I think I'm not the person who replied to you re the quote you make.

One of the powerful points the author makes is at the heart of what you are resisting. Feeling and understanding are substantiatively different things. We can feel when misled. Or driven from intuition. Understanding can come through reason or just an acceptance. One of the powerful takeaways I had was how empathy can be a tool to retain tribal strength, regardless of efficacy.

I agree with your conclusion and won't push further that you should read the book. But I do find it it is important to dwell on this separation between feeling and understanding.

> I think I'm not the person who replied to you re the quote you make.

I quoted you twice, but then I quoted the book:

> The notion of empathy that I’m most interested in is the act of feeling what you believe other people feel—experiencing what they experience. This is how most psychologists and philosophers use the term. But I should stress that nothing rests on the word itself. If you’d like to use it in a broader way, to refer to our capacity for caring and love and goodness, or in a narrower way, to refer to the capacity to understand others, well, that’s fine. For you, I’m not against empathy.

Sorry for not making that more clear, if that is the source of confusion at least.

> But I do find it it is important to dwell on this separation between feeling and understanding.

This is not radical, at least the circles I travel, and in general understood as true, but by itself is not a comment on empathy or strengthen an argument against empathy, even Bloom's definition of empathy.