[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.