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

-5 Post author: casebash 29 May 2016 01:47PM

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Comment author: gjm 31 May 2016 01:28:38PM -1 points [-]

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.

Comment author: casebash 01 June 2016 12:33:06AM -2 points [-]

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.