EA - Strange Love - Developing Empathy With Intention (or: How I Learned To Stop Calculating And Love The Cause) by EdoArad

Link to original articleWelcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is: Strange Love - Developing Empathy With Intention (or: How I Learned To Stop Calculating And Love The Cause), published by EdoArad on October 1, 2022 on The Effective Altruism Forum. Tl;dr: if you are intellectually convinced that a cause is important, but you don’t emotionally empathize with the people or animals affected, you can develop this emotional empathy intentionally. When Andrés Jiménez Zorrilla first heard that Charity Entrepreneurship wanted to incubate a charity devoted to shrimp welfare, he was pretty sceptical. He’d cared about animal rights for a long time, but this still seemed like a deeply weird idea. However, over the course of the CE incubation program, he learnt some things which shifted his perspective. He discovered that 350 billion shrimp per year are farmed for food. Even if there was only a tiny chance that shrimp are sentient, astronomical numbers like that meant that he should take the issue seriously. Andrés gradually became intellectually convinced that shrimp welfare could be a very important cause, but he was not yet emotionally invested. He decided that it was important to emotionally connect to the cause. When covid lockdowns lifted, he went to visit a shrimp farm and actually witness the beings he would be helping, an experience that he found extremely powerful. He now runs the Shrimp Welfare Project. He says that he feels deep empathy for shrimp, as well as being intellectually convinced that it is important to improve their welfare. He even has a shrimp tattoo on his arm! EAs sometimes say that they feel intellectually compelled by the arguments that they should care about the suffering of non-human animals, future people, digital beings, or some other group of sentients who are outside of our typical moral circle, but they struggle to have emotional empathy for the suffering of this group. However, in my experience, this is not a fixed fact about a person - you can work to develop empathy for beings who are very different to you, or distant from you in time or space. In this post, we offer some advice on how to do this. Why should I develop more empathy? It’s not necessarily a problem to have a mismatch between your beliefs and your emotions. In Radical Empathy, Holden Karnofsky suggests that we should care intellectually about many beings and causes that we don’t care about emotionally. The opposite is also true - in his book Against Empathy, Paul Bloom argues that our intuitive emotional caring might lead to bad choices. EAs are generally somewhat suspicious of ‘warm fuzzies’, and it’s a central aspect of EA that we should be guided more by our brains than our guts when it comes to altruism. However, there are some reasons why people might want their empathy to match their beliefs: Congruence: it’s easier to decide what to do if our emotional intuitions and our considered beliefs line up. When they conflict, we are more unsure about how to act, or how to think about unfamiliar scenarios. Motivation: you might feel unmotivated to work on the causes you care about if you don’t feel enough empathy for beings who benefit Understanding other EAs: even if you don’t want to work on (for example) ending insect suffering yourself, developing some empathy for insects might help you better understand people who do This post is about aligning our intuitive emotional empathy with our cognitive, intellectual empathy. How can I develop more empathy? Here are some suggestions for how to develop empathy. In general, detailed knowledge creates empathy (particularly for people who are already empathetic by nature). If you want to empathize with a certain type of being, try to find out more about their lives and their troubles, or imagine in detail what it’s like to be them. Learn more about the beings you want to empathize with 🦐 When I (Edo) hea...