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”.
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.
What about it do you believe I failed to understand?
I have no idea. But you’ve indicated, if not in those exact words, you found it difficult to read.
The ending is kind of unsatisfactory, though, as a result of relatively poor plot pacing; it feels like the author got bored.
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.
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.
Personally, I suspect casebash might be Russian, and that’s why it is written this way.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
Instrumentally, it detracted from your understanding of the article.
I’ll merely point at the title, which says exactly what the article is about and what it is conveying.
It takes about one paragraph to figure out whether or not a piece is worth finishing, with or without a thesis statement.
I’m not sure what you mean by that, but if you mean that you think the original article killed my mind… 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.
Aside from that—does anyone actually “think formulaic writing is good writing”?
Yes.
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”.
The title tells you exactly what the article is about and where it was going.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Politics is 95% incentives.
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.
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.
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.
Imagine a machine that created $100 every time you (and only you, you can’t hire somebody to do it for you, or give it to somebody else) push a button; more, this is a magical $100 imbued with anti-munchkin charms (such that any investments purchased never gain value, any raw materials transformed or skills purchased remain at most the same value (so research is out), and any capital machines purchased with it provoke the same effect on any raw materials they themselves process, and so on and so forth; and no, burning the money or anything else for fuel doesn’t subvert the charm, or even allow you to stop the heat death of the universe). Assuming you can push it three times per second, fifteen minutes of effort buys you a really nice car. An hour buys you a nice house. A solid workday buys you a nice mansion. A week, and you could have a decent private island. A few months and you might be able to have a house on the moon—but because of the anti-munchkin charms, it won’t jump-start space exploration or the space industry or anything like that.
You have, in effect, as much personal utility as you want.
There are three things about this scenario:
First, you consume utility in this process, you don’t create it. The anti-munchkin charms mean you are a parasite on society; the space travel you purchase is taking resources away from some other enterprise.
Second, even without the anti-munchkin charms wrt capital goods, money is a barter token, not utility in and of itself. This machine cannot be used to make society better off directly, it merely allows you to redistribute resources in an inefficient manner. Insofar as you might be able to make society better off, that is dependent on you being about to distribute resources more efficiently than they already are—and if you can recognize global market inefficiencies with sufficient clarity to correct them, there are more productive ways for you to spend your time than pushing a button that dispenses what is relatively chump change.
Third, the first thousand times you push the button will make a substantively larger difference in your life than the second thousand times. Each iterative $100 has diminishing returns over the previous $100, even without taking the inflationary effect this will have on society into account.
What kind of causality is this, given that you assert that the correct thing to do in smoking lesions is refrain from smoking, and smoking lesions is one of the standard things where CDT says to smoke?
Recursive causality.
“A causes B, therefore B causes A” is a fallacy no matter what arguments you put forward.
Perfect mutual correlation means both that A->B and that B->A.
CDT asserts the opposite, and so if you claim this then you disagree with CDT.
No it doesn’t.
You don’t understand what counterfactuals are.
A counterfactual is a state of existence which is not true of the universe. It is not a contradiction.
You said “you shouldn’t smoke”, which is a decision-theoretical claim, not a specification. It’s consistent with EDT, but not CDT.
No it isn’t, it’s a statement about the universe: If you smoke, you’ll get lesions. It’s written into the specification of the universe; what decision theory you use doesn’t change the characteristics of the universe.
In other words, you’re denying the exact thing that CDT asserts.
No. You don’t get to specify a universe without the kind of causality that the kind of CDT we use in our universe depends on, and then claim that this says something significant about decision theory. Causality in our hypothetical works differently.
Which is what a counterfactual is.
No it isn’t.
Whatever your theory is, it is denying core claims that CDT makes, so you’re denying CDT (and implicitly assuming EDT as the method for making decisions, your arguments literally map directly onto EDT arguments).
No it isn’t. In terms of CDT, we can say that smoking causes the gene; this isn’t wrong, because, according to the universe, anybody who smokes has the gene; if they didn’t, they do now, because the correlation is guaranteed by the laws of the universe. No matter how much work you prepared to ensure you didn’t have the gene in advance of smoking, the law of the universe says you have it now. No matter how many tests you ran, they were all wrong.
It may seem unintuitive and bizarre, because our own universe doesn’t behave this way—but when you find yourself in an alien universe, stomping your foot and insisting that the laws of physics should behave the way you’re used to them behaving is a fast way to die. Once you introduce a perfect predictor, the universe must bend to ensure the predictions work out.
This implicitly assumes EDT.
No it doesn’t. It assumes a “perfect predictor” is what it is. I don’t give a damn about evidence—we’re specifying properties of a universe here.
But that’s not what CDT counterfactuals do.
CDT assumes causality makes sense in the universe. Your hypotheticals don’t take place in a universe with the kind of causality causal decision theory depends upon.
You cut off previous nodes. As the choice to smoke doesn’t causally affect the gene, smoking doesn’t counterfactually contradict the prediction.
In the case of a perfect predictor, yes, smoking specifies which gene you have. You don’t get to say “Everybody who smokes has this gene” as a property of the universe, and then pretend to be an exception to a property of the universe because you have a bizarre and magical agency that gets to bypass properties of the universe. You’re a part of the universe; if the universe has a law (which it does, in our hypotheticals), the law applies to you, too.
We have a perfect predictor. We do something the perfect predictor predicted we wouldn’t. There is a contradiction there, in case you didn’t notice; either it’s not, in fact, the perfect predictor we specified, or we didn’t do the thing. One or the other. And our hypothetical universe is constructed such that the perfect predictor is a perfect predictor; therefore, we don’t get to violate its predictions.
Simply: I disagree.