Potential downsides of understanding people’s motivations to do “bad” things (however you define “bad”):
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Alternatively: what are the advantages of understanding people’s motivations to do bad things, which are big enough to outweigh the risk of cynicism, guilt, social contagion, etc?
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the concern about "too much empathy" / "not enough self-righteousness" makes sense if that impulse is something you rely on. a lot of the other costs seem already baked in; you're paying the cost whether you consciously understand the motivation or not
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eg, - shouldn't you suspect that you're already acting out of those low motives if you aren't conscious of them? - your "elephant" is highly evolved to sniff out base motives in other people and react against them, isn't it better to be aware that that's what it's doing?
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I find that a lot of times when people do to-me-incomprehensibly bad things their motivations aren't necessarily "low"!
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Ooh that’s a good one. Big if true.
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N=1: - I'm terrible at intuiting people. Being cynical gives me hope that people can be understood with system-2 and this understanding trained/practiced into a semblance of normality. - I strongly firewall "causal reason" and "moral justification" for exactly this reason.
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