My interest was piqued by the "Alt Right" reference, as I have a very old friend that seems to have gone down this road and it's very disturbing to me, but I wanted to comment on a few things: Empathy-as I understand it, there are TWO kinds- affective and cognitive. Affective empathy is when you have an understanding of how someone feels (and perhaps share pain or feel guilt), and cognitive empathy is when you understand someone's actions and intent. Sociopaths are thought to lack affective empathy, and Aspies tend to lack cognitive empathy. Secondly, I was impressed by the length and depth of your posts (this is not meant sarcastically). As I tend to write textbook length posts on FB, I felt quite among my ilk. I am often accused of overthinking things, and perhaps this too is an Aspie trait. Logic can be our friend or our foe, and in my Alt Right friend I see a misuse of logic. When we start turning everything into equations we run the danger of confusing symbols with reality (what IS reality is a topic that philosophers have been arguing about for millennia), and if we happen to get one of our initial suppositions wrong, we can be led down a whole line of erroneous thought. Our brains evolved to interpret the universe in a relatively limited number of ways. My cat can see in the ultraviolet light range and my dog has a sense of smell a million times more powerful than mine, and I've read that there may be eleven dimensions-but our brains aren't designed to experience them. The best advice anyone ever gave me was to ask myself, "Would I rather be right- or be healthy." Your life will be smoother if you try to learn how to treat people how they want to be treated -it's something I have to work on all the time, and it doesn't come easily because of my cognitive empathy deficit. Neil DeGrasse Tyson said something to the effect of, "The difference between science and religion is that when we get new data we're willing to change our beliefs." We all start with assumptions-I assume when I go out the door I'm not going to be eaten by a T-rex, or I probably wouldn't go out the door (or rather, that's not why I don't leave the house). The science and data behind anthropogenic climate change is not nearly as complex nor unlikely as you'd think. What is unlikely is that 98% of the world's scientists would conspire to punk the rest of us. And THAT is where conspiracy theories fall apart. If you've ever worked in an organization of any size, you'll see that people can't even do the things (or keep the secrets) they're paid to do.
20 Sep 2016, 9:36 am
