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Punoxysm comments on Open thread, July 28 - August 3, 2014 - Less Wrong Discussion
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The point of a parable is not to de-bias a heated political topic and then draw direct conclusions about the original topic. It is an attempt to extract one or two key ideas that tend to get muddied up by contentious object level issues. It is essentially an extended analogy.
If someone makes an argument of the form "If A is X, then Y", then a parable is an attempt to extract this idea form the political arena and then test in on new inputs. "B is X, but is it Y?".
It is not an attempt to get rid of the finer details of an issue, but rather to figure out what those details are, and which details are irrelevant.
I get this. And I think many parables profoundly fail in this. They create a simplistic narrative and conclusion, then make it harder to argue about by transferring the logic over to an analogue.
Then it's hard to get the discussion back onto important details.
De-biasing and removing words that trigger an immediate emotional response is one major use of analogies too though.