Terrorism and the Weaponization of Empathy

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An interesting article by neuroscientist Orli Peter:

Across the Middle East, militant groups from Hamas to the Syrian rebels orchestrate calculated psychological operations. Seen from a clinical point of view, they demonstrate exceptional skills in cognitive empathy, which they use to manipulate our emotions.

Cognitive empathy is the ability to accurately understand and model the thoughts, feelings and values of others. It’s like hacking into someone else’s algorithm for how they think and feel, enabling you to predict their reactions to your actions. On the other hand, emotional empathy – what the West excessively values – is the ability to feel what you believe the other person is experiencing.

Cognitive empathy takes effort to construct, whereas emotional empathy is involuntary. Anti-Israel militants have been able to turbo-charge their propaganda by using their cognitive empathy to manipulate Westerner’s emotional empathy.

Using cognitive empathy, militants have learnt to present their cause as aligned with Western humanitarian values, carefully curating their image as champions of freedom and justice. This dynamic is rooted in asymmetrical power relationships, where weaker groups often develop a detailed understanding of powerful parties, using cognitive empathy to identify and press the psychological buttons that influence those in power. These terrorists often possess a stronger cognitive grasp of Western psychology than Westerners understand jihadi psychology.

I think there is a lot of truth in this. However, many of those who project sympathy for the jihadis are not doing so because they have emotional empathy, but because they want to be believed to have emotional empathy.  This is particularly the case, I think, in the case of media people and academics.

Also, empathy toward one group of people can serve as a self-justification for the unwholesome pleasures of cruelty–direct or vicarious–toward another group of people. See my post Conformity, Cruelty, and Political Activism. This phenomenon is particularly evident in the anti-Semitic behavior which is being justified by claims of empathy toward people in Gaza.

I remember something Chesterton said:  ”

The modern world is not evil; in some ways the modern world is far too good. It is full of wild and wasted virtues. When a religious scheme is shattered (as Christianity was shattered at the Reformation), it is not merely the vices that are let loose. The vices are, indeed, let loose, and they wander and do damage. But the virtues are let loose also; and the virtues wander more wildly, and the virtues do more terrible damage. The modern world is full of the old Christian virtues gone mad. The virtues have gone mad because they have been isolated from each other and are wandering alone. Thus some scientists care for truth; and their truth is pitiless. Thus some humanitarians only care for pity; and their pity (I am sorry to say) is often untruthful.

There is today way too much latching onto pity toward a socially-acceptable set of designated victims and closing of minds toward the facts of the case (Chesterton’s “untruthfulness”)….and closing of hearts toward other groups of people who are being harmed by the policies purportedly intended to protect those designated victims.

The distinction among cognitive empathy, emotional empathy, and pretended emotional empathy is an important one. 

Reaching for the Alien Shore

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So, about those drones. Treating the current social contagion as a subset of the ongoing “UAP” fad, how are we to evaluate the obsession with extraterrestrial aliens? Lest my output appear misleadingly prodigious, I wrote most of what follows in late summer 2023 and have modestly updated it for our situation as of (very) late autumn 2024. The organization of this post is an attempt at a hierarchy from most immediate/local to greatest space/time extent.

NOTICE! In compliance with the Manifoldian Transparency Pledge of 2024, which I just thought up:

  • this thing runs > 8k words, reading time potentially exceeds 30 minutes, and that doesn’t account for
  • lots of math and possible inducement to wander off down various rabbit trails invoked thereby (besides the homework/syllabus assignments), which you may or may not regard as part of the fun; and
  • not to overlook the obvious, I will address the concomitant obsession with foreign infiltration, and OCD contamination phobia in general, in at least one separate post.

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The FBI, Politics, and the Administrative State

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Timothy Carney writes:

”While President-elect Donald Trump drives out FBI Director Christopher Wray, Trump’s critics have taken to the airwaves, suggesting that the federal law enforcement agency should be beyond the reach of politicians. They posit a fourth branch of government outside of the executive branch and lean on the idea of a 10-year term for the director to suggest the bureau has always and should be run immune to the demands of elected officials.”

Reading this, two things come to mind.

In regard to politics…

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Economic Development: From the Roof, or From the Foundations?

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An interesting thread by Kamil Galeev:

Why the USSR failed? There are two ways for a poor, underdeveloped country to industrialise: Soviet vs Chinese way. Soviet way is to build the edifice of industrial economy from the foundations. Chinese way is to build it from the roof. 1st way sounds good, 2nd actually works.

To proceed further, I need to introduce a new concept. Let’s divide the manufacturing industry into two unequal sectors, Front End vs Back End: Front End – they make whatever you see on the supermarket shelf Back End – they make whatever that stands behind, that you don’t see
Front End industries are making consumer goods. That is, whatever you buy, as an individual. Toys, clothes, furniture, appliances all falls under this category. The list of top selling amazon products gives a not bad idea what the front end sector is, and how it looks like.
Still, the production of ready consumer goods comprises only the final, ultimate element of manufacturing chain. The rear part of the chain remains hidden from our sight. We call it the Back End Back end products are not recognisable. You never bought an SMX 700 radial forge.

Read the whole thing.

I’m reminded of something Peter Drucker wrote in 1969:

In any aid program, the economist, especially the development economist employed by government, tends to impose his own values on the choice of priorities and projects. Understandably he likes things that look big, impressive, and “advanced”: a petrochemical plant, for instance. He likes the things he knows the poor “ought” to have. He has nothing but contempt for the “frivolous,” e.g., small luxuries. In this respect there is amazingly little difference between the Russian planners and the economists in the governments of the most “capitalist” nation.

The factory girl or the salesgirl in Lima or Bombay (or the Harlem ghetto) wants a lipstick. She lives in a horrible slum and knows perfectly well that she cannot, in her lifetime, afford the kind of house she would like to live in—the kind of house her counterpart in the rich countries (or the white suburbs) can afford. She knows perfectly well that neither she nor her brothers can get the kind of education they would like to have. She probably knows perfectly well that—if lucky—she will marry some boy as poor as herself and as little educated who, within a few years, \vill start beating her out of sheer despair. But at least she can, for a few short years, try to look like the kind of human being she wants to be, respects, and knows she ought to be. There is no purchase that gives her as much true value for a few cents as cheap cosmetics.

A cosmetics plant gives more employment per dollar of investment than a petrochemical plant. It trains more people capable of developing and running a modem economy. It generates managers, technicians, and salesmen. Yet the economist despises it. And the reliance on aid makes it possible for his moralism to prevail over economics and for his desire for control to prevent development.

(The Age of Discontinuity)

Of course Drucker understood the importance of the petrochemical plant; his argument is that things work better when the petrochemical plants are called forth by the cosmetics factories and other consumer-facing businesses, rather than planned from the top.

I don’t think the above points just apply to poor & undeveloped nations.  In the US, the development of the computer and semiconductor industries benefited greatly from the sales volumes and technical challenges created by the computer game field…which is not the kind of thing that a central planner would be likely to earmark as a critical industry for the future.

In a market economy, ‘industrial policy’ intended to spur vital industries via subsidies and tax incentives will often seem to make sense–the US certainly does need it own ability to produce high-end chips, for example–but carries the danger of starving other industries of investment dollars and talent. And some of those industries may turn out to have been just as critical, or more critical, than the ones focused on by the industrial policymakers.

The Inconvenient Man

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Anybody here remember the name Nicholas Roske?

Probably not.

If you don’t that’s okay because there are a lot of people, especially right now, who wish you didn’t.

However, you do know the name of the killer of Brian Thompson.

I am not going to use that murdering sc*mbag’s name here. You can find it easily enough. There are millions of people treating him as a modern-day Robin Hood or (if they weren’t so ignorant of their cultural patrimony) an avenging angel. I shouldn’t say that about ignorance because you can actually purchase merchandise depicting the man as a saint. Just in time for Christmas…. or the Holidays…. or WinterFest or whatever they are calling it this year

Well, for now, regarding the merchandise because it seems Etsy is pulling this stuff down off their site as fast as it goes up. The other day there were multiple pages of stuff there for sale so maybe there is still hope for decency. Then again, there is always the possibility of our friends at places like Target stepping up — they haven’t forsaken the high holies of DEI yet, and open enrollment does run through Jan. 15.

So back to Nicholas Roske.

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