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gjm comments on When considering incentives, consider the incentives of all parties - Less Wrong
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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.