Empathy is not the moral compass we've been told it is. It's a spotlight—brilliant where it points, leaving everything else in darkness—and our culture's elevation of empathy as the highest virtue may be making our collective decisions systematically worse.
Praise feels like information about what you're good at. It's actually identity assignment. And once an identity settles in, it shapes what you attempt, what you avoid, and eventually what you become. The most limiting thing someone can tell you is that you're exceptional at something.
We treat internal consistency as a mark of intellectual integrity. The research on belief formation says otherwise: the drive for coherence is one of the primary mechanisms by which humans avoid updating toward truth. The people who appear most principled are often the people most entrenched.