Selective Empathy Quotes

In short, physicians are getting more and more data, which requires more sophisticated interpretation and which takes more time. AI is the solution, enhancing every stage of patient care from research and discovery to diagnosis and therapy selection. As a result, clinical practice will become more efficient, convenient, personalized, and effective.

Empathy is a tool for building people into groups, for allowing us to function as more than self-obsessed individuals.

Holden went to his bungalow and began to understand that he was not alone in the world, and also that he was afraid for the sake of another, -- which is the most soul-satisfying fear known to man.

How convenient it is to declare that everything is totally ugly within the habit of the époque, rather than applying oneself to extract from it the dark and cryptic beauty, however faint and invisible it is.

Humor is a developed sense, stemming basically from cruelty. The more primitive a mind, the less selectivity exists. … A man slips on a banana peel and breaks his back. The adult stops laughing at that point, the child does not. And a civilized ego finds embarrassment as acutely distressing as physical pain. A baby, a child, a moron is incapable of practicing empathy. He cannot identify himself with another individual. He is regrettably autistic; his own rules are arbitrary

Angel is responsible for all the AA prayers and mottoes. DON’T THINK AND DON’T DRINK. Angel put a cold wet one-sock on Tony’s head and knelt beside him. “Brother, believe me … I’ve been there … right down there in the gutter where you are. I know just how you feel.” Tony didn’t open his eyes. Anybody says he knows just how someone else feels is a fool.

Ideas, written ideas, are special. They are the way we transmit our stories and our ideas from one generation to the next. If we lose them, we lose our shared history. We lose much of what makes us human. And fiction gives us empathy: it puts us inside the minds of other people, gives us the gift of seeing the world through their eyes. Fiction is a lie that tells us true things, over and over.

Thinking of Macintosh's reaction to Veronica, Grant felt a wave of empathy. "Poor kid's going to be mooning like a puppy for a month. Did you have to smile at him?" "Really,Grant.He can't be more than fifteen." "Old enough to break out in a sweat," he commented. "Hormones," she murmured as she found Fairfield's sparse selection of wine. "They just need time to balance." Grant's gaze drifted down and focused as she bent over. "It should only take thirty or forty years," he muttered.

I worry that our nation today suffers from a deficit of empathy, and this is especially true of many in positions of national leadership. It is a phenomenon that is born from, and that exacerbates, the broader divisions tearing at our republic. We see a rising tribalism along cultural, ethnic, economic class, and geographic lines. And the responsibility for these divisions should fall more squarely on the shoulders of the powerful, those who need to be empathetic, than on those who need our empathy. When we live in a self-selected bubble of friends, neighbors, and colleagues, it is too easy to forget how important it is to try to walk in the shoes of others.

The thing about groupthink or social media bubbles is that they aggressively feed and amplify repetition. And repetition, however familiar and comforting, will never challenge us mentally, emotionally or behaviorally. Echoes simply reiterate what has already been said at some point in time, long gone. Like dead stars, they might seem to have a presence from a distance, but in truth, they are completely devoid of life and light. Echo chambers, therefore, severely limit the breadth and depth of the views we subject ourselves to, they ration knowledge. And, at the same time, they limit wisdom: wisdom which connects the mind and the heart, activates emotional intelligence, expands empathy and understanding, allows us to reach beyond the lonely confines of our own minds and engage with the rest of humanity, to listen to them and learn from them. To leave one echo chamber for another is not a solution either. We must strive to become intellectual nomads, keep moving, keep learning, resist confining ourselves in any cultural or mental ghetto, and spend more time not in select centers but at the margins, which is where real change always comes from.

But humans have been given the ability to think. That is what makes us learn and grow. It is also what gives us the knowledge that cooperation and understanding are necessary for our own survival, and that has led to empathy and compassion, but there’s another side to those kind of feelings. The empathy and compassion we feel for our own kind is sometimes extended to the rest of the living things on the earth. If we allowed it to keep us from killing a deer, or other animals, we would not live long. The desire to live is the stronger feeling, so we learn to be compassionate selectively. We find ways to close our minds. We limit our sense of empathy.

When you show deep empathy towards others that should amplify their positive energy. Try to share your soul but be selective because your soul cannot be shared with every soul you meet. Some will not understand or appreciate it.

They expected the crowd that had already gathered, golden in the torchlight of dawn. Some were tired. Some were smiling. The latter stunned Isaiah, but not Samuel. These were people after all. There was, therefore, some kind of happiness to be found in someone else being humiliated for once. Failure of memory prevented the empathy that should have been natural. Samuel knew, though, that it was selective memory, the kind that was cultivated here among the forget-me-nots.

A blind date is when well-meaning friends select two people from opposite ends of the earth, with as little in common as humanly possible, and lie to each of them about just how fabulous, interesting, normal, well adjusted, intelligent, and attractive the other half of the blind date is. Reality hits as they come through the door. You then pursue the same formula as on a regular date, hopefully in less time, and you pray that they wrote down your phone number wrong. After that you go home and cry, eventually laugh, and never speak to the friends who set you up again. And after you forget just how bad it was, you let the same friends, or others, do it to you again. With love and empathy. d.s.

But it is easy to be angry with the father, the judge, and the friend. It is also fitting, up to a point. Yet it would be a mistake to view them as on a different plane of moral obtuseness, as opposed to merely being on the extreme end of a himpathetic spectrum on which many of us lie. Brock Turner's defenders exhibited forgiving tendencies, and spun exonerating narratives, that are all too commonly extended to men in his position. And such tendencies seem largely from capacities and qualities of which we're rarely critical: such as sympathy, empathy, trust in one's friends, devotion to one's children, and having as much faith in someone's good character as is compatible with the evidence. These are all important capacities and qualities, all else being equal. But they can have a downside, when all else is not equal: for example, when social inequality remains widespread. Their naive deployment will tend to further privilege those already unjustly privileged over others. And this may come at the expense of unfairly impugning, blaming, shaming, further endangering, and erasing the less privileged among their victims. In some cases, the perpetrators, knowing this, select their victims on this basis.

Traveling on, the shaft of his light reached now a great, dully shining oblong, and he stopped, surprised. Then, through the glass sides, he saw bright shapes of fish wheel in schools down the opaque water, startled by the illumination. Coming at last, and so suddenly, on life like his own, Mr. Lecky moved closer. The fixed flood of his light enveloped these small fish dimly, glowed back on him. They came sliding, drifting, mouths in motion, gills rippling, up the light, against the glass. Their senseless round eyes stared at Mr. Lecky. Idling with great grace, the extravagant products of selective breeding - fringetails, Korean, calico - passed, swayed about, came languidly back. Moving faster, stub-finned, crop-tailed danios from the Malabar coast appeared, hovered, taking the light on their fat flanks, now spotted, now iridescent pearl or opal. Seeing so many of them, so eager and attentive, Mr. Lecky felt an unexpected compunction. He was their only proprietor; and soon, trapped unnaturally here in the big tank, they would starve to death. His light went back to a counter he had just passed, showing him again the half-noticed packages - food for birds and pet animals, food, too, for fish. Returning to the tank, his light found many of the fish still waiting, the rest rushing back. He went and took a package, tore the top off, and poured the contents onto the rectangle of open water. It would perhaps postpone the time when, having eaten each other, the sick remainder must die anyway.

numbing vulnerability is especially debilitating because it doesn’t just deaden the pain of our difficult experiences; numbing vulnerability also dulls our experiences of love, joy, belonging, creativity, and empathy. We can’t selectively numb emotion. Numb the dark and you numb the light.

Of course, to the Iranians, with a history spanning thousands of years, the events of 1953 were like yesterday, and the support the United States gave to the Shah and the SAVAK up until the bitter end in 1979 were even fresher wounds. This calls to mind the story about Chinese premier Zhou Enlai being asked by Richard Nixon in 1972 about the significance of the 1789 French Revolution, whereupon Enlai, also from a country with an ancient history, quipped, “too early to say.” In truth, the well-documented amnesia that Americans have about historic events is selective, with Americans usually able to remember the tragedies they have suffered and the crimes committed against them, like the attacks of September 11, 2001, or the bombing of Pearl Harbor in 1941. Of course, in all fairness, Americans are kept in the dark about the less savory episodes in our collective history by both our schools and our press. At the same time, it seems to me that in addition to a lack of knowledge is a lack of empathy for others’ suffering, as well as the complete refusal to accept the truth about the suffering our nation has inflicted on others even when we are told about it.

While the seven essential elements are a distillation of what we did on an everyday basis, they represent long-term discovery too. An important aspect of this book is the way we built our creative methods as a by-product of the work as we were doing it. As all of us pitched in to make our products, we developed our approach to creating great software. This was an evolution, an outgrowth of our deliberate attention to the task at hand while keeping our end goal in mind. We never waited around for brilliant flashes of insight that might solve problems in one swoop, and we had few actual Eureka! moments. Even in the two instances in my Apple career when I did experience a breakthrough—more about these later—there certainly was no nude streaking across the Apple campus like Archimedes supposedly did. Instead, we moved forward, as a group, in stepwise fashion, from problem to design to demo to shipping product, taking each promising concept and trying to come up with ways to make it better. We mixed together our seven essential elements, and we formulated “molecules” out of them, like mixing inspiration and decisiveness to create initial prototypes, or by combining collaboration, craft, and taste to give detailed feedback to a teammate, or when we blended diligence and empathy in our constant effort to make software people could use without pulling their hair out. As we did all this mixing and combining of our seven essential elements, we always added in a personal touch, a little piece of ourselves, an octessence, and by putting together our goals and ideas and efforts and elements and molecules and personal touches, we formed our approach, an approach I call creative selection.

Telling other people our life story changes us in a startling and profound way. The act of telling demands selection, prioritization, evaluation, and synthesis, which intellectual activities increase understanding, make us more sensitive to key distinctions in principles, and expand our empathy for other people.

Modern psychology and neuroscience fail to back these bleak views. We’re preprogrammed to reach out. Empathy is an automated response over which we have limited control. We can suppress it, mentally block it, or fail to act on it, but except for a tiny percentage of humans—known as psychopaths—no one is emotionally immune to another’s situation. The fundamental yet rarely asked question is: Why did natural selection design our brains so that we’re in tune with our fellow human beings, feeling distress at their distress and pleasure at their pleasure? If exploitation of others were all that mattered, evolution should never have gotten into the empathy business.

We are all the same underneath our clothes. Only our thoughts separate us.

the most meaningful rewards come when we decide to reframe a trauma as a lesson, when we forgive ourselves for a momentary lapse or awkwardness, when we choose to apply empathy to someone else’s suffering. At those moments—when we decide to deliberately select our mental habits—we receive the most profound kind of reward: the self-esteem delivered by becoming our best selves.

Author Joe Rigney has traced the movement in this term, empathy, and he suggests that while empathy certainly has a place in our lives, we all tend to use the term selectively.17 We empathize with perceived victims only. (Who, for example, wants to empathize with a murderer or rapist?) Selective empathy is one of the key contributors to tribalism and polarization. To Rigney, empathy is dangerous because if the highest form of love is standing in someone else’s shoes, no one is left standing in a place of objective truth. If someone is drowning in a river, jumping in with him may break up his loneliness, but having two drowned people produces an even greater problem. Sympathy allows someone to stand on the shore, on the solid ground of objective truth where real help might be found.

Our selectivity in who to care about makes a difference. About twenty years ago, Walter Isaacson expressed his frustration over the American public’s focus on the crisis in Somalia and relative disregard of the (objectively greater) tragedy in the Sudan, when he plaintively asked: “Will the world end up rescuing Somalia while ignoring the Sudan mainly because the former proves more photogenic?” Before

I have been selected to design and administer these unique initiatives because of my prior experience and effectiveness. Past success breeds repeat performances. … What is important are the personality and character traits needed to stand up to criticism and stress, and to labor effectively in a very emotional vineyard—empathy and sensitivity to the plight of those singled out for special consideration; confidence and firmness towards critics. I turn the other cheek when face-to-face with distraught victims or a businessman challenging my pay decisions. Life's unfairness is usually the real source of their anger. The nature of the compensation received is secondary. But a strategic retreat is not an option when critics attack. Self-confidence and firmness become virtues. You cannot allow yourself to be bullied when you are trying to administer a complex policy experiment. The public is usually supportive, appreciative of the difficulty of the task.

If you believe, God is the supreme creator of everything, then God is also the one who gave you a brain. Use it. Likewise, if you know that we have evolved from the apes through natural selection, then you should also know about the fascinating mental faculty we developed alongside reason, called empathy. Use it.

If you believe, God is the supreme creator of everything, then God is also the one who gave you a brain. Use it. Likewise, if you know that we have evolved from the apes through natural selection, then you should also know about the fascinating mental faculty we developed alongside reason, called empathy. Use it. Some might say, it is cowardly of me to not pick any side with confidence. Well, I am a behaviorist after all. You don't expect me to peddle the same old dualistic ideologies that philosophers and theologians have been peddling for centuries, do you - that too with a complete disregard for the necessities of the everyday mind! I want to induce integration in the world, not conversion. So I say, if you believe in God, make it a reason for assimilation, not segregation. If you prefer reason, use it for warm ascension, not cold and fancy descension.

Kegan spent three decades tracking this group,32 seeing what happened to their psychological maturity and capacity along the way. He discovered that while some adults remained frozen in time, a select few achieved meaningful growth. Right around middle age, for example, Kegan noticed that some people moved beyond generally well-adjusted adulthood, or what he called “Self-Authoring,” into a different stage entirely: “Self-Transforming.” Defined by heightened empathy, an expanded capacity to hold differing and even conflicting perspectives, and a general flexibility in how you think of yourself, self-transforming is the developmental stage we tend to associate with wisdom (and Roger Martin’s Opposable Mind). But not everyone gets to be wise. While it usually takes three to five years for adults to move through a given stage of development, Kegan found that the further you go up that pyramid, the fewer people make it to the next stage. The move from self-authoring to self-transforming for example? Fewer than 5 percent of us ever make that jump.

Poetry has a unique ability to distill complex emotions into a few lines, creating a powerful impact that lingers in the hearts of readers. As a poet, one learns to harness the potency of words, selecting them with precision to convey nuances and evoke empathy.

Society at a Crossroads: Diminished Empathy, Rising Crime, and Injustice In contemporary society, we bear witness to numerous changes shaping our everyday lives. However, one of the most concerning trends is the diminishing empathy and increasing crime across all spheres. As the world strives for material progress, it seems that values and ethical principles have yielded to the pursuit of success and wealth. Empathy, a key element of humanity, is becoming a rarity in today's society. Immersed in technological advancements and immersed in a virtual world, people are losing touch with real emotions and the need to understand the suffering of others. This attitude towards empathy reveals a profound crack in the fabric of society, leaving individuals vulnerable to various challenges without basic support. On the other hand, the growing crime in different domains poses tensions and threats to personal security. Not only is crime one of the biggest state and social problems, but it also fosters feelings of insecurity and fear among people. The roots of criminal behavior can be traced back to a lost sense of community and empathy, preventing many youths from taking the path of crime in their search for belonging and recognition. Furthermore, the race for material wealth has created a society where the value direction is lost. While economic progress is essential, it becomes evident that, at times, the price of success is paid with the loss of values and ethical standards. This orientation not only damages the individual but also the society as a whole. We live in a society where an ordinary person finds it challenging to obtain justice. Contradictions within the legal system and a lack of empathy among some institutional representatives often lead to injustice. Citizens become victims of their own systems, which should protect their rights. To escape this tragic situation, it is necessary to bring empathy and values back to the forefront. Education and awareness about the importance of empathy and values must be prioritized. Additionally, a reassessment of the legal system is crucial to ensure that it functions in the service of justice rather than benefiting a select few. If society does not turn towards the ideals of empathy, selflessness, and respect for values, the danger of descending into complete chaos and injustice will increase. Only by rejuvenating the spirit of empathy and humanity can we avoid a path where crime and injustice prevail, leaving the common people struggling to obtain their justice.

Recognizing the problem, some secularists are searching for ways to salvage an objective status for morality. The favored strategy is to invoke evolutionary psychology. Hardly a week goes by without an article appearing in the popular press claiming that natural selection has explained the origin of this or that moral trait. Typically the argument goes something like this: You Christians claim that it is impossible to have morality without God. Well, we’ve solved that problem. Evolutionary forces can produce empathy, cooperation, mutual aid, and all the other forms of social bonding. These behaviors are selected for because they help secure genetic fitness and promote survival. Voilá, evolution becomes the basis for moral realism. And evolutionary biologists become the new priests. As a New York Times article says, if “morality grew out of behavioral rules shaped by evolution,” then “it is for biologists, not philosophers or theologians, to say what these rules are.”40 But

In the first of these- the natural world- I felt at ease; nature was full of beauty and interest and mystery, also good and bad luck, but never misuse. The second world- the world of literature- offered me, besides the pleasures of form, the sustentation of empathy (the first step of what Keats called negative capability) and I ran for it. I relaxed in it. I stood willingly and gladly in the characters of everything- other people, trees, clouds.

We live in the Age of Spectacle. Spectacle promises to engage us, to mediate between us and objective reality in nonjudgmental ways. Very like the promise of nuclear energy: to be safe, clean, and cheap, but turned out to be dangerous, dirty (contaminated), and expensive. The promise made by the spectacle has been forfeited. Not only are we not engaged, we are profoundly distanced—unable to discriminate, edit, or measure shock or empathy. The “regime of visual authority [is a] coercive organization of images according to a stopwatch” and passes its organization off to us as a simulacrum of the real.

I am suggesting that we pay as much attention to our nurturing sensibilities as to our ambition. You are moving in the direction of freedom, and the function of freedom is to free somebody else. You are moving toward self-fulfillment, and the consequences of that fulfillment should be to discover that there is something just as important as you are.

I have identified seven elements essential to Apple’s software success: Inspiration: Thinking big ideas and imagining what might be possible Collaboration: Working together well with other people and seeking to combine your complementary strengths Craft: Applying skill to achieve high-quality results and always striving to do better Diligence: Doing the necessary grunt work and never resorting to shortcuts or half measures Decisiveness: Making tough choices and refusing to delay or procrastinate Taste: Developing a refined sense of judgment and finding the balance that produces a pleasing and integrated whole Empathy: Trying to see the world from other people’s perspectives and creating work that fits into their lives and adapts to their needs There weren’t any company handbooks describing these elements. Nobody outlined this list in a new-employee orientation. There weren’t any signs affixed to the walls of our Cupertino campus exhorting us to “Collaborate!” On the contrary, we felt, on an instinctive level, that imposing a fixed methodology might snuff out the innovation we were seeking. Therefore, our approach flowed from the work. This happened from the top down, stemming from the unquestioned authority and uncompromising vision of Steve Jobs, and it happened from the ground up, through the daily efforts of designers and programmers you’ve never heard of, people like me and my colleagues, some of whom I’ll tell you about.

Natural selection may be selfish (in a metaphorical sense), but if so, it's selfish about genes, not individuals. The story goes that J. B. S. Haldane was asked if he would give his life to save his brother and he said he wouldn't, but he would happily do so for two brothers or eight cousins. Only a biologist would say something like that, but Haldane was nicely expressing how evolution works.

By having a clear strategy that is shared throughout your team, you will be better able to orient your selections and apply your resources.

Inspiration: Thinking big ideas and imagining what might be possible Collaboration: Working together well with other people and seeking to combine your complementary strengths Craft: Applying skill to achieve high-quality results and always striving to do better Diligence: Doing the necessary grunt work and never resorting to shortcuts or half measures Decisiveness: Making tough choices and refusing to delay or procrastinate Taste: Developing a refined sense of judgment and finding the balance that produces a pleasing and integrated whole Empathy: Trying to see the world from other people’s perspectives and creating work that fits into their lives and adapts to their needs

In his book-length review of the executive functions, Dr. Russell Barkley (2012) explored the reasons that these skills evolved in humans in the first place. He makes the compelling case that it was the selection pressures associated with humans living in larger groups of genetically unrelated individuals, which made it selectively advantageous to have good self-regulation skills. That is, these abilities became more important to survival as humans became more interdependent with and reliant on dealings with people who were not family. Attention-Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD) and executive dysfunction continue to have effects on the myriad relationships and social interactions in daily life. These connections include romantic and committed relationships/marriage, relationships with parents, siblings, children, and other relatives, friendships, and interactions with employers, coworkers, and customers. The executive functions in relationships also figure in the capacity for empathy and tracking social debt, that is, the balance of favors you owe others and favors owed to you. The ability to effectively organize behavior across time in goal-directed activities gains you “social collateral.” That is, the more you deliver on promises and projects, the more that you will be sought out by others and maintain bonds with them. Some of the common manifestations of ADHD and executive dysfunction that may create problems in relationships include: • Distractibility during conversations • Forgetfulness about matters relevant to another person • Verbal impulsivity—talking over someone else • Verbal impulsivity—saying the “wrong thing” • Breaking promises (acts of commission, e.g., making an expensive purchase despite agreeing to stay within a household budget) • Poor follow-through on promises (acts of omission, e.g., forget to pick up dry cleaning) • Disregarding the effects of one’s behavior on others (e.g., building up excessive debt on a shared credit card account) • Poor frustration tolerance, anger (e.g., overreacting to children’s behavior) • Lying to cover up mistakes • Impulsive behaviors that reduce trust (e.g., romantic infidelity)

We could have chosen any key arrangement we wanted for Purple, and perhaps we missed a golden opportunity at the advent of touchscreen typing. We could have banished QWERTY forever. Yet this assumes QWERTY is bad. It isn’t, and the reasons have to do with how taste and empathy combine with craft to make a technology like a software keyboard.

popularity doesn’t equal excellence. A better justification is that people can type on a smartphone QWERTY keyboard without thinking about it. The keyboard can melt away, it can recede, and when it does, it leaves a space for what people really care about. A properly judged mixture of taste and empathy is the secret formula for making products that are intuitive, easy to use, and easy to live with.

A small group of passionate, talented, imaginative, ingenious, ever-curious people built a work culture based on applying their inspiration and collaboration with diligence, craft, decisiveness, taste, and empathy and, through a lengthy progression of demo-feedback sessions, repeatedly tuned and optimized heuristics and algorithms, persisted through doubts and setbacks, selected the most promising bits of progress at every step, all with the goal of creating the best products possible.