I strongly disagree with you but was planning on staying out of this conversation. But now I feel compelled to interject.

Your example fails in supporting your point. Your example person could not be more different from Arfa.

Your character: Fat Boy who enjoys messing with .NET is alive and enjoying his snickers bar.

Arfa: Young Intelligent, Motivated Girl Concretely acting in fulfilling her goals and bettering her environment dies at 16.

It does not matter her gender, age or privilege. Her outlook, her willingness to act in perusing her goals and enrichment - in spite of her "silver spoon" - puts her ahead of a lot of people. Do not underestimate the power of taking things for granted.

We agree that her early death is tragic. But is it fair that so many other people also die and no one notices? No it is not fair. I agree. But the reality of the matter is that attention is a scarce resource and will always be. Now, If I had somehow heard about the death of your rich fat kid from NYC then I would certainly feel empathy for the parents and the early loss. But the reality is, a random person hearing of that event is not a likely scenario. Most news outlets would not be interested.

Many people, some more technically accomplished than Arfa will not get similar coverage. But technical accomplishment is not the sole determinant of value as a person or worth in attention units. If you look at how we price people's worth in attention you will notice that it is only loosely correlated with the value of the labor they put into improving themselves and more correlated with how much demand for their attention they can create.

As for Arfa's case she actually does stands up to scrutiny of the worth of her accomplishments. The real loss is not her current skill but the time derivative of it, the rate of increase, her potential. The fact that she had already made news, met Bill Gates, lack of greed, willingness to give back and the inspirational aspect of it all. Those add to make hers a very uncommon situation and hence worth covering by the media.

Her dying is a very sad event as is the case for nearly all deaths. But make no mistake, this coverage is not due to the empathy of the news outlets but a calculated cost value decision. Fair or not that is the reality of it and there is no gain in focusing on how many others are not covered instead giving more weight to the tragic fact of her loss. She has gotten to your ellipsoid of attention. That alone justifies the attention she is receiving, not an accounting of how easy it is to replicate her accomplishments. Such a stance is not much difference from holding a belief that I could make stackoverflow in a week.

Finally I completely disagree that empathy drains perspective. Empathy gives perspective. You underestimate the value of social and emotional intelligence, which are vital in getting people to work together and overcome difficulties. Empathy is exactly trying to get someone's perspective and then using that to your mutual advantages (or manipulate to get ahead). Intelligence in species is correlated with complexity of social groups. Some argue Neanderthals were more IQ intelligent than us - closer to our savants but we overcame them by being more able to work together and having a superior Collective Intelligence.

Empathy is not an enemy of rationality. See Higher order intentionality. I have a pet theory that the empathetic mind is a simulation based intelligence, dual to the calculation based intelligence commonly linked to I.Q. You can run simulations, or run outright calculations to get at the same answer. Some things are easier to calculate others easier to simulate. Both add perspective and neither has ordinality.