Not trying to obfuscate, just avoid sensitive terminology by sticking to analogy. I’m borrowing from Scott Alexander’s tendency to do that for touchy subjects. Also not putting high confidence in my thesis. Other people’s comments have already moved me a bit away from my initial position.
There’s a relevant difference in that when Scott does it, the analogy is used only for part of the post—the topic is introduced beforehand, which lets people immediately start tracking how well the analogy holds, and the analogy is dropped afterwards, for a meta-level discussion of where the analogy works and where it fails. With this post, the analogy is used from the beginning without stating the topic first, which means that people who aren’t interested in that topic can’t tell that the article is one that they should skip, and people’s analogy-accuracy tracking doesn’t come online until mid-way through.
To me a core difference between what you are doing and what Scott is doing is that Scott adds empiric backing to the claims he makes and doesn’t just stay at the level of a narrative.
When it comes to making claims in sensitive topics, it’s important to back up claims with citations and you skip that part by staying with the analogy level.
Not trying to obfuscate, just avoid sensitive terminology by sticking to analogy. I’m borrowing from Scott Alexander’s tendency to do that for touchy subjects. Also not putting high confidence in my thesis. Other people’s comments have already moved me a bit away from my initial position.
There’s a relevant difference in that when Scott does it, the analogy is used only for part of the post—the topic is introduced beforehand, which lets people immediately start tracking how well the analogy holds, and the analogy is dropped afterwards, for a meta-level discussion of where the analogy works and where it fails. With this post, the analogy is used from the beginning without stating the topic first, which means that people who aren’t interested in that topic can’t tell that the article is one that they should skip, and people’s analogy-accuracy tracking doesn’t come online until mid-way through.
To me a core difference between what you are doing and what Scott is doing is that Scott adds empiric backing to the claims he makes and doesn’t just stay at the level of a narrative.
When it comes to making claims in sensitive topics, it’s important to back up claims with citations and you skip that part by staying with the analogy level.