Comment by MisterTea
7 hours ago
The fact that you are questioning this is alarming. When you hear of someones misfortune and you have no emotion you are lacking empathy which is a common trait of psychopaths.
When you think about harming someone, at least in my mind, it is impossible not to think of the scenario reversed. How would I feel if the same were done to me? That is at least what a responsible person would do: think about the consequences of their actions. Most people would feel bad after doing something bad to someone. If you cant understand this then there is a problem.
I'm just thinking do you have to be an ahole to be successful eg. despite the risks, think Jordan Belfort or the current "higher ups" raking in more money despite the effect on the world. Maybe I am trained to be poor is what I'm getting at because "I want to be nice".
So many grifts out there and people do it, sleep well at night. I'm not religious and think right/wrong is a concept/enforced by law. Sure I believe in pain, pain is universal/suffering. But yeah I just think I don't have it in me to be cut-throat, step on others.
I think it's often entirely reasonable to shed one's empathy for someone who displays no empathy for people like you. Tit-for-tat isn't always the best policy, but it's not psychopathic either.
A considerable portion of the AI-girl rhetoric quoted in the article is specifically denigrating liberals. It would be very generous and possibly laudable of liberals to nevertheless feel empathy for the people falling for it, but I think it's pretty understandable if most don't. And I'm not even convinced it's laudable; there's a particular tendency in US media discourse to assign moral responsibility to liberals, but not conservatives, so that liberals are supposed to empathize with MAGA voters and endeavor to understand their values but it's just normal and accepted that Republicans think liberal cities are hellholes that deserve to burn. This asymmetry isn't healthy, even if I'd rather it be resolved by a general increase in empathy than a decrease.
How about empathy for the other people they'll make miserable if you encourage their worldview , and maybe the people they'll make miserable if you further embitter them?
It's really not clear to me how MAGA people getting scammed will encourage their world view, or that there's meaningful room for further embittering them. Maybe, but perhaps they'll be discouraged! Or perhaps they'll have less money to give to actually sincere MAGA activists who will do something bad with it!
To be clear, I don't think the law should tolerate scams of this kind, or that policy should encourage them in any way. But empathy for the victims is an ask on top of policy, and "maybe there will be some bad indirect effects" is a weak argument for it.
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Stop using an LLM to write your posts.
Thank you for complementing my natural writing style!