people who are aggressively empathetic turn out to be weirdly bad at clocking people’s motivations

it’s like the gimmes (sad person is sad) give them a false sense of clairvoyance (person who gave me weird look hates me)

see also correlation between empathy and magical thinking. same deal.

Design and software at Apple. Also into AI, philosophy of mind, ethics.

I wonder if some people who seem very empathetic might just be projecting aspects of their own emotional state onto others.

more generally, people that are good at pattern matching tend to find patterns where there are none. 

others can take advantage of them by faking patterns

e.g. smart people often succumb to conspiracy theories