Hi Derek, 

I think it might be useful for you to read it again. Though it was a while since I had read it, on re-reading I can see that Nagel also uses reduction to illustrate his point. And from the article it is clear that the interpretation I used was correct. He does make the point about reduction

We may call this the subjective character of experience. It is not captured by any of the familiar, recently devised reductive analyses of the mental, for all of them are logically compatible with its absence. 

The "something" is the description, as I have repeatedly told you. You can read in post http://philpapers.org/post/23998 me informing you of that again. The footnote I think you are were mentioning is footnote 6

Therefore the analogical form of the English expression "what it is like" is misleading. It does not mean "what (in our experience) it resembles," but rather "how it is for the subject himself".

But that is not a declaration that Nagel did not mean "like" in a comparative way like you suggested. If you read where the reference to the footnote is made:

And if there is conscious life elsewhere in the universe, it is likely that some of it will not be describable even in the most general experiential terms available to us.

You can perhaps understand that it is simply that it is not necessary for us to understand the description (the "something" the conscious experience is like), because it is not necessary that the experience resembles ours. This is confirmed when he later writes:

I am not adverting here to the alleged privacy of experience of its possessor. The point of view in question is not one accessible only to a single individual....There is a sense in which phenomenological facts are perfectly objective: one person can know or say of another what the quality of the other's experience is. They are subjective, however, in the sense that even this objective ascription of experience is possible only for someone sufficiently similar to the object of ascription to be able to adopt his point of view - to understand the ascription in the first person as well as in the third so to speak. 

Also just for reference, you had stated:

Nagel’s proposition – or at least the proposition allegedly based on his article – is this specifically: “There is something it is like to be conscious”. 

What Nagel actually stated was:

But no matter how the form may vary, the fact that an organism has conscious experience at all means, basically, that there is something it is like to be that organism.

and shortly after:

But fundamentally an organism has conscious mental states if and only if there is something that it is like to be that organism - something it is like for the organism.

Could you answer the questions that I gave you by the way, because I am still not clear on what part of the question I previously gave you, and you repeatedly did not answer, that you thought was ambiguous or not clear. 

Yours sincerely,

Glenn