people with this disorder are living among us, stealing our energy and resources and making us weak. Basically just a reskinned version of the antisemitic conspiracy theory.

    These narratives became so popular that people started using the slur for a person who has the disorder without even knowing they were talking about a disorder. They thought it was just a word for a certain kind of bad person. Like how kids in the 90s used the R word.

    You heard that word and didn’t realise it was a slur, and you used it to describe your parents.

    The word is “n*rcisisst”