You’re a soldier. You are part of a force dealing with civilians. You need to calm them, to settle them, to ensure a stable, controlled environment. Why?
Maybe you’re part of an occupying force.
Maybe you’re part of a defensive garrison.
Maybe you’re part of a military unit being used for humanitarian aid. Military logistics and command-and-control capabilities make it a very common application.
Or maybe you need to be able to decide if someone does represent a threat. You know what they call that ability to understand someone else’s body language and mannerisms to gauge motive and intent? S’called ‘empathy’.
So no. I wouldn’t turn down the ‘empathy’ slider. I’d turn up the ‘discipline’ slider, and probably the ‘ethics’ slider… because if I’m making a race of transhuman soldiers, I have to accept the likelihood that in short order, they’re going to be their own officer corps.
Very few civilians rolling around in space, especially these days, and I typically leave those matters in the hands of civilian governance for that reason. After, all, civilians are by definition not involved in the war. But, still, that is a nice example of how empathy could increase ones strategic flexibility.
Empathy is not the only determining factor in those circumstances however, charisma and charm, hell even looks in some neck of the woods would have a large impact on your ability to calm the masses down. The most empathetic individual in the cluster may find himself unable to calm a mob that a man with no empathy and a few dozen men with machine guns could. There are many stories of sociopaths climbing to great heights in business and finance primarily because of their ability to not feel guilt over manipulating people, although we sadly have no method for generating a statistic for empathy in order to find out if that’s matched on the other end of the bell curve for ‘super-empaths’.
I must concur on wishing someone had turned up the ethics and especially discipline sliders. Would be nice if people broadcasted at the right time, eh?
Most symptoms out there in the great big universe of ‘places people have conditions’ apply to more than one condition or disease, yes. You’re coughing. Is it the flu? Bronchitis? Plague? Lung cancer?
Anyone looking at a list of symptoms and saying ‘these only apply to that one thing’ is an idiot.
Conditions and diseases are often (usually?) bad actors and a list of criteria based on symptoms are required to identify one over another based on which get checked off. Inability to narrow down the condition or disease based on said criteria calls for further testing.
So basically what Ms Arrendis said, but with a little more of an explanation. HTH