Empathy is in Short Supply---Psychopaths Abound

So I just finished reading How to Talk So Kids Will Listen & Listen So Kids Will Talk by Adele Faber, & Elaine Mazlish. And a thought came to me.

If such techniques of acknowledging the feelings of a child can help them not ``act out'', why can't these techniques be applicable to the adult in the real world? After all, we do have many adults who ``act out'' in various [often times destructive] ways when their feelings are somehow wounded/unacknowledged.

Then I realised that most people, once they get beyond a certain group size, will tend to prefer treating everyone else in a transactional manner as opposed to a relational one. And that comes about because of a side effect of the preferred manner of thinking---keeping things transactional as opposed to relational short circuits the types of thinking that needs to be done to achieve the same [short-term] results.

After all, that is the very definition of transactional---our relationship is only as good as it needs to get whatever [short-term] results we require, your feelings be damned; after all, feelings are irrational, and therefore unscientific (i.e. 不科学), and thus have no place in any of the calculus involved.

Transactional relationships make extremely large groups of people function in a manner that is more efficient (in terms of getting results) than one that is more relational in nature. Each time one adds another person to the group that currently has N members, there is an increase of N − 1 interactions to take note of---this means that the number of interactions to worry about in a relational manner of treating people requires the ability to reason about O(N²) interactions.

Compare this to the transactional one, where it is strictly linear in the number of transactions to be performed.

This is perhaps a type of uncodified natural law that can explain why there exists a life cycle of sorts for the formation of groups: they start off with aggregation of the like-minded, and then when they hit some critical size, end up splitting up into smaller groups due to schisms, after which the aggregative phase begins anew for each of the smaller groups.

This critical size is probably really small, as my arm-chair first-principles type analysis suggests, but it gets artificially amplified when the soapbox of social media comes into play, leading to people who happily(?) mouth and ape all that they heard, without necessarily stopping to think about the consequences those things they said might do with the relationships with other people.

Think ``cancel culture''. Think of the rise in extremism from both the left and right. Think of unmitigated political correctness that is basically sycophancy.

That's about what I have. Sorry if it is incoherent. Till the next update then.