When considering incentives, consider the incentives of all parties
Once upon a time the countries of Alpago and Byzantine had a war. Alpago was mostly undamaged during this war. Byzantine was severely damaged by this war, although they have caught up in some metrics such as education, their economy is still somewhat weaker. Alpago was the clear aggressor, and now, fifty years later, everyone who is reasonable now acknowledges that Alpago was in the wrong.
There is a major debate within the countries about how to respond to the past. Many Byzantians argue that the views of the Alpagoans are irrelevant. The Alpagoans are "unbombed", this provides them with many systematic advantage over the Byzantians such as career opportunities, indeed most of the top companies in Byzantian still have Alpagoan CEOs since many of the senior management were hired before Byzantian had built anywhere near the number of colleges in Alpago.
Many Byzantians argue that the views of the unbombed deserve very little consideration. Of course the unbombed will want to preserve their advantages. How can the Byzantians ever have their voices heard when unbombed members of parliament are giving their opinions in the Alpago parliament on how much compensation is appropriate? Surely if Alpago was truly sorry, they would accept the demands of the Byzantian government without question.
The Byzantians are undoubtedly correct in their assumption that the Alpagoans have a very strong incentive to underestimate what is owed. They are also correct when they say that the Alpagoans are in a position of power that makes it very easy for them to ignore the issue of compensation, after all, it does not affect them very much if their government decides to pay compensation to the Byzantians, instead of the alternate plan of wasting it on a fleet of nuclear submarines. However, in other areas, the Alpagoans no longer have a power advantage. Many Alpagoan politicians used to say that the war was justified, if a politician said that these days, even the conservative party would demand that they resign because no reasonable person could come to such a conclusion.
In contrast, some of the more extreme Byzantians regularly declare the burning of their capital as a intentional war crime, while the evidence quite clearly shows that the Alpagoans had not targeted their civilian population, only their military base which had inadvertently led to the fire when it was destroyed. During the war, the intentional targetting theory was best supported by the evidence available to the Alpagoans, but advance in forensics have long ago disproven this theory. Many Byzantines consider this forensic technique discredited, because it was originally used to blame the war on the Byzantines. The reason why the Alpagoans did not burn the city was not altruistic. They did not want to burn the city merely because this would make it impossible for them to loot it. It is politically risky for an Alpagoan to point out that the burning was unintentional, since they might be mistaken for a member of the Alpagoan Pillorying Club. These are really legitimately horrible people (even the conservative party consider them to be bigots).
On the other hand, the Alpagoans almost universally insist that they never executed any Byzantine civilians in the brief period that they occupied the country. There are extensive interviews with numerous witnesses who saw this happen with their own eyes, but no hard evidence. The Alpagoans dismiss these accounts as it is impossible for them to conceive that criminals might be telling the truth when their own soldiers (whom they consider honorable - they blame politicians for the war) deny this ever happened. Any Byzantine who mentions this immediately gets dismissed as a "loony conspiracy nut".
If the Byzantians want to consider the incentives of the Alpagoans, they need to also consider their own incentives, as they would be construed by a hardened cynic. They might argue that their incentives are to fight for justice as this would earn them respect, but the cynic would not accept this. The cynic would argue that their incentives are to fight for the maximal amount of compensation, even if a perfectly impartial judge decided that it should be X, their incentive would be to claim that it should be at least X + 1. These incentives exist, even if the Alpagoan government would never offer even half of X.
Some of the Alpagoan are motivated by conscious self-interest to preserve their advantages, while many more who are convinced that they support fair compensation are affect by unconscious self-interest bias. But, the cynic will believe that the Byzantians will have an incentive to position the effect of self-interest on the Alpagoans as greater than it is. The cynic will believe that similarly, some of the Byzantians will be motivated by conscious self-interest, and others by unconscious bias, all while completely convinced that they are being fair.
The Alpagoans are in a position of power when it comes to compensation. The Byzantians lack the ability to force them to pay it, so the resolution will most likely be on the terms of the Alpagoans. The cynic will note that the Byzantians have the incentive to position themselves as being in a position of power for all issues, even when they are the ones in the position of power, such as in relation to the claim that the Alpagoans had intentionally burned their capital. Many Byzantians know that the Alpagoans didn't actually intentionally try to burn their capital, but they see this as a technicality (they started an illegitimate war which resulted in the capital burning) and they do not want to get into an argument with their fellow Byzantians who *really* strongly believe this. Further disagreeing with other Byzantians would undermine their cause which they see as just. The cynic would note that this is a very easy argument for the Byzantians to make. It does not harm them if the actions of the Alpagoans are misrepresented, in fact it helps them. Further, there are social incentives to agree with their fellow Byzantians.
Even though the Alpagoans are correct that they didn't intentionally burn the city, many of them have formed their viewpoint out of self-interest. There is convincing historical evidence, but very few of them have actually seen this, nor do most of them have interest in checking it out as it might disprove their beliefs. Most Alpagoans would be unwilling to acknowledge this, as it would harm their credibility and by used as ammunition by Byzantian activists who believe that they burned it intentionally.
We can see that considering the incentives of all the parties will help both the Byzantians come to a better understanding regarding the situation. The same will be true for the Alpagoans - the Byzantians are right in that the Alpagoans are often unaware of their bias. On the other hand, if either group only considers the incentives of one of the parties, they will most likely come to a more biased conclusion than if they had considered the incentives of neither of the parties. For these purposes, it is very important that the cynic be maximally cynical, without actually being a conspiracy theorist, in order to reduce room for bias.
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Comments (95)
I'm curious. For those in their 20s, how were you taught to write essays?
Back in the Stone Age when I was growing up, we were taught to have a thesis statement early on so that our readers would know what we were going to be talking about. Here's where we're going with this. Is that entirely out of fashion?
My advisor in grad school expanded on this, to here's the issue, here's the thesis, here's how we're going to get there. A tidy map to let the reader know where we're going, to make it easier to know what to look for to follow along with the progress of the trip.
After a couple of paragraphs, I have no idea where this is going, Are we setting up some analogy to current events, or just setting up the context in which some thesis operates? I don't know, and I find I just don't care enough to continue reading.
I have often griped about essays here, suggesting that people start with an abstract. But here, I want to get get some information on how people are being taught to write. I'm often infuriated by journalists these days, as they write and write and write, and I wonder and I wonder and I wonder where the hell it's all going. Are people doing this on purpose?
Are they being taught to do this? If so, what are the specifics of the pedagogy involved?
I think the author is being obfuscatory in order to try to get the readers to have particular feelings about a specific real-life political conflict by analogy, without revealing too early what the actual conflict under discussion is. Unfortunately I don't think the author is really able to pull this off.
At school, I was taught that the correct way to write is...
...so that at the beginning people have an idea about what will be said (so they can focus on the important parts instead of tangents), and at the end they can review and remember the important points.
There is a slightly modified version for teachers, where as an introduction you ask motivating questions, such as "how could we do X?", and then you proceed by a lesson that includes how to do X.
However, out of school, when I was writing short stories, I was told that this is the part of school education that is most important to unlearn for writers. You do not write stories like this, because they will be super boring -- the introduction will contain unnecessary spoilers, and the conclusion will just repeat what you already know if you paid any attention to the story. The lesson is that text written with a different purpose requires different structure.
Instead, here is what works for stories:
tl;dr -- how you write should reflect your expectations why and how people will read your text; for example textbook vs fiction, but also tutorial vs reference, etc.
About the same for me. But I pictured you older than my 20s target group. No?
Yep. Let them know where you're going, so they can more easily follow along. In this case, the payoff is clear - you will learn how to do X. More generally, we're going to answer the question we asked.
Yes. Write to the purpose you want to achieve. Keep in mind the purposes of your readers to achieve your purpose.
In keeping with the title, consider the incentives of all parties when writing.
Correct; I'm 40 now.
I'm 51.
I think you should be old enough to have been an adult when The Change occurred. Invasion of the Body Snatchers. Or something.
By my recollection, once upon a time, I'm thinking maybe 20 years ago, journalists used to write articles that articulated a point. They made a case for something. There was some presentation of evidence. Arguments. Arguments and evidence arrayed to make a point.
At least 10 years ago, I'm not sure when, I started seeing recognizable points being replaced by vomitous streams of consciousness, or article by anecdote. The blah blah blah continues until i stop reading, or gouge my eyes out.
Perhaps I've overstated the change a bit, but I think there has been a definite shift in the direction indicated. Do you perceive anything of the sort?
That might be related to the process of news organizations (like newspapers and magazines) going out of business.
They used to make money. Some of that money was used to pay more-or-less professional journalists to write more-or-less competent articles and stories. Large papers maintained their own foreign bureaus, for example, and had their own man-on-the-spot who lived in that country and didn't just fly in for a few hours to do a quickie reportage in front of the issue du jour.
For a fresh example consider a remarkably candid description of how Ben Rhodes, a mid-level White House official, was able to effectively manipulate the media coverage of the Iran nuclear deal. He is quite open about it:
As you have noticed, things changed. There is no money to pay professional journalists (or professional news photographers) any more. They've been replaced by "citizen journalists" and bloggers -- see HuffPo for where the whole thing goes.
Is it horrible and terrible and the end of the world? Well, as usual it depends :-) You gain some, you lose some. From my point of view you lose effortless access to competent summaries of what's happening. You gain somewhat effortful access (you need to do a LOT of filtering) to multiple and very different points of view. I count it as a net loss for issues I care little about and a net gain for issues I care more about. YMMV, of course.
I get that with the proliferation of outlets, and free media, compensation and quality have gone down.
But I'm not commenting on quality of the writing as much as the structure of what is written. The structures have changed away from the communication of a reasoned argument marshaling facts to support a point.
That structure is a major element of the "quality of writing".
Plus, of course, the incentives changed somewhat. If you are going out of business, clicks/eyeballs become more important than the reputation of a respectable publication.
Ok, I think I'm catching on.
It's not really that people were trained differently. (May or may not be). Instead, market conditions have changed, and therefore what the market produces has changed.
Evidence and argument takes time. Stories and stream of consciousness can be churned out. Whether that trade off is better to survive in current conditions is dependent on the particulars of the conditions.
I can see an argument that with the barriers to entry in publishing removed, the proliferation of outlets means fewer eyeballs for each. In that environment, revenue goes down.
Also, the number of people who want a reasoned and evidenced article is limited. Their tastes were probably overly accommodated in the past, because of the meritocratic competition for the few chairs at the table left smart, talented people at the table making decisions. With the click democracy and proliferation of outlets, the mass who have relatively little interest in reason and evidence will have more outlets more suited to their tastes.
See another current story on the fall of Salon which goes into some details about how quality first slipped and then went into free fall. Notable quote:
When you hire as cheap people as possible, and make them write every day as many articles as possible, you get neither reasonable jurnalists nor reasonable article structure.
My country is far behind the most current wave of clickbait journalism, but things have been reliably going downhill for years. I know a person who worked for one of the most respected newspapers in the country. Their job description was like this: "at morning, the boss gave them a random topic; till 4pm they had to write two long articles for the paper version, and two more short articles for the web version". Every day way like this; after a year most people were fired because they were burned out, and they were replaced by fresh ones. Mind you, this was one of the serious newspapers.
Now imagine yourself, that you get a task to write four articles about a topic you know nothing about. What can you do? Use google to get some background, then pick up the phone and call a few random people, ask them some questions, and write as fast as you can. Most people will refuse to answer the phone because they already have experience of being misrepresented by media. However, there are a few people who are willing to give you a simplistic opinion on any topic; any experienced journalist has a list of them, because when everything else fails and your boss is screaming at you, these people can save your day. So, you get some background by reading articles in English about the topic (yeah, we are stealing shamelessly), you invent a probable story, then you fish for some quotes, and then you hurry writing the text because you barely have time. Four stories a day, about a topic you previously never heard about.
When I write blog articles, I usually spend much more time writing an article than a journalist could afford.
You and Lumifer pointed out the economic aspects, by which I see that:
Rest of my reply to Lumifer: http://lesswrong.com/lw/nnq/when_considering_incentives_consider_the/dbch
Essays are written that way, not stories
Are you saying you were just telling a story? This was a work of fiction?
I'm puzzled as to why people think formulaic writing is good writing.
Thesis statements tell the reader whether they agree with the work or not in advance. I disagree firmly with their use, as they encourage a lazy style of reading in which you decide before you begin reading whether or not you're going to discard the evidence before you, or consider it.
Laziness is a virtue :-P
There are a great many things available for me to read and I would prefer to figure out whether I want to read a particular piece before finishing it. There are way too many idiots who managed to figure out how a keyboard works.
Winner.
Yep. Motivate the reader early that reading the article will be worthwhile.
I think I'm going to be using that one someday.
It takes about one paragraph to figure out whether or not a piece is worth finishing, with or without a thesis statement.
Often, yes. Not always.
They enable a lazy style of reading. They also enable the reverse: a style of reading where the reader knows ahead of time that certain of their buttons are about to be pushed, and takes measures in advance to minimize the effect.
For my part, I find both helpful. Sometimes it's clear that something is unlikely to be worth my time to read because it's entirely based on premises I don't accept. Sometimes it's clear that while the author's position is very different from mine, they have interesting things to say that I might find helpful. Sometimes their position is very different from mine and I read on in the hope that if I'm wrong I can be corrected. All of these require different attitudes while reading.
(Of course one can do without. But the more mental effort the author kindly saves me from expending in figuring out whether their piece is worth reading, whether I need to be reading it with an eye to revising my most deeply held beliefs, etc., etc., the more I can give to the actual content of what they've written.)
You find it helpful for the following cases: 1.) You're not going to agree no matter what evidence is presented, so it's not worth reading their evidence. 2.) They might have interesting things to say. 3.) They might be right, and you might be wrong.
The issue, of course, is that you can't actually distinguish between these three cases from the thesis statement; a properly-constructed thesis statement offers no information to actually tell you which attitude you should come into reading the work with, it only states what conclusion the body of evidence reaches.
Again, I am not concerned solely with thesis statements as such, but with the practice of beginning an article with an indication of where it's headed. Something that merely says what the conclusion is going to be, indeed, is unlikely to help much with distinguishing 1,2,3; but something that does a better job of indicating what's ahead may do much better.
Suppose, for instance, I am interested in some question about the morality of abortion in certain circumstances, and suppose my current opinion is that it's unproblematic. Article One begins "I shall argue that abortion is in all cases unbiblical and contrary to the traditions of the church". That might be a very useful article for Christians, but it's unlikely to offer me any useful guidance in thinking about abortion if I am not among their number; I reject some of their key premises and this article is unlikely to be justifying them. Article Two begins "The purpose of this article is to argue against abortion in circumstances X, not on the usual grounds that Y but because of the often-neglected Z". I've thought a bit about Z before and decided that it doesn't actually affect my opinions about abortion which are dominated by other considerations P,Q,R; but it hadn't previously occurred to me that Z is the case in circumstances X, so it might be interesting to read the article. Article Three begins "Abortion is widely held to be permissible in circumstances X because P, Q, and R; I shall argue that this is a mistake because P and Q don't actually hold and R is irrelevant because S." This speaks directly to my reasons for holding the position I do; if there are other indications that the author is intelligent and sensible, they may have compelling arguments and persuade me to rethink.
I'll merely point at the title, which says exactly what the article is about and what it is conveying.
What people are you talking about?
Schoolteachers teach formulaic writing because (1) it's easy to teach formulas and hard to teach actual clear thinking and good writing style, (2) it's easy to assess writing against a formula and hard to assess actual clear thinking and good writing style, (3) writing to a formula is relatively easy to do, compared with writing well without one, and (4) most schoolchildren's baseline writing skills are so terrible that giving them a formula and saying "do it like this" makes for a considerable improvement.
Schoolteachers suffering from déformation professionelle may think formulaic writing is good writing. Their pupils may think the same, having been taught that way; hopefully those who end up doing much writing will learn better in due course.
Aside from that -- does anyone actually "think formulaic writing is good writing"? I don't see anyone here saying it is. What I do see is some people saying "this article was hard to read and would have been improved by more indication of where it's going, the sort of thing that writing-by-formula tends to encourage". I hope you can see the difference between "formulaic writing is good" and "this specific element of one kind of formulaic writing is actually often a good idea".
Fair enough. But note that buybuydandavis's complaint isn't really "there isn't a thesis statement" but "after a couple of paragraphs, I have no idea where this is going": a thesis statement would be one way to address that, but not the only one. (And your own articles on LW, thesis statements or no, seem to me to have the key property BBDD is complaining casebash's lacks: it is made clear from early on where the article's going, and there are sufficient signposts to keep the reader on track. Possible exception: "The Winding Path", which you say was an aesthetic experiment.)
Yes.
The title tells you exactly what the article is about and where it was going.
The article isn't ambiguous, however. If anything, it's overextended and overwritten in support of that point - yes, we get it, everybody in the construction is suspicious of everybody else's incentives and for genuinely good reasons, and everybody is engaging in motivated reasoning.
The only "confusing" aspect is if you read the body of work looking for a hidden purpose.
Except that most of the article makes rather little contact with the idea stated in the title, and instead concerns incidental details of the squabble between the As and the Bs. Or, to put it differently:
This is exactly why ...
The article reads very much like other articles I have read before that have a hidden purpose. So I think there may be one. Why is that unreasonable?
The incidental details are the point of the article, however; they're an in-depth example of how the incentives of the two groups interact and intersect.
Instrumentally, it detracted from your understanding of the article.
It seems to me that the article could have done just fine with about half the quantity of incidental details. I am guessing that in fact you agree, given your description of it as "overextended".
What about it do you believe I failed to understand?
Quite, yes. I don't think it's a perfect article - indeed, my primary issue with the criticisms of it are that they are criticizing the wrong things.
I have no idea. But you've indicated, if not in those exact words, you found it difficult to read.
I've indicated that I found it harder to read than it should have been because of the barrage of incidental details and the constant feeling that it's really about something else besides its surface meaning.
I was (as you will readily see if you read my original comment) perfectly well able to extract what in your view was the entire point of the article. I just felt like I had to do more work to do so than was warranted.
[EDITED to add:] It seems that you actually had the same experience. So apparently we are agreed that casebash's article was stuffed with unnecessary incidental details, that it gave the impression of having some kind of hidden meaning, and that these made it harder to read; the difference is ... what? That you have decided, I know not on what basis, that I was "mindkilled" whereas you "treated it as practice in dealing with mindkilling". Except that you haven't offered any actual evidence that I was mindkilled (I'm pretty sure I wasn't, for what it's worth) or that I was any less successful than you were in understanding the article.
You do make one specific complaint about a line of criticism that, e.g., buybuydandavis and I have made. We say that it's not clear where the article is heading and it could have used more signposts up front; you say no, there's a thesis statement right in the title and that's all anyone needs. (And you suggest that this indicates a failure to make sense of the article, which you blame on mind-killed-ness.)
But you are missing the point. The title, considered as thesis statement, is manifestly insufficient to explain what's going on in the article, because most of the article consists of (what you yourself describe as) overextended elaboration of details of the argument between the As and the Bs. This is what readers could use some help in navigating. With only the title to go on, the best we can do is to pay careful attention to each paragraph and analyse the motivations of both As and Bs therein. But that's a lot of work for very little payback, because then basically every paragraph is telling us more or less the same thing in more or less the same way.
What would have helped with this is some framing material at the start indicating one or more of the following: (1) This story is functioning as a metaphor for such-and-such a thing in the real world; you will follow the details more easily if you match them up with reality. (2) The details of this story aren't terribly important in themselves; if you ignore some of the details you will lose nothing. (3) The really important bit of this story, as far as the point of the article goes, is such-and-such; the rest is there just to give it context.
... Or, of course, just losing about half of the incidental details. But buybuydandavis and I were both willing to give casebash the benefit of the doubt and assume there was a reason why all those details were there.
Formula's are quite helpful in achieving an end. If someone has already achieved an end in a certain way, you can use that way too, you don't have to reinvent the wheel.
Given the general limits of pedagogues, what is taught is the formula, and not the ends. That was how I was taught when young. Do this. That's the right way.
In grad school, my advisor gave both the end to be achieved, and a formula for doing so. The end was getting people to read and understand the article. The formula was a means to do so.
If you want people to read your articles, you need to motivate them to do so. They need to anticipate a payoff of value to them, which will we weighed against the anticipated cost.
If you want people to understand, you should help them to do so.
I want to use my time efficiently getting value for me, and appreciate it when writers help make that happen. Help me assess the value of their article to me up front. Help me to extract the value from their article.
I prefer the ultimate lazy style of reading - to not read at all if I don't see value. I don't think I'm alone in that.
If this is supposed to be a name swap for an actual conflict its too mangled to get throught. On the otherhand it seems messy and unclear as a pure hypothetical. It is some kind abstraction over many such conflicts? Alpago and Byzantine also seem awfully integrated into a single economy and how a country membership now is an economic class. I would expect two countries economies to mainly funciton within their own context and mechanicsw and not so automatically lean to others.
Also such phrases as "everyone who is reasonable now acknowledges that" are very shaded. I don't know whether it was intended to be used in that capacity its not a automatic "beyond reasonable doubt" disclaimer. Somewhat recently when I thought there were such stances and they "didn't get shot down" made me doubt the objectiveness of such claims. After hell experiences a couple of winters "when hell freezes" no more means "never". Addtionally what is the difference between "you are saying X but you are not reasonable" and "you are saying X, but you are just biased"? Also it can be understood as an expression of closed mindedness. No matter what your reasons or evidence they must be wrong if that is the conclusion. Or that if you say X I am going to disbelieve you as a person.
This scenario is explicitly about a hypothetical oppressed group. Some parts of it are explicitly motivated by gender discussions, many parts of the scenario are not supposed to be analogous.
In meshing together multiple issues there is risk that you think of interactions of phenomena that actually do not interact because they are part of different series of events.
For example genders are way more economically integrated than countries. But genders also usually don't have leadership hierarchies. Usually hypotheticals work by cutting out stuff that is inessential to the central logic of the phenomen making it easier to see and reason about. If you just slap together random mechanics taht might or migth not be relevant its going to be a very unintuitive franksteins of fact and fiction where you don't know which part is which.
There is something to the idea of appriciating how several social effects work together to make systems and complex outcomes. And about discovering social effects that are in effect that are not obvious. But trying to make both at once seems more like a recipe for confusion rather than clarity.
Huh?
Women and men tend to live in each other proximity and atleast have occasional contact. You don't in the same way spatially mix different states.
There are some effects where for example nurses can have disproportionally female composition. But even in such a setting the nurses might be regularly interacting with doctors which don't have the same kind of gender skew. How the nurses conduct themselfs might have very practical signifcance to possibly male doctors.
However things need to play out rather wonkily if a corporation has employess in two states. And one state can fix signficant laws that don't have any impact on the other state (as they don't hold there). There are some effects where for example some criminals find mexico to be a easy drug production place and the US a handy market for them. But these tend to be less intensive and don't reac tto each other so well.
Oh, I see what you meant.
This isn't about rationality and incentives. Treating groups as if they were individuals is politics.
Politics is 95% incentives.
No. Policy may be about incentives. Politics is mostly about misdirection of attention and taking advantage of tribal instincts to gloss over individual incentives.
I agree with other commenters that this reads like an obfuscated version of some real-world issue (perhaps A and B are white and black people in the USA or men and women or something?), and it ends up (for me, at least) not working well either as an oblique commentary on any real-world issue or as an abstract discussion of how to think well: it feels like politics and therefore stirs up the same defensive reflexes, the obfuscation makes it hard to be sure what the actual point is, I'm wasting brainpower trying to "decode" what I'm reading, and it's full of incidental details that I can't tell whether I need to be keeping track of (because they're probably highly relevant if this is a coded discussion of some real-world issue, but not so relevant if they're just illustrations of a general principle or even just details added for verisimilitude).
I propose the following principle: the mind-killing-ness of politics can't be removed merely by light obfuscation, so if you want to talk about a hot-button issue (or to talk about a more general point for which the hot-button issue provides a good illustration) it's actually usually better to be explicit about what that issue is. Even if only to disavow it by saying something like "I stumbled onto this issue when arguing about correlations between race and abortion among transgender neoreactionaries, but I think it applies more generally. Please try not to be distracted by any political applications you may see -- they aren't the point and I promise I'm not trying to smuggle anything past your defences.".
As to the actual point the article is (explicitly) making: I agree but it seems kinda obvious. Of course considering the incentives on all sides may be difficult to do when you're in the middle of a political battle, but I'm not sure that having read an article like this will help much in that situation.
So you noticed your defensive reflexes rising up, and spent effort trying to decide what you should be defensive about, instead of taking the opportunity to try to analyze and relax your defensive reflexes?
"Politics is the mindkiller" is a problem, not an excuse.
Nope.
I noticed my defensive reflexes doing their thing. Then I (1) continued to read the article while dealing appropriately with those defensive reflexes, and (2) mentioned the uprising of those reflexes as evidence that the author had not successfully made a non-political-mindkilling article out of whatever potentially-mindkilling issue s/he had in mind.
I'm not sure what you mean by that, but if you mean that you think the original article killed my mind (and that rather than trying to avoid that I just said "politics is the mindkiller so I couldn't help myself" or something) then I invite you to show me some evidence for that.
You read a perfectly clear and frankly rather tediously overexplained article and apparently find it murky and ambiguous. More, you think there's a hidden political agenda in a piece about fictional politics in which the author went to some length to state that both sides are guilty of motivated reasoning, which would make it a failure as a political hit piece if it named any names.
Read it again. Read the title first. Everything in the article is in support of the title. It is, in fact, extremely boring in its tedious repetition of the same basic principle, over and over again, and it is in fact quite balanced in its attacks on both parties. If it helps, imagine it's talking about, say, communist-era Chinese atrocities against some of their modern holdings.
So, there are two possibilities. One is that casebash has simply written a tedious and overextended article out of mere incompetence. That's certainly possible. Another is that the article is tedious and overextended because it is in fact trying to do something else besides arguing for the very obvious thesis contained in its title.
What other thing might it be doing? Well, the conflict it describes seems like it pattern-matches tolerably well to various hot-button issues of exactly the sort that people sometimes try to approach obliquely in the hope of not pushing people's buttons too hard. Hence the conjecture, made by more than one reader, that there was some somewhat-hidden purpose.
Personally, I suspect casebash might be Russian, and that's why it is written this way.
Given that it's a parable describing a common fault mode of human political interactions, it could easily be pattern-matched onto a dozen different situations. Indeed, pretty much any situation in which there are historical grievances; I doubt there's a European country around to which one side or the other could not apply.
More to the point, it can be pattern-matched to claims about real-world political situations that may not necessarily describe the actual real-world political situation very well, where the parable is being used to sneak those claims through as "hypotheticals" so that people don't dispute them.
Often a claim that two sides are on par with each other is
1) false, and 2) a tactic used by partisans.
http://dailyanarchist.com/2011/04/15/allopathy-versus-homeopathy/ : "Most people are unaware of the silent warfare that has been waged between two distinctly different philosophies in the field of medicine.... The anarchist community would be served well to learn the differences between these two medical approaches to health care... The debate between allopathy and homeopathy seems worthy in a marketplace of ideas... "
Yes. Explicit is good. Be clear to the reader.
If the point was a general principle to be illustrated by use of particular real world examples, don't obfuscate the examples by turning them into hypotheticals.
Use them, and be clear you're using them as illustrations, and that the goal isn't to talk about the particulars of the political issue.
Or, just make up a true hypothetical. A hypothetical a lot like a real world issue leaves an uncertainty in the reader on whether we're setting up a hypothetical for a general point or we're talking about a real world particular in general terms.
Political examples are probably bad to use for general purposes regardless, as the interpretations of those events differ between people, so that communication with your reader is made more difficult, and your inferences about his map, and his about yours, and yours about his about yours, ... make for a ton of uncertain inference about what is being communicated.
Two interacting sources of inferential distance between the reader and your point. Probably a bad idea.
This scenario is explicitly about a hypothetical oppressed group. Some parts of it are explicitly motivated by gender discussions, many parts of the scenario are not supposed to be analogous.
I think it's great that you focused on Byzantians and Alpagoans. On the other hand I get the feeling that the story is unneccarily complex for the point you want to make.