No Sci-Friday this week but cool stuff to talk about below this video – On the Absence of Empathy – which sounds very similar to what I’ve said about empathy in other posts. Take a listen (note: he needs to put $$ in the swear jar after he finishes this):
Pay close attention to what he’s saying because he’s absolutely right: somewhere around half of the population is completely incapable of caring about a thing if it doesn’t affect them personally. That applies to many areas of life, and that includes the science fiction community.
I’ve also experienced the same ‘asking a Labradoodle to solve for x’ behavior when I’ve talked about toxic fans, or the scifi ‘purity test.’ We can disagree on specific points about scifi in general, but it needs to be couched in empathy, the ability to see another person’s point of view, and the possibility that we may not have all the facts. The binary THIS IS RIGHT AND THE REST OF YOU SUCK tone of scifi discourse needs to end. I’m not saying this for me, I’m saying this for all the people who are being harmed by this angry, callous disregard for basic human decency.
Thanks very much for coming to my TED talk.
