If they had BDSM vampire zombies in space I would totally watch that. Once.

as my after-work fluid intake is mostly beer, I realized that now my brain cannot tell the difference between thirst and alcohol cravings.

Does your at-work brain confuse thirst with alcohol cravings too?

One idea would be thirst-like feeling -> drink water -> re-examine, but water is not a very good thirst quencher.

So test this by drinking something that isn't beer or water but matches your other criteria for good thirst quenchers. Carbonated water with lemon or lime juice in it will meet the criteria that you listed, but actually staying hydrated with water will just prevent you from getting thirsty in the first place. Seriously - ginger ale, lemon-lime or orange soda, etc.

I am toying with the idea to alternate alcoholic and non-alcoholic beer in the evenings to de-train the association

What? You're suggesting that you should train yourself to associate the taste of beer with satisfying your craving for hydration here, so the association that you're trying to de-train is the one between beer and satisfying alcohol cravings? That's crazy, dude. Look at how much energy you've put into thinking about ways to keep drinking beer while avoiding satisfying alcohol cravings and put the same amount into thinking about ways to not drink beer. That will be an easier way to decouple the satisfaction of your cravings for hydration alcohol.

I'm an alcoholic and have been sober for about 7 years now so take that into account. My advice is that you quickly try all the ways you can think of to control your drinking. Make notes about what you're trying and how well it works. Track stuff like servings of alcohol consumed, etc. so that you can look at how well your control mechanisms work. Spend some time with no control mechanism in place and just track your consumption for a baseline if necessary (maybe even do this for a week or two in between trials to see if your baseline fluctuates). Make notes about things that trigger cravings. If something works, tweak it or stick with it. If none of them work, consider that you'll either need to abstain entirely from alcohol (and avoid things that trigger cravings for a little while) or that you're just going to slide further into alcoholism and make the necessary adjustments in your life to do those things. Gather information and be honest with yourself.

I guess what I mean is how do you know that it was that tactic that worked? How do you know that the people who showed compassion afterwards did so because it was demanded of them and not because people making angry demands made them feel more safe openly showing pre-existing compassion? I tend to agree with your first impression. I certainly don't respond to hostility by handing over control of my emotions to hostile people. I get defensive of my position.

Of course this is probably me committing the typical mind fallacy and trying to avoid thinking about the question by finding ways to disqualify it. So, one mechanism that comes to mind is that people who are more prone to guilt may see angry protesting as signaling an issue that their guilt can attach to and then subsequently act compassionately to alleviate their guilt. That's not very charitable since it assumes a kind of mental defect on the part of the compassionate, so maybe people who were not really aware of another groups suffering and don't feel too defensive about it once they're made aware of it and don't have any particular problem with the defining feature of the suffering group might feel that the angry demands are justified and come to feel/act compassionately for that reason.

Why do you think that angrily demanding compassion works?

Extrapolating from just the American civil rights movement and Indian independence movements, both of them were accompanied by barely contained violent movements with the same goals. Acceding to the demands of the peaceful protests provided a way to give the status of winning the conflict to the peaceful people while meeting the demands of the violent. Conversely, the recent Occupy movement had no real violent wing to speak of and while a lot of people showed up for the protests and there was a lot of awareness raised, there was no legislative impact at all.

Meanwhile, in the US, the life expectancy of homeless people.

I think you forgot the rest of this sentence. From the context, I would expect that you were going to say that it's going down, but that's not clear from the linked articles.

Any example I could give could be disputed because it's always possible to reverse cause and effect and say "he only lacks empathy because of X" rather than "he believes X due to lack of empathy".

Fair enough. It does seem like it would be difficult to tell those two things apart from the outside.

And my impression is that empathy towards only the in-group is a normal human trait and that it is often affected by society only in the trivial sense that society determines what the in-group is.

Also true (probably).

If you're trying to get the best match between map and territory though, it's worth looking for the motive for each particular evil. If you're trying to reduce evil in the above-defined sense of enjoying causing involuntary suffering, doesn't it make more sense to treat this as outgroup persecution rather than terminal "evil." I guess my point was that I don't think evil as a terminal goal exists in most people. There may be terminal goals for which evil is a hardwired strategy, but it's more important to look at what those goals actually are if you're going to try to minimize the evil. Maybe we can tweak the definition of outgroup. Maybe we can make the ingroup value something that the outgroup doesn't and then "deprive" the outgroup of that thing as our form of persecution. Just saying that "evil" exists and is a driving force feels like a mysterious answer.

But individuals who have empathy with some others, but not other others, are more common. They can have terminal values to cause suffering for that portion of the population they don't have empathy with.

I'm having a hard time getting this. Can you provide an example where the lack of empathy for some group isn't driven by another value? My impression is that empathy is a normal human trait and that socializing teaches us who is worthy of empathy and who isn't, but then the lack of empathy is instrumental (because it serves to further the goals of society). People who actually lack empathy suffer from mental disorders like psychopathy as far as I know.

Of course empathy-lacking individuals exist, but make up a small portion of the population. It seems more likely that any given instance of one person enjoying harming another is due to instrumental value rather than terminal.

Are you are suggesting that people just have a desire to cause suffering and that their reasons (dieties, revenge, punishment, etc.) are mostly just attempts to frame that desire in a personally acceptable manner? I ask because it seems like most people probably just don't enjoy watching just anyone suffer, they tend to target other groups which suggests a more strategic reason than just enjoying cruelty.