Empathy is not the be all and end all. https://www.amazon.com/Against-Empathy-Case-Rational-Compass...
No. The main reason he gives for policy changes is that the policy isn't working. Numbers haven't budged, despite measures getting ever more extreme and likely illegal. He then suggests that maybe, just maybe, the policy is based on a false assumption. And then delivers some evidence that this could be true. And then presents some ideas of what policies might have a better chance of working.
> empathy is a core publicly-stated internal value of Google which Damore explicitly called for de-emphasizing
Where? I've searched a bunch of places and can't find this, for example:
https://www.google.com/about/philosophy.html
I also googled "google values" and none of the posts so far have had "empathy" in them, though it could be that I haven't searched enough. Anyway, empathy is not a value. Empathy is an emotional capacity. His criticism of empathy is, as far as I can tell, based on the thesis of Paul Bloom's recent book Against Empathy: The Case for Rational Compassion. [1][2][3].
"Brilliantly argued, urgent and humane, AGAINST EMPATHY shows us that, when it comes to both major policy decisions and the choices we make in our everyday lives, limiting our impulse toward empathy is often the most compassionate choice we can make."
[1] https://www.amazon.com/Against-Empathy-Case-Rational-Compass...
[2] https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/29100194-against-empathy
[3] https://www.nytimes.com/2016/12/06/books/review-against-empa...
I think you misunderstand what he is getting at. Yale researcher Paul Bloom wrote a whole book about this concept of empathy as a bad thing, and I think that is what the manifesto is getting at (I'd almost argue quoting): https://www.amazon.com/Against-Empathy-Case-Rational-Compass... TL;DR is this:
> We often think of our capacity to experience the suffering of others as the ultimate source of goodness. Many of our wisest policy-makers, activists, scientists, and philosophers agree that the only problem with empathy is that we don’t have enough of it.
> Nothing could be further from the truth, argues Yale researcher Paul Bloom. In AGAINST EMPATHY, Bloom reveals empathy to be one of the leading motivators of inequality and immorality in society. Far from helping us to improve the lives of others, empathy is a capricious and irrational emotion that appeals to our narrow prejudices. It muddles our judgment and, ironically, often leads to cruelty. We are at our best when we are smart enough not to rely on it, but to draw instead upon a more distanced compassion.
This is how that manifesto is being so miscategorised. It says - DIRECT QUOTE - "relying on affective empathy — feeling another's pain — causes us to focus on anecdotes, favour individuals similar to us, and harbour other irrational and dangerous biases". Not empathy is not required. Not empathy is useless, but a specific, nuanced usage of empathy. It is understandable this miscategorisation given how most people see empathy, but it is still borderline strawmanning to impose a definition here that was not intended.
There's definitely assumptions in the article e.g. Men (may) prefer coding due to the average innate preference of things vs people (and then vice versa for women)and the belief programs exclusive to minorities due more harm than good, but outside of those this seems like a fairly well researched document that, for better or worse, has a dissenting opinion from the group.
[1] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3826203/ [2] https://www.amazon.com/Against-Empathy-Case-Rational-Compass...
We should be able to understand how smb feels, not feel the same.
Personally, I'm quite interested in why/when people are synchronizing their movements. Shameless self plug: http://kaikunze.de/papers/pdf/gupta2019blink.pdf Don't know why it happens yet our eye blinks and head nods are synchronizing when we talk face-to-face (versus back to back).