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.
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.
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.
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… ”
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Well, I will rephase. I think pre-meditated killing of another human being against the targets will outside of immidiet self-defence in times of peace should be illegal. That should disinclude capital punishment and allow for possbility of euthanasia. Cops can still gun down gun nuts, but essentially only when they violently resist arrest.
I was thinking of the word “murder” in a more neutral “pre-meditated act of causing the death of another human being for the sake of it” sense. Over what it is legitemate to declare war I leave to separate consideration but I consider it important they be declared. Capital punishment for war crimes I am less worried about althought I am happy and accepting of my countrys stance that its not a valid legal consequene even for them.
Some people would say that it might be considerable for extremely bad crimes but I disagree. I think for example that Norway had adequate and proper consequence for Breivik. Everyone whoms beliefs I have got even a little traction of that favours for a consequence of death for him has essentially the same flaw in logic that the motive of itself Breivik did, that violences solves something or meaningfully communicates something. Argument via stick is not a persuasive argument.
How do you feel about jail sentences for criminals? Isn’t forcibly imprisoning someone basically “argument via stick”?
I don’t think jails main function to be deterrant. Jail can give room for reflection and it can be used to provide a more structured environment. Various interventions are more easily carried out in jail context. Jail prevents further commitment of most types of crime. At least for their stay in jail they will have to carry out a way less crimeful life.
Actually, deterrence is a big part of why we incarcerate criminals. I don’t really think that jails (in many parts of the world anyway) are very conducive to positive interventions, rehabilitation, etc.
Obviously capital punishment is more effective than jail in preventing the criminal from committing additional crimes.
I’m not sure that is true. Many jails are full of criminal activity, e.g. drug dealing, other contraband smuggling, violent assault, etc. And, criminal gangs operate in many jails in the US and many other parts of the world as well.
Capital punihsment doesn’t help the convict to live a crimelss life where a jail does.
I do take not that jail is described as deterrence and that a proper “no argument to the stick” line would want to abolish that. However if we are going to discourage people with negative consequences jail has less downsides to it than capital punishment.
I do come from a part of the world where rehabilatory stances are taken more seriously and the prison conditions are kept way more orderly (which like takes money). I can speak only for my half on why I approve having jails around and how I would like them to be run. US type prisons are very in line with the will of the voter but I disagree with the popular stance there to handle prisoners.
In a documentary apparently one inmates motive for the crime was to be incarcinated in order to buy their drugs at prison prices instead of street prices. While I understand this from the convicts point of view I don’t think that any system that allows this to happen is a good one. While you can’t 100% remove them because the smugglers have pretty good incentives to try, if it is too much accepted as a inevitability the countermeasures can be too lax.
Yes, its my own rather limited special group rather than being universal. But I think we don’t think we are especially non-murdery but see it as a natural extension on civilization eradicating free-for-all murder. But I guess on other systems the state merely has a monopoly on murder that it can do at its discretion.
While its true that given signficant poltical will it could be changed it migth not be true that majority of the relevant countriers think its okay/neutral to do. The political process involves compromises and this can be an accepted downside. Also inhibiting dispersion of political ideas either by limiting media or removing opposing political stances means the choice is not that cognitive. In a way by doing such things the actors admit that its worthwhile to bother doing it meaning they don’t dare face the “fair fight” where the people have all the options available and are informed about all the choices. So when the process is rigged its outcome isn’t as strong an argument to show what the people want.
Maybe its the question of what are the relevant crime statistics. Having heard and read about such a black person committing a serious violence is more likely to get death-sentence while a white gets life in prison. Compared to a general population there are disproportionally more black people doing crimes. However if you controlled for socioeconomical status a lto of it could be that blacks are majority in poor areas. But even then its common to hear stories where police are more active in regards to black people. They also tend to use more serious measures against them. A black person doesn’t need to be armed for a cop to start fearing for his life and discharging weapons and tasers.
There is even the joke of “Well white people can’t use the N word but atleast we can use phrases like ‘thanks, for the warning officer’”. There is reason to suspect that there are a lot of “false positives” of black people being processed by the legal system where a lighter process could have sufficed. Still it gives an order of magnitude that the prospensity to convict blacks for murder and such is weaker than overall prospensity to charge blacks for crimes.
So your special group looks down on all the other groups.
So what’s your position on your groups laws against “hate speech”?
How is the relevant to the point?
Yes, that’s because black people are more likely to commit crimes and high-black areas tend to be high crime areas.
The same is true for a white person. You may be biased because “cop shoots unarmed black” type stories tend to be overplayed in the media, and key details like “the unarmed black was high on marijuana/speed and was going for the cop’s gun” tend to be omitted from the stories.
This is a hypothetical. Perhaps I should have said a 100 years in instead of 50, but, for example, practically all Americans acknowledge that slavery was wrong.
To my knowledge slavers didn’t win (if there ever was a slaver-side). Winners being right is business as usual but here losers are put forward as being acknowledged as having been right.
One could make a more compelling case for capital punishment. Beheadings in middle-eastern countries are looked down upon, assasinations being involved in Russian politics is often critizied and you can get executed for rather political actions in China. However the face of the western world, US, has a death-row that is disproportionally black. However many european countries disagree enough with the US stance that they embargo the relevant execution drugs to be supplied to US. However being for capital punishment is not seen as an unreasonable stance and states are allowed to legalise it. One doesn’t expect an armed conflict over it but its more of a case that angry brutes are going to execute regardless of ethics.
For things that are more universally seen as transgression one might consider the spanish inquisition or witch trials. I do not know anyone that today thinks those were the “right thing to do” while it might be possible that those people exist. But I doubt any of the people organising them faced any consequences for having done so. But the victims of the transagressions don’t seem to demand any relief either.
Also while white people came to america first the spread of new diseases was accidental. However at some point it might have become intentional for some people. That is pretty dirty business and I can’t see people reallly seriously defend those people. But for what might have been ethnically targeted bioweapon mass-murder it is quite easily not given any attention. And while native american want and do have special rights its usually not seen from the lense of making up for bad things done.
By whom? Not by (the majority of) the Middle-Easterners, Russians, or Chinese.
Disproportionate to what? Compared to the relevant crime statistics it’s disproportionally white.
Yes, this is a combination of reasons (3) and (4) from my list.
Edit: also in that example there are other highly plausible explanations for the difference in number of CEOs.
time’s point remains—I doubt you can find any instance of a large group of people who generally acknowledge they were in the wrong and are responsible for significant unjustified harm to another large group. Winners or losers, they will always place the responsibility elsewhere—bad leaders, protection against a threat, economic necessity, whatever.
Be careful with such assertions. Practically all believe and acknowledge that it’s wrong now. There are a significant number who don’t think it’s categorically and forever wrong across all of history. I’m not even sure what “wrong” means when applied to historical situations.
And even to the extent that most (if not “practically all” do condem the historical practice, there aren’t many who think they personally are responsible for the harms.
Post-WW2 Germany.
Only because they ultimately lost.
Original thread here.
Great example. The vast majority of Germans that I’ve met or read about do not classify themselves as responsible for the wrongs of their country. Acknowledging that the leaders and the country was in the wrong is not the same as acknowledging that the current group is the same entity and members are responsible for the wrongs.
Are they proud of famous historical Germans who did good things? Do they invoke past Germans when the past Germans do things they approved of?
Hard to generalize, but I’ll try. I’m sure some do, but most that I experience, like most Americans I talk with, don’t really do those things. They’ll invoke current examples, and assert general German (or American) attitudes and skills, but don’t seem to think that historical figures or events are things they can take credit/blame for
Personally, no. But they identify with an entity (a tribe) which they agree is responsible.
Are we talking at the individual level or at the social-group level? At the individual level the phrase “any instance of a large group of people” makes little sense. And at the social-group level personal responsibility isn’t relevant, we are talking, I think, about I belong to group X and group X is responsible attitude.
I just mean that I am part of the group that thinks murder outside of war should be illegal. I not a relativist in the sense that for others its negation should/could hold. I think they are wrong and misguided and their reasons for their belief and their stated reasons are insufficient. I could be deluded that everybody things that murder is wrong. but no there are people that genuinely believe and effectively enact that running a country by a few murders is appropriate.
Stane on hate speech that is encouraging and calling for criminal acts is okay to be punishable but purely communicative speech should be allowed. Having a minority political opinion should not in itself be a basis for punishment (and is not sufficient grounds for “political instability” security arguments).
But even if the speech freeness conditions are not perfect I don’t think it gives basis to go invade or mess too much with internal affairs of a state. But it does mean for me that it is more okay to treat the countrys offiical stance to be attirbuted as of their opinion on who are in (de facto) power. There are lines of argument in that if the leadership deviates too much from the will of the people they would bother to revolt to revoke the technically illegimately held power. Thus even power illegimately gained needs to be atleast passively accepted granting it a sort of genuine legitimacy. But here arguments about how cost-effective it is to genuinely influence the political direction are strong. If there is a official position and disagreeing with it gets you murdered it does tell what the legitimate stance would be.
I am suspecting taht the reason is that poors are more liekly to commit crimes and using race as a proxy for social-economical status doesn’t add anything significant. That is “high-black area-> high-crime area” is a correlation not a causation.
I guess my main emphasis was that police have more readiness to use force against blacks than against whites. The tendency for media to give attention selectively doesn’t totally explain it. There are also additional media effects that play a role. A story is more likely to be a news story if it features a white victim as opposed to a black victim. And for example in the recent gorilla story somehow the father that was not on the scene was found relevant even with his past being somehow relevant. A embarassing reason for it is probably because there were details that resonated with casting that person in a villain role.
Black people are searched more often, their treatment while police direct actions towards them is more hostile. a black person doesn’t need to exhibit any actual sign of terror such as wielding weapon or be found near a crime scene or anythign like that. Just being black makes police likely to treat you as a higher threat. This is against the principle of “innocent until proven guilty”. One can argue whether using skin color as part of threat assement is legimate or that it doesn’t happen. But most of the time it seems its seen as illegimate and it does happen.
Everyone believes that. Of course, since the standard definition of [murder] is “the killing of another human being without justification or valid excuse” or “unlawful killing with malice aforethought”, this is a somewhat tautological belief.
Well, of course.
In fact, one may treat this as a circular argument: “they were in the wrong” == “they ultimately lost” X-)
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.
Considering the responses I observe, I’m going to say—well done. You’ve made people deeply uncomfortable without giving them a specific reason to be uncomfortable. Granted, in typical Less Wrongian fashion, they’d rather criticize you than take an opportunity to observe their own minds.
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. Take this as a learning opportunity in how to be less mind-killed. The correct stance is not the stance you already hold, and by trying to find a real-world analogue, you’re admitting that your view is being informed, not by rationality, but by tribal politics.
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?
People said as much? And your own impulse to treat my praise as tribal impulse, rather than its facial reasoning. You’re motivated.
I did notice the effect when I was reading it. The difference is that I treated it as practice in dealing with mindkilling.
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.
No, but suggesting I am “influenced by tribal motivations” while asking for evidence is. You’re mixing an insult with a request for information; you’ve already decided I am wrong.
As for evidence, it is provided by the exceptionally poor quality of the criticisms. Fighting the hypothetical, fighting the hypothetical, fighting the hypothetical, suspicion of hidden purpose, a claim that an article whose title is its thesis statement has no thesis statement, and another suspicion of hidden purpose. There are real criticisms to be made, and their absence is quite conspicuous given the strongly negative tone of the commentary.
Real-world hypotheticals are often made with hidden purposes in mind. It may end up being a good idea to fight the hypothetical, when faced with the tactic of stating claims about real things as “hypotheticals” in order to get the audience to avoid questioning them.
Simply: I disagree.
Given your own charge that other people are mindkilled it’s interesting that you see that charge as an insult and not as a factual description. I didn’t intent to insult, but to state a hypothesis. A hypothesis that I stated with the word “maybe” to mark uncertainty. Don’t generalize from one example.
Stating a hypothesis does not mean I decided that believe a certain outcome. It just put forward a point about which I intent to communicate.
The opposite of fighting the hypothetical is to avoid critical thinking and not challenge it’s assumptions.
The problem with the hypothetical is that it ignores how beliefs in a society actually form. That’s a process that’s vital to the topic at hand. At a core it assumes that a society has beliefs about a war hold 50 years ago that have nothing to do with propaganda.
It’s a point that I might made irrespectable of whether the story I’m reading favors a group that I support politically.
What does “conspicuous” mean here? That you should treat people as being an enemy tribe? That’s tribal thinking.
It’s not thinking though the actual concent of the post.
It is a claim of irrationality; yes, it should be taken as insulting.
I hypothesize you may be an idiot. (Do you see the issue?)
Reversed stupidity isn’t intelligence. Something can be poor rationality, and its opposite can be poor rationality as well.
No it doesn’t. It makes it clear that there’s motivated reasoning—and thus propaganda—going on on both sides of the equation.
No. It means there are clear and obvious problems with the article that COULD have been criticized, but weren’t, in favor of dumb tribal things to criticize.
Does anyone feel that they were made deeply uncomfortable?
For me, it’s more like “a long complicated story only to illustrate something that was obvious from the beginning; probably contains a hidden metaphor that I was too tired to decode”.