I found it very hard to apply the golden rule as someone who was abused as a child. I don't care how I'm treated, so I can treat you in any way, however cruel.
By accident I discovered that if instead of imagining how you would feel if I did this bad thing to you, I imagined how the one person I loved would feel. Suddenly I had a working version of empathy, which I use to this day. I don't treat others as I would want to be treated - I treat them as I would want them to treat my loved one.
I do not know your circumstances, but see what you think of this:
I have a nascent theory about human feelings, which goes that the basic feelings we experience are usually perceived through extensive filtering by our personal, social, cultural, etc., beliefs/experiences. The convincing conscious perception of a feeling may be misinterpreted to an extent. Anger is an emotion that can often become misdirected. Supposedly, sexual arousal can be interpreted in translation from fear[0].
Someone who is suicidal may consider suicide seriously, but feel an urge to live in the process of suicide. Circumstance may make certain feelings clear, but by examining removed from circumstance, the person had the capacity for both feelings. There is some "essence" to the person that those feelings, brought on by circumstance, only scratch the surface of. Observing a narrow range of circumstances and assuming it is the essence is a mistake.
I think that more or less every person, in their essence, understands human decency. It may be that some people truly don't have the capacity to appreciate it (thought: aliens?), but usually, I think the real culprit is learned behavior through various factors, and innate cognitive biases. I don't mean to say that it is easy to change people, because the opposite is generally true, but I think it is worth thinking about.
That said, if there was someone who truly needed to, say, murder the way we need to eat, I say that they would do no wrong by murdering, but that we would do no wrong by apprehending them. I wish to get to people at their essences, not their accidents.
Felt bad hearing about your childhood but am really glad you found a way to get past it to start trusting people again. It must have been a difficult process for you but I am glad you shared your worldview with us - I find it more "selfless" than the golden rule.
is this a common problem? are software maintainers in the east sufficiently committed to racial superiority that they can't work with people in the west?
aren't we told all the time though, that a board of directors beholden to shareholders and a god given edict to make numbers go up are the only way to do things efficiently, to be lean and productive? are you telling me that when people find there's a need for something to happen, they make it happen? for the good of mankind? no billionaires?
it's literally the BS we're given for privatisation. Here in the UK, the train network is shittier than ever and there's no competition. the water companies are literally pouring shit into the sea while paying themselves billions in dividends and putting the companies in massive debt.
we were told the profit motive and competition would make them efficient.
I just find it odd that people would still defend them like this. They don't seem to realise you can buy boot polish in tins nowadays. but maybe they like the fresh taste of dirt on it.
Indeed, this was taught to me in the late-90s in A-level Economics as absolute undisputed fact. The path forward had become clear whereas it hadn't been understood previously. It annoys me now, looking back and knowing it's such an incredibly naive take on how capitalism works. Was it naivety on the part of the teacher, or propaganda slipped into the curriculum? I don't know.
A separate issue worth mentioning is that the water companies (as opposed to trains, gas, electricity, Royal Mail, etc) don't fall under this because they were privatised as regional monopolies. The government didn't even (pretend to) attempt to create competition.
They have! They're way more efficient at making their owners rich. Before, there was this whole "having to provide a service" thing that cost money and drove down the efficiency of moving money from the public to their wallets. Now, it's way better!
Claude code with opus is a completely different creature from aider with qwen on a 3090.
The latter writes code. the former solves problems with code, and keeps growing the codebase with new features. (until I lose control of the complexity and each subsequent call uses up more and more tokens)
Asserting that somebody is "victim blaming" isn't giving somebody the benifit of the doubt, and in the context of a scenario were few if any relevant facts are known reveals a very credulous mindset.
similarly, in the west, when your boss takes you to HR for an honest and open discussion, it's not really an honest and open discussion. normies know this instinctively. I didn't.
By accident I discovered that if instead of imagining how you would feel if I did this bad thing to you, I imagined how the one person I loved would feel. Suddenly I had a working version of empathy, which I use to this day. I don't treat others as I would want to be treated - I treat them as I would want them to treat my loved one.
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