[tux3]

That's an interesting perspective, thank you.

Though even as someone acutely atuned to the various forms trauma can take, wouldn't you agree there's such a thing as a reasonably trauma-free population? Or at least trauma-free to a degree that it makes sense to consider the bias induced by traumatic experiences minor for that population?

I think you get the perspective you have, that there's no ovjectivity, by focusing solely on the victims.

I agree with your point on subjectivity when it comes to abuse victims. Statistics want to average out individual differences, the exactly wrong thing if you're interested in understanding the specifics of individual cases. I'm with you on that.

But I think you have to go back up at some point, if you ever want to help more people than have the privilege of seeing you at a time.

Statistics as a discipline is aware of biases. It is not always applied with the appropriate carefulness, but there is tremendous, systemic good to be had as a reward for success.

I'm not convinced your criticism of current ideas in your field is something objective science cannot learn to address.

The problem I'm faced with is that empathy wants me to care, also, for people that can't directly see or reach me. They're out of sight, but not out of mind.

[skim_milk]

Empathic emotional responses are absolutely required for society to function healthily, just look at our species' dark past! Living in a not-empathic, insensitive society would absolutely suck. But the pendulum has swung past healthy empathy to being overly sensitive - there's a happy empathy middle lost to some academic cultures. Both over and underreaction to empathic emotional responses are destructive and unhealthy. Here's a good lecture on the extremes of empathic responses: including insensitive and overly sensitive empathic responses, and what healthy empathy might look like https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IMw8Ua1953w

Being overstimulated by empathic responses renders one emotionally unavailable and unable to help just like the emotionally insensitive person. That's why people draw a line with some academic cultures: it resembles/promotes unhealthy relationship patterns.

Having empathy isn't a problem, it's just about getting the balance right. Too much or too little of a good thing is a bad thing

[tux3]

I think my point is only about whether any empathy you have should apply preferentially to people close to you, or whether you should endeavor to have it for everyone equally, all else equal.

I wouldn't agree there's anything particularly extreme about that. It's not a degree of empathy that I'm trying to make a point about, but how it's distributed.

If you're able to generalize things you learn with rigorous statistics, it starts to apply more broadly, and so you can help more people who don't necessarily have to see you personally to benefit.

The extra cost to you is small, and if providing help is your goal, making a rigorous science out of it will, in the happy case, increase efficiency tremendously.