I’ve always found steelmanning to be stupid. If you want to discuss something with me you should actually discuss my argument not the argument you replace it with that you think is better and I think is worse.
But haven’t you now just asked the other person to steelman for you instead? While being unwilling to do so yourself?
The purpose of dialogue is to explore differences in thinking and possibly emerge with a new shared understanding.
To me, steelmanning is offering the other person the courtesy of the same thing you just insisted they “should” do if they want to have a discussion with you.
I think a lot of this conversation is getting tied up in knots around some new terminology.
For years, a big part of my process for evaluating a new idea was to ask questions and mentally argue for and against various propositions. This might force me to read or think a bit more, but that process almost inherently tries to find the strongest (by whatever values constitute 'strong' to me) version of a point of view.
Is it foolproof? No, I find new arguments and facts.
But I do generally find it easier to see where other people are coming from in a discussion because I can usually reference back to my own interior dialogue to see where the idea at least could have come from (whether it did or not).
Is that steelmanning? I have no earthly idea, but it works for me.
I’m speculating here, but I think the new terminology has started to emerge so people can encourage others to engage in a similar good faith exchange of ideas, and what was pretty common in years past gotten so rare that it needs a name now.
It seems the hard part is convincing people that this kind of dialogue is important.
I see it more as a way of pre-empting predictable retorts in a constrained time and space. If your retort is not obvious then fine, we discuss your argument.
However, if I say A and I know 90% of people counter A with B then I'll say A and counter with steelmanned B and then counter that all at once so we can quickly jump to C.
C would either be a less predictable counter or no counter at all.
If you actually address B when I either say B or was inclined to say B then sure. But I’ve seen way too much of “that argument is weak, the better argument is X which fails because Y” meanwhile Y fails to refute the original argument making it quite unclear that X is actually a better argument.
It’s not though. At least according to every description of steelmanning I read you’re supposed to replace an argument you encounter with the best possible argument. But the best possible argument might be different enough that arguments which address it don’t address the original argument. Which is my whole problem with the practice. If you only make minor improvements to what I say that makes the arguments responding to my claims identical to the arguments responding to the new claim then I have no problems. But people in practice steelman arguments in ways that change the responses too them. At some point, if you aren’t actually addressing my claims we aren’t actually having a conversation.
I think the main disconnect here is the replcaing the argument point. You are supposed to take the best version of the argument presented, not replace it with the best possible argument. Of course anyone doing the latter is going to often be too far off course to move the conversation along.
To me steelmanning is more of a better version of restating the others point in order to verify you understand their point. The best steelmanning is often proceeded by that. (do I understand the other parties meaning, and what is the strongest version of that meaning.)
Most often though I just find that steelmanning is just ignoring fallacies in otherwise decent efforts at conversational debate. In order to not devolve into back and forth "thats a fallacy!".
> But the best possible argument might be different enough that arguments which address it don’t address the original argument.
In which case the responsibility is on the steelmanner to demonstrate conclusively why the best possible argument differs from the original argument by discussing what makes the original argument weak. You can't just address it with 'it's weak.'
