Hello, different trans person replying here. (FtM, if it matters.)
I would be completely fine if there was some "trans gene" that was identified and eradicated, so as long as the already-living people who possessed them were not killed or otherwise infringed upon. Gender dysphoria has been nothing but a net-negative on my life. Being suicidal since the onset of puberty, paying for medicated perpetually, and being socially displaced (and not just due to prejudice; well-intentioned people will mistake your identity sometimes, and treat you differently than a normal person) are not positive experiences, nor have they led to any positive experience or insight I would have not arrived at otherwise. Nothing of value would be lost.
I would make the stronger preposition that any trans person who disagrees is either being disingenuous (likely for rhetorical reasons), is overpowered by emotions, or does not have gender dysphoria/is not transgender, but I'm not in a position to defend it.
A quick example I like to use when people around me appeal to nature is that smallpox and arsenic are natural, air conditioning and manufactured clothing are not.
My stipulated definition is not "small-scale kindness", it is the emotional concern for other's well-being that causes an "emotional inclination to be kind". Politicians lack concern for others' suffering because they cannot have sonder, and therefore cannot have emotional concern, for the suffering of everyone their policies will affect. (Just about everyone has intellectual/abstract concern for others' suffering; we can all say, "children dying in a war is bad", but when we hear news about such, we don't have the same emotional reaction that we would have if the dying children were members of our own families or communities.) Emotionally identifying with and caring about people is known as affective/compassionate empathy; those with ASPD lack this, though they may have cognitive empathy (which is how they can manipulate people).
I don't believe that empathy is the sole cause and determiner of political polarization, only that it is the root. While tribalism is present in all societies (Europe and Japan are not free of racism, for instance), social factors such as the identification of ethnicity/culture/religion with politics, influence of social media, and presence of charismatic individuals (the modern American right would not have existed to the same extent without Donald Trump) drive tribalism along political lines.
Thank you for catching that! I will fix the post once I have the time. Still, even if Dunbar's number does not directly define the limits of human empathy, it does limit the amount of people you can really conceptualize or understand in an intuitive manner; anything beyond that has to be abstraction. (That is, it limits the amount of people who you can really feel sonder for, even though we all know abstractly that all eight billion of us have inner lives as valuable as our own.) You cannot feel empathy towards something that is not a person (to empathize with inanimate objects or animals, you need to humanize/anthropomorphize them), and since Dunbar's number limits the amount of people you can conceptualize, it limits empathy.
[E]mpathy, defined here as the identification with and emotional inclination to be kind towards another person
When do I use a different definition than the one above? If I have made an error, I am interested in correcting it.
I know many members and influential figures of this are atheists; regardless, does anyone think it would be a good idea to take a rationalist approach to religious scripture? If anything, doing so might introduce greater numbers of the religious to rationalism. Plus, it doesn't seem like anyone here has done so before; all the posts regarding religion have been criticizing it from the outside rather than explaining things within the religious framework. Even if you do not believe in said religious framework, doing so may increase your knowledge on other cultures, provide an interesting exercise in reasoning, and most importantly, be useful in winning arguments with those who do.
Fair; in either case, I wrote it myself because I have the sense of humor of a college student taking his first discrete math class (because this is what I am).
1An LLM would have a smoother writing style and less grammatical errors than the above, unfortunately :(
By "emotional concern", I intended to convey that you feel an emotional impulse in response to how someone else feels; you are physically/emotionally upset by seeing someone suffering, and you are made physically/emotionally joyful by seeing someone succeeding.