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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   4039 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for March 26, 2023

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What should I know about the genetics of empathy especially in regards to racial differences and the development of nations? If empathy is genetic, should this be as important as a metric to look at as IQ?

There is a fundamental difference between empathy induced by direct stimulus + perceived closeness vs empathy induced by "aBsTrAcT" thoughts

Besides those two categories, the third component is that empathy can be also purely semantic, devoid of emotion.

See e.g. this partial example https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hierarchy_of_death

Gender studies have also found a consistent deficit of empathy from both men and women towards men

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Women-are-wonderful_effect

As for the pharmacology of empathy I am not well versed. Oxytocin has complex and paradoxical and hormesistic effects IIRC.

Some neurosteroids are relevant too and therefore maybe etifoxine.

As for the neural basis

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mirror_neuron are the most famous component but only? apply for the first category of empathy I defined. I don't know what are the others.

Also there is a whole class of recreational drugs called empathogens, such as GHB and MDMA and therefore serotonin and VGCC channels are relevant.

The thing is most people stereotypically seen as good empaths are from the first category, which is often useless. People are extremely defficient in the two latters categories and that explain why most humans are locally behaving as psychopaths.

Read Joseph Heinrich's "The WEIRDest people in the world". It explains a lot of of the non-intelligence related reasons that humans differ in their cognition.

(full disclosure: I haven't actually read the book yet myself. It's working its way to the top of my reading list)

I’ve read it. Henrich writes a lot of plausible things- and can draw some support for most of them- but he very definitely avoids anything which would pit his cultural hypothesis against genetics hypotheses.

Also I really don't care for the audiobook narrator. Quite a mismatch.

That's Henrich

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