You sound very sanctimonious and unwilling to consider the idea that in order to be compassionate on a large scale, such as population ethics, you have to minimize the effect of idiosyncratic stories and consider aggregate measures of well-being or harm.

> “Maybe you should consider why human empathy is so abhorrent to you.”

This is just egregious trolling. Seriously, you should be ashamed of yourself for trying to equivocate my point of view with finding human empathy “abhorrent.” In all seriousness, that is borderline psychotic of you to say.

Far from finding human empathy abhorrent, I care a great deal about human empathy. In fact, it is because I care about human empathy that I don’t attach nearly as much importance to idiosyncratic stories as I do to large scale measurable outcomes and statistical understanding of how policies are actually likely to relate to outcomes that help people.

You are never going to get to constructive policy decisions that have high chances of success across large cohorts of people if you make up your opinions from idiosyncratic emotional journalism.

You’re just going to lobby for bad policies driven by emotional thinking and end up hurting people with policy contrary to your intentions.

(First, a small aside. This is petty, but... the words "equivocate" and "psychotic" don't mean what you think they mean and you should probably look them up.)

Atrocities have been committed by those who believed they were being "compassionate on a large scale" but somehow didn't want to get into the messy details of what people affected by their policies thought and felt on an individual level.

> All the accoutrements of interspersed personal narrative and details about rando other people she met along the way feel gratingly boring and indiosyncratic to me.

You chose to reject her lived personal experience accumulated over decades as having any weight or relevance to policy because it bored you and you apparently prefer dry statistics. Or, as you put it, declarative sentences read by a robot voice.

You sound like you've had a sheltered life and you lack the life experience to have an informed opinion on policy around sex work. (That's perfectly fine, by the way. It can be quite liberating to accept the fact that you don't have to have an opinion about everything.)

What's unfortunate is that you think you're the enlightened one with your insistence on solid statistical aggregate data only, when in reality you're exactly what she's describing -- blindly locked in your own narrative, sure that you know what's best for other people while refusing to listen to those same people when they tell you you're wrong.

Now honestly you probably don't need to have an opinion on this topic, and you'd probably be a lot better off if you just admitted that you don't know and don't need to know what's up. But if for some reason you do, and you're worried that just one "idiosyncratic emotional story" is going to bias you, then you always have the option of doing some research or even going out and talking to the people affected by these policies and buying them a coffee in exchange for a piece of their mind on these topics. I'm guessing you wouldn't, and the very idea probably terrifies you, but feel free to prove me wrong.

Now I don't suppose you're going to take advice from a "sanctimonious" asshole like me, but in case some of this is getting through to you, consider that rather than being unwilling to consider your ideas, I might just know a few things you don't. People who look at measurable metrics but refuse to listen to individual people never get the outcomes they really want, and have done incalculable damage along the way in human history, much of it in the name of "science".