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Smartphones Destroy Empathy
When I’m at a social event, I never tell anyone I’m a doctor, because I don’t want to talk about medicine when I’m trying to relax. But we went to a party last night in our neighborhood here in Hilton Head, and all our friends of course know what I do for a living. So Mrs. Jones comes up to me and says she hurt her shoulder, and it’s not getting better, and what should she do about it? I couldn’t just glare at her and leave, because I was in her house drinking her Scotch. So I politely listened to her complaints.
But I didn’t answer. I just pointed across the room: “Why don’t you go ask Bob? He’s an orthopedic surgeon. Surely he’d know more about this than me. I’m just a humble primary care doc.” Her face lit up, she thanked me, and she hustled right over to Bob, who had been enjoying her Scotch until that moment. She started talking to him, he smiled at her, and then he looked across the room at me and gave me the stink eye. I smiled and raised my glass to him. I’m a giver.
There are a few reasons I deferred. First of all, I really try to avoid giving medical advice to people who aren’t my patients. I don’t know the case, I don’t know the background – that’s an easy way to say something stupid. Second, it’s true, Bob would know more about this than me. As it happens, her condition is one with which I have a lot of experience, and I probably could have answered her question. But Bob is obviously more qualified. And the third reason is that I try to avoid looking like a fool. What if I answer, then she asks Bob, he gives a different answer, and I look like a fool? No. I try to avoid looking like a fool. But then Tom came over, struck up a conversation with me, and proved that not everyone tries to avoid looking like a fool.
Tom is an airline pilot who has developed an interest in nutritional supplements, essential oils, acupuncture, and God knows what else. At a party last year, he said that curing MS was easy by altering your diet and taking high dose vitamins or something, and that doctors knew this, and that they refused to use this cure because they couldn’t profit from it.
So, I inferred, apparently my job is to earn money by intentionally killing people.
I blew up in his face. Great entertainment for everyone. My wife guided me out the door. Forcefully. Holy crap I was angry.
I apologized to him the next time I saw him. I don’t think he recognized what a profound insult that was to someone like me, who believes that he serves God by devoting his life to healing the sick. Or at least doing the very best I can. Tom was just chatting about his hobby. To me, this is no hobby.
So I made nice, and we moved on.
On the other hand, the only way that Tom would not recognize what a profound insult that would be to me is that he lacks empathy. He can’t see things from anyone’s perspective other than his own, so he didn’t realize that what seemed like a casual statement to him would come across as a vicious attack to me. I’m sure he was surprised when I jumped down his throat.
If you lack empathy, other people become mysterious creatures. ‘What’s wrong with these people? Can’t they see the truth?’
Anyway, so Tom sits down next to me last night. I immediately start saying to myself, over and over, “…don’tsayanythingdon’tsayanythingdon’tsayanything…” as Tom starts to talk.
He talked about COVID. Now, if someone is a big enough conspiracy theorist to honestly believe that doctors are intentionally killing MS patients for profit, you can imagine what he thinks of the COVID mess. He’s an anti-vaxxer, and he spent 30 minutes telling me the dangers of the COVID vaccines.
Now, these vaccines are new, and perhaps we’ll discover problems as we go forward. I think they’re probably a good idea, but honestly I’m not really sure yet. Just like on most other topics, the more I read the less I know for sure. And I’ve read a lot on this topic. It’s just too soon to say. I think it will be years before we really know if the vaccines were a good idea. I think they are. Probably. But we’ll see…
Which brings me back to my conversation with the lady with the bad shoulder. I was reluctant to answer her question, because I knew there was someone in the room that knew more about it than me, and if he somehow became involved in our conversation, I might look stupid. So I shut my trap and deferred to the guy who has spent his life studying the question at hand.
That was not Tom’s approach last night. He sat right down next to someone who he knows does this for a living, and gives a 30-minute dissertation on something that he knows very little about. An amateur telling an expert how to do his job. And he seemed perfectly comfortable doing so. Tom did not ask me a single question. He lectured me. About my field. He wasn’t concerned about me publicly pointing out that he was wrong. Because he knew he wasn’t wrong. He believes.
Or, perhaps, he lacks sufficient empathy to understand that there may be perspectives other than his own which may have some validity.
It would be like me telling him how to fly a plane. Ok, maybe I’ve flown a Cessna before. Maybe I read about aviation as a hobby. But he flies passenger jets for a living. Why would I try to tell him how to fly a plane? Why would that thought even cross my mind? “You know what I’m going to do at this party? I’m going to go over there and tell that pilot how to fly a plane. This should be fun!”
Why would I do that?
As I sat there trying to be nice, it occurred to me that Tom wasn’t exactly lecturing to me. He was preaching. He was preaching with the confidence of someone preaching to the choir. Because in his world, everyone is in the choir. They all believe. Which got me to thinking about smartphones and social media.
Tom may have been the only one in the room last year that actually believed that doctors intentionally kill people for profit. And he was probably surprised that I reacted to his casual comment with such hostility.
He was surprised because he hangs out on websites that confirm his biases. He’s the only one in the room who thinks that, but he can pull out his iPhone and instantly connect with a virtual room full of like-minded individuals. And that’s where he lives. So his occasional excursions out into the real world probably feel sort of odd. ‘What’s wrong with these people? Can’t they see the truth?’
Politics is getting more and more tribal and hostile because we’re no longer fellow Americans discussing tax policy or immigration laws or something. We identify more and more with smaller and smaller subgroups online to such an extent that we’re losing the ability to communicate, and more importantly to empathize, with nearly anyone else.
So every debate just turns into a shouting match. Even if it’s about something as boring as scientific research.
I’m convinced that Tom is a nice person, and he means well. He’s just so far down some rabbit hole that he can’t even see out anymore. That describes a lot of Americans, these days.
We’re losing the ability to see things from the perspective of others. We’re losing empathy.
Is it possible that smartphones are destroying our society by destroying our empathy? What if that’s true? What should we do?
I love my smartphone. I really do. But I’m starting to think they’re dangerous.
Published in General
Do doctors use drugs more than diet and lifestyle changes? Of course. Because nobody ever actually does diet and lifestyle changes.
And then we start the drug in 3 months. Every dang time.
I don’t criticize – I struggle with my weight too.
About two years ago I had a guy decline cholesterol and BP meds, because he was about to lose some weight. I said fine. We discussed diet and exercise, like I always do. But then this crazy dude went out and lost weight & got in shape. His BP and labs normalized. Like freakin’ magic. So I didn’t use the drugs in his case. It was amazing.
So it happens.
But not usually.
And to answer your question that I bolded above, I don’t think Big Pharma plays a significant role in our propensity for unhealthy lifestyles. Maybe you could blame video game companies, book publishers, Hollywood, and other industries that encourage us to sit on our butts. But I’m not even sure about that. It was my choice to read an entire book last weekend…
The other problem is that if you lower cholesterol with drugs in some people, and you lower cholesterol with diet and exercise in other people, the people on drugs live longer, have fewer heart attacks and strokes, need less nursing home time (due to less strokes), and so on. There’s more to it than cholesterol. And these drugs have other mechanisms that prolong life & prevent disability besides their impact on cholesterol.
It’s really complicated stuff…
Great, so now my profession is killing people. 😉
Thanks for the insight.
Barry conveniently neglects reality in favor of the day’s theme. 18 trillion since the 1960s sounds like a sh*t ton of empathy to me.
But Randy Webster + Concretevol + bourbon = endless laugh-out-loud client stories.
How many people have to die before we require masks and ban books?!?
The problem, of course, is that a lot of things are bad for us. In excess, at least.
A sedentary lifestyle is a real problem today (he types on his laptop, while sitting on his couch).
So is fast food, the entertainment industry, the internet, and God knows what else.
But I like all those things. It’s tricky. I don’t intend to give up books. I like to sit around and read. Heck, I don’t intend to give up fast food.
Americans have the longest lifespan on the planet, and our lifestyle stinks. We’re overweight, we eat junk, and we don’t move. And we have the longest lifespan on the planet (if one ignores inner city gun violence).
So maybe I’m making too big a deal out of weight and exercise and so on. We seem to do fine. Maybe it doesn’t matter as much as it seems like it ought to.
Which makes no sense to me. Of course, there are lots of factors. It’s complicated.
But I don’t understand.
My insight is that I have no idea how any of this works.
You’re welcome! Happy to help!
I don’t think smartphones are the culprit. It’s more of a natural evolution of the culture.
History shows that all cultures go through these phases where comity wanes and groups are increasingly at loggerheads over intractable issues. The US did this once before over slavery, and we ended up with a Civil War. That wasn’t because Lincoln was on a smartphone all the time. (He did hang out at the telegraph office a lot, though.)
Societies have to repeatedly teach themselves that issues don’t matter enough to tear everything apart, usually by having gone through a period where everything was torn apart. And then it’s a lesson people take to heart until the next time.
Some of what you say here is what prompted my comment #85. It seems as if making good economic decisions on the price and quality of goods and services gets much more difficult as the amount of unreliable information increases.
There was a longevity study I once read about on the Internet [ :-) ] in which the researchers learned that the number of close relationships a person had was the most significant factor in longevity. Intuitively, that finding makes sense.
So Ricochet is good for us. :-)
What’s your assessment of the quality of decisions ordinary customers make in purchasing concrete, not those with expertise in purchasing concrete?
You need energy to gain energy. You need money to make money. Life is easier in momentum. At the start, it’s an uphill battle. Maybe tomorrow.
From 1942’s “The Magnificent Ambersons:” “The only public advance was the street car. A lady could whistle to it from an upstairs window and the car would hold at once and wait for her while she shut her window, put on her hat and coat, went downstairs, found an umbrella, told the girl what to have for dinner, and came forth from the house. Too slow for us nowadays, because the faster we are carried the less time we have to spare.”
Our last house (the log cabin I’ve shown in some of my pictures) was like that. I used concrete forms for the basement – 3″ of Styrofoam on each side, with 8″ of concrete in the middle with rebar the size of your thumb laid out in a web with 6″ centers.
If I ever build another house (Lord help me…), I will build the whole house like that. It’s fantastic.
As long as you never need to modify it. Try adding an outdoor spigot (which I did) – good heavens…
Quoting Pascal:
“All of humanity’s problems stem from man’s inability to sit quietly in a room alone.”
Sorry. Smart phones fall under Emergency Use Authorizations, so no long-term testing is required.
ka-POW!
OK, I think a part of this would be when goods or services are produced and delivered wholly by those with lots of money, those with lots of money have no clue regarding the pricing experience of the people. Remember the story about George H.W. Bush purchasing a loaf of bread at the supermarket.
My favorite.
99.99999% of all “problems” could be solved by telling someone, “It’s none of Yer damn business.”
@randywebster
Why not?
No hammer drill? A champion among hand-held
power toolstoys for grown men.I cancelled a service this morning. They wouldn’t let me complete the process without telling them why.
That is precisely the reason I gave.
I used to do estimating for a defense contractor. When the margins for your contract are in the 8-10% range, and if your costs exceed the estimate, you eat them, well, a serious amount of time and effort goes into getting the estimate right.
Facts:
You have labor charging history, for types of work on certain projects, or in ongoing operations.
You have buy history for materials of any and all kinds.
You have overheads or ways to calculate them consistently (often as a percentage of labor or overall cost)
So – with the right tools, and they are out there, you can put all those cost elements together into a pricing tool and kick out something that’s really, really accurate. What you can’t do is know what happens tomorrow, and the terms of the contracts for all your subcomponents could be all over the place, meaning one contract might be allowed to increase the contract price under extenuating circumstances (gas price increase), but others do not, so reality will always be different than the estimate.
I’ve also worked in a hospital’s budgeting office. It’s roughly the same idea, ironically with less precision. You have past history of costs, for labor and materials and overheads, for providing medical services across hundreds of cost centers. It’s there. It just needs to be dug out and reviewed. Which it was, annually, as budgets were built, because the hospital’s allowed margin (3.4%, I think) was even tighter than the DoD.
That’s what I used.
The first hole, I of course hit rebar. I had stone on the outside, so I couldn’t drill just anywhere – had to use the mortar gaps. I obviously couldn’t tell if the rebar I hit was vertical or horizontal, so I had to guess where to measure to. And I guessed wrong, and hit rebar again, somehow. Barely, that time. But I didn’t want to put plumbing through that hole. So Mr. Genius measures again and drills another hole.
The next one worked. Thank goodness. But it took a long time. And I used 3 bits and lots of curse words. Not a fun day.
It would have been easier if I had anticipated where I wanted that spigot…
That is a lot of work and certainly beyond the resources available to most individual consumers (unless they are rich!). What I was really trying to get at is how does the ordinary consumer do the work to know he /she is getting a fair price.
I am sure there is a lesson to be learned by comparing the whole Pinto mess with the array of responses that our “betters” made to COVID.
And whatever is left can be solved with WD-40 and/or duct tape.
I have never done a project as big as 4 yards. Don’t want to do more than I can handle with the help of friends.
I agree with others. The issue is a lack of humility. That’s a byproduct of the loss of religious faith, which is the primary school of virtue.
However, smartphones have definitely transformed our lives. Sometimes for the better, but often not (porn in our kids’ pockets, for example).
Edit: have you noticed how few questions people ask? /see what I did there??
You can’t think of everything…….
We all lack empathy. When that lack becomes acute, we are a psychopath. (which BTW doesn’t mean a lot of things we believe it means … see “The Psychopath Inside“.
Pilots tend to be pretty competitive and competent people, as do doctors. Fighter pilots tend to be the most confident in piloting, surgeons in medicine. Quarterbacks are also a good example — there are lines of work that DEMAND lots of confidence and competence in one area. As we advance in knowledge, degrees, titles, awards, etc, we become more prone to the superiority illusion … the idea because we have achieved X, we are also superior in Y.
I see the core of our problem as lack of humility, and excessive willingness to judge. The practice of Confessional Christianity (“I, a poor miserable sinner confess …”) used to be a great reminder of our condition and a reminder that judgement is generally beyond our pay grade.
Yes, cell phones, the internet, mass media, lack of F2F interaction especially in this time of Covid (great to see that you were at a party!), etc are all contributors. I believe the base however is the idea of radical individualism leading to the idea that we are “all well above average”.
Don’t Japanese live longer than us?
So do the Danes, I think.
But if you ignore our deaths from inner city gun violence, we do have the longest life span on the planet. And it’s not that close.
So if we could just get our teenage boys to stop shooting one another, we’d have the longest life span on the planet.