[_jal]

Necessary but not sufficient.

Also, don't confuse empathy and sympathy - you need to extinguish the latter, but the former is incredibly important to your ability to play suckers.

[thot_experiment]

I think you might have them backwards? Empathy is the one where you viscerally feel the other person, sympathy is where you can simulate what they're feeling but without that deeper connection, or at least that's how I was taught it.