Sam Harris

You hear her cries from the bottom of the well.

The whole country stops.

I mean, there was an example of this 20, 25 years ago, I think, where it was just wall to wall on CNN.

This is just the perfect use of CNN.

It was 72 hours or whatever it was of continuous coverage of just extracting this girl from a well.

So we effortlessly pay attention to that.

We care about it.

We will donate money toward it.

I mean, it's just, it marshals 100% of our compassion and altruistic impulse.

Whereas if you hear that there's a genocide raging in some country you've never been to and never intend to go to, the numbers don't make a dent.

And we find...

the story boring, right?

And we'll change the channel in the face of a genocide, right?

It doesn't matter.

And it literally, perversely, it could be 500,000 little girls have fallen down wells in that country and we still don't care, right?

So it's, you know, many of us have come to believe that this is a bug rather than a feature of our moral psychology.

And so empathy plays an unhelpful role there.

So ultimately I think

when we're making big decisions about what we should do and how to mitigate human suffering and what's worth valuing and how we should protect those values.

I think reason is the better tool, but it's not that I would want to dispense with any part of empathy either.