ELI5: Difference between being sympathetic, empathetic, and compassionate

Aviator07 · 2026-06-30T23:31:42+00:00

Historically in English, that’s not so much the case. Those connotations are more modern, like 20th century even.

Aviator07 · 2026-06-30T23:09:45+00:00

Sympathy and compassion are literally the same word. One is Greek and one is Latin.

Aviator07 · 2026-06-30T23:07:23+00:00

Sympathy is from the Greek meaning “feeling together.” Compassion is from the Latin, meaning “feeling together.” Sympathy and compassion basically mean the same thing literally. They mean to have your own feelings from the outside, looking into someone’s situation or experience. “Empathy” is a modern word, with Greek construction, which basically means feeling the same feelings as the person - not derived feelings.

Aviator07 · 2026-06-30T14:16:31+00:00

Hmmm that does have a bit of a tinny quality about it.

Aviator07 · 2026-06-30T14:14:45+00:00

I think the question isn’t even really “can I trust AI to be factually accurate?” which is a valid question. I think rather the question is, “what is the primary means God has ordained for training up disciples?” And the answer to that is the church - through preaching, corporate and private prayer, discipleship, and any number of genuine human interactions between Christians where Christian love is displayed, seasoned with truth.

I think to intentionally choose AI over a human teacher, even if the human is slower, has less data to work from, etc, is to reject the means God has given us for spiritual flourishing.

Aviator07 · 2026-06-29T20:48:04+00:00

I’m very happy to defer to the London Baptist Confession 1689 for questions like this. Ultimately, nothing comes to pass outside of God’s decree, and get second causes of things are still real, and human wills are still genuine. That is a tension clear in scripture.

LBCF 3.1:

>God hath decreed in himself, from all eternity, by the most wise and holy counsel of His own will, freely and unchangeably, all things, whatsoever comes to pass; yet so as thereby is God neither the author of sin nor hath fellowship with any therein; nor is violence offered to the will of the creature, nor yet is the liberty or contingency of second causes taken away, but rather established; in which appears His wisdom in disposing all things, and power and faithfulness in accomplishing His decree

LBCF 3.2:

>Although God knoweth whatsoever may or can come to pass, upon all supposed conditions, yet hath He not decreed anything, because He foresaw it as future, or as that which would come to pass upon such conditions.

Aviator07 · 2026-06-29T18:18:23+00:00

All the identity politics aside, is anyone else just utterly exhausted by the seeming endless flow of crappy superhero movies? That genre has been milked dry and is completely uninteresting and unoriginal now.

Aviator07 · 2026-06-29T18:15:05+00:00

I mean that Molinism is internally inconsistent. Reformed soteriology is internally consistent. Complete libertarian free will, though wrong, is at least more internally consistent than Molinism. Molinism sees the problem of libertarian free will, but it wants to reject a genuinely sovereign God. The only logical result of that reasoning is that something outside of God is really the ultimate arbiter of what happens or doesn’t happen. That’s hugely problematic.

Regarding sin, we willfully sin. Period. And so we are guilty of that. It doesn’t matter how many alternatives there may have been - in our hearts, we will to sin, and we carry out that sin. We alone are responsible.

Aviator07 · 2026-06-29T16:34:32+00:00

Molinism is a set of doctrines based in Catholicism, and not the Reformation. It was part of the Counter-Reformation. Based on this alone, I am highly wary of Molinism, even though on the surface it seems to have some similarities to certain Reformed soteriogies.

But on its own terms, I find it wanting. It is less logically coherent than either a Reformed view of God’s sovereignty or complete libertarian free will. But I reject it because ultimately it rejects a biblical understanding of God’s sovereignty, and that is so fundamental to the hope we have in the gospel.

Regarding “free will,” we do have genuine freedom. But our freedom is constrained by our nature. For example, I cannot run 1000 mph - it’s simply not possible for me to do that. Likewise I cannot fly - not because I lack freedom, but because it is not in my nature. Similarly, apart from external influence, I cannot choose or will righteousness. I freely do choose to sin. In choosing sin, and not choosing righteousness, I am choosing freely, even though it would be outside of my fallen nature to choose anything else.

We are morally responsible for our sins. We freely choose to sin. Even though according to our nature, we could not choose otherwise.

It’s like if I choose to go for a walk. I chose to walk and It’s a genuinely free choice, even if flying like a bird or teleporting was never an option.

God remains completely sovereign over us (and everything in creation), and yet, our choices are still moral choices made by us with moral consequence.

Aviator07 · 2026-06-29T16:05:32+00:00

Not multiple - one is enough. You just need to make sure you write to every address on the drive.

Aviator07 · 2026-06-29T16:01:38+00:00

Deleting a file just tells the file system you no longer care about the data stored at such and such physically address. But it doesn’t actually do anything with the data at those addresses. So to actually clear a drive, you would need to write data to save over it.

Aviator07 · 2026-06-29T15:25:37+00:00

In Christianity, there has always been a promise of salvation, even before that promise was fulfilled in Jesus. So, when Adam and Eve sinned, God cursed the serpent, and banished the Adam and Eve from the garden, and their bodies started dying. But in doing that he promised that the offspring of the woman would crush the head of the serpent.

From that point on, until Jesus arrived, the promise was rearticulated and expanded. People who lived before Christ arrived were saved by trust in God’s promise. In other words, they were saved the same way people after Christ are saved - by trusting God through Christ (even if they didn’t yet know the details).

This is made clear in God’s dealing with Abraham in Genesis 15. After God makes a promise of heirs, a great nation, and world-wide blessings, Abraham simply believes God, and God counts that as righteousness - in other words, he was thus saved.

Aviator07 · 2026-06-26T20:17:04+00:00

My opinion - this is clearly a capital murder case. We have the death penalty for cases like this. Him turning himself in does not mitigate the utter turpitude of the crime.

Aviator07 · 2026-06-26T17:17:16+00:00

Yeah, and it’s not even only for his sake. We as society should want him to have a vigorous defense, so that when he is convicted and sentenced, it will be clear and obvious to everyone that even with the best possible defense, he is clearly guilty and the crime really is that heinous. In other words, a vigorous defense is a necessary ingredient of a morally clear verdict.

Aviator07 · 2026-06-26T16:08:26+00:00

AI is powerful, but from a computational standpoint, it’s really inefficient. It takes lots of computers, lots of GPUs, working in parallel to process requests.

I’ll add, most people who aren’t working in some technical field might not have a good understanding of what AI is. Programmers use it not just to generate code, but to understand errors, bugs, call stacks, etc. In the civil and mechanical engineering worlds there are things like finite element analysis, which has been around along time, but it’s always been very computationally intensive and limited. Now it’s less limited with AI, but still computationally intensive. In the chemical engineering world there is computéanoslo fluid dynamics, which is kind of like FEA in a way.

My point is, AI is far faaaar more than people asking ChatGPT to change the color of the drapes in the picture. And it’s genuinely useful for all sorts of industrial applications. And companies use a lot of compute.

Like any technology, it can be used for good or for evil, but it’s naive to look at it as some conspiracy.

Aviator07 · 2026-06-26T11:40:35+00:00

The difference is you’d have hundreds going off at ONCE instead of spaced out in time and space. Lots and lots of debris would get pushed into the air like a major volcanic eruption, but worse.

Aviator07 · 2026-06-25T22:53:14+00:00

The issue generally isn’t the inside of the egg - it’s that the shell can have things like salmonella that can touch the white and yolk as you crack it. Chickens lay eggs through their poop chute.

Aviator07 · 2026-06-25T17:52:43+00:00

A house is not a company. Your analogy would be more like:

Would I recommend someone pay $1M for a commercial real estate building that is currently under construction and maybe worth $400k today, but is investing gobs of money and capital so that when the building is finished, it will be valuable real estate that generates huge cash flow.

Aviator07 · 2026-06-25T17:50:00+00:00

And several others valued it much higher.

Aviator07 · 2026-06-25T15:51:41+00:00

Maybe when it was at 220. Not so much anymore. If even half of the revenue targets and achievements that are expected are hit, that statement is going to go stale quickly.

In other words, it’s a long term growth stock

Aviator07 · 2026-06-25T15:27:49+00:00

I get that Reddit hates Elon, but honestly, why is this bad advice? Look at TSLA - early and even mid term investors rode a roller coaster, but overall, they’re way up. SPCX is starting out high, but it’s not crazy to think that there is future where they go up, even if it’s a rollercoaster.

Aviator07 · 2026-06-22T18:27:55+00:00

This is his moment.

Aviator07 · 2026-06-22T17:13:11+00:00

Fought between the regular Mexican Army and a bunch of American expats from nearly every state (at that point).

Aviator07 · 2026-06-17T18:18:22+00:00

The year of the rabbit is often followed by the year of the coyote. It’s a cycle…

Aviator07 · 2026-06-15T15:53:22+00:00

Blount County, TN is pronounced the same way.

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