• Significant Digits (Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality: sequel intended to conclude the story; more action-focused with a literary bent, and much less didactic/"author tract" and Harry-focused than MoR. Highly recommended for anyone who liked MoR.)

People said as much?

No, they didn't.

User time manages to point out the inconsistency of the scenario. This isn't something that happens in a timespan of 50 years without there being an cause that's the OP left out.

A person who actually focuses on the scenario as presented instead of focusing on the transfer to other scenario's like blacks or women sees that problem with the scenario. The fact that he sees it suggest him not being mindkilled.

Dagon argued against thinking in political tribal terms in the first place. Saying that you oppose categorizing people into two distinct nonoverlapping groups is no sign of being mindkilled but a reasonable argument. It's no sign that he's motivated by feeling aligned with either of the groups.

I wouldn't expect gjm who has general liberal political views to criticize a scenario that advocates liberal political ideas because he's mindkilled. He manages to critizise it despite it being a scenario for "his tribe".

buybuydandavis points out that the essay isn't good writing because it doesn't start out by stating it's thesis. That might be motivated by political impulses but can also simply be motivated by a preference for clear writing.

Slider also made a point about writing style. The fact that you don't address an argument about writing on it's merits but judge it as mindkilled could be explained by tribal impulsives.

My post on the other hand addresses what you are writing and asks for the evidence that you have for your beliefs. That's a standard rhetorical move. Engaging in it is no signal for being mindkilled.

tediously overexplained [...] extremely boring [...] tedious repetition

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.

The title tells you exactly what the article is about and where it was going.

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:

it's overextended and overwritten

This is exactly why ...

you read the body of work looking for a hidden purpose.

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?

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.

they encourage a lazy style of reading

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.

So you [...]

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.

a problem, not an excuse

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.

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".

I disagree firmly with their use

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.)

they encourage a lazy style of reading

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.)

Other readers: If you're trying hard to figure out which side you should take based on the real-world analogue you think this could be representing... well, you're mind-killed.

Do you have any good argument why you think that's why anyone here opposed the article? Maybe it's just your own tribal impulsives speaking?