Did Albert Einstein ever say anything about empathy?

Loosely related to Which explorer called the Gulf of Mexico/America the Golfo de Florida? …

David Levitt, a Marvin Minsky PhD student at MIT 40 years ago, posted the following meme on his Facebook feed:

It struck me as odd that Einstein, who died in 1995, would have written or said anything on the subject of “empathy”, a term that has only recently come into vogue as a personal bragging point (“I’m empathetic and you support genocide; #FreePalestine”). Being a horrible person without an AI assist, of course I couldn’t resist commenting with Einstein’s well-documented writing “It would be a pity if these Chinese supplant all other races. For the likes of us the mere thought is unspeakably dreary.” (from 1922-23 diaries), presenting this in a positive light as an inspiration to Harvard University’s admissions office. And I noted that even our AI overlords couldn’t find any source for Einstein having said “Empathy is patiently and sincerely seeing the world through the other person’s eyes”. David responded with a clickbait quote web page, which itself did not cite any source, as proof that Einstein had opined on empathy. (Of course, since those who advocate for diversity can’t tolerate viewpoint diversity, he subsequently defriended me.)

Now I’m curious… did Einstein ever write or say anything on the subject of a working definition of empathy, as in the meme? Most of Einstein’s writings are online, e.g., at https://einsteinpapers.press.princeton.edu/, so one would think that ChatGPT would have consumed them. In fact, however, ChatGPT can’t find any instance of Einstein using the term “sincerely” except in closing a letter with “Yours sincerely”. This makes sense to me because bragging about one’s superior fund of sincerity is also a relatively recent phenomenon.

David Levitt has a Ph.D. from MIT. This member of the credentialed elite accepted a combination of meme and clickbait quote web page as proof that a historical event (Einstein writing or saying something) actually occurred. In the bad old days, by contrast, middle school kids were taught that they couldn’t use an encyclopedia as a source. Teachers demanded that they find a primary reference so as to avoid accepting a misattribution. What is a reasonable definition of historical truth in an age where we have an arms race between people with computer assistance putting out falsehoods (possibly just for clicks/ad revenue) and people training LLMs? If Grok says that something didn’t happen can we be more confident in that than in Wikipedia, for example? Are LLMs sufficiently skeptical to cut through what’s produced by all of the cleverest Internet content developers? Or are we doomed to lose access to historical facts? In fifty years will the remnant humans left alive by Skynet believe memes in which Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. praises rule by AI?

Separately, never forgot that Albert Einstein is justly famous as a science writer for popularizing the work of physicist Mileva Marić (photoelectric effect, Brownian motion, and special relativity, for example). Even if Einstein never wrote or talked about empathy, that doesn’t take away the credit he deserves for his work in assisting Ms. Marić with publishing her research.

The “Capt. Gilbert” quote might be genuine. How about the Hannah Arendt quote? She died in 1975, decades before the Empathy Boom among Democrats. ChatGPT:

No, Hannah Arendt did not say, “The death of human empathy is one of the earliest and most telling signs of a culture about to fall into barbarism.”

This quote is often misattributed to her, but there’s no verified source—none of her writings, interviews, or lectures—where she says or writes this exact line.

Finally, let’s look at the Elon Musk quote, taken from a conversation with Joe Rogan (bold highlights are my own potential excerpts to capture the spirit of the Musk-Rogan conversation):

Musk: There’s a guy who posts on X who’s great, Gad Saad?

Rogan: Yeah, he’s a friend of mine. He’s been on the podcast a bunch of times.

Musk: Yeah, he’s awesome, and he talks about, you know, basically suicidal empathy. Like, there’s so much empathy that you actually suicide yourself. So, we’ve got civilizational suicidal empathy going on. And it’s like, I believe in empathy, like, I think you should care about other people, but you need to have empathy for, for civilization as a whole, and not commit to a civilizational suicide.

Rogan: Also don’t let someone use your empathy against you so they can completely control your state and then do an insanely bad job of managing it and never get removed.

Musk: The fundamental weakness of Western civilization is empathy. The empathy exploit. They’re exploiting a bug in Western civilization, which is the empathy response. So, I think, you know, empathy is good, but you need to think it through and not just be programmed like a robot.

Rogan: Right, understand when empathy has been actually used as a tool.

Musk: Yes, like, it’s weaponized empathy is the issue.

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I, of course, will never see eye-to-eye with Elon Musk on the issue of whether every vehicle should have sliding doors… #LongLiveHondaOdyssey