Viswanathan K's Thoughts

We tend to believe that empathy is better than compassion. After all, as Pranay Kotasthane writes : “Empathy is the ability to understand and share the feelings of another person. It involves stepping into someone else's shoes and experiencing their emotional state as if it were one's own. ”   But policy makers would do better to experience compassion, but not go as far as empathy, he says. Here’s why. Empathy, he says, can lead one to care too much about one individual (or one group) only . It creates the risk that the policy maker frames simplistic solutions that address the problem of that one set with whom he experienced empathy. Or as Rutger Bregman once wrote: “Empathy makes us less forgiving, because the more we identify with victims, the more we generalise about our enemies. The bright spotlight we shine on our chosen few makes us blind to the perspectives of our adversaries, because everybody else falls outside our view. ” I think this is a good point. After ...

Gregg Knauss wrote this iPhone app called Romantimatic to, hold your breath, “remind the distracted or forgetful to text nice things to their significant other”! As you might suspect, the app attracted a fair amount of criticism, wrote Knauss , “often in the language of the Web, by which I mean the most hyperbolic terms possible”. Knauss wondered why there was any reaction at all? “It’s not evil, by any sane definition of the word. It’s not hurtful. It does not do damage to the user or to others. Everyone who has argued so vehemently against it could have just as easily quietly noted its existence, decided it wasn’t for them, and moved on, without moral obligation or qualm.” He also felt that a similar reaction would have never have come if he had written an app that advised people to eat less. And so he asks: “Why is one type of self-improvement aid worse than the other?” And concludes that: “Those people who don’t need the help feel free to judge those who do. Th...