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Comment by nuclearnice1 | Hacker News Reader

Andrew Gelman offered a brief, mild critique of steelmanning [1] which you may find worth reading.

[1] https://statmodeling.stat.columbia.edu/2022/04/28/the-challe...

A good read, thanks for the link.

I think I'd disagree with his take on steelmanning though. He seems to think that in steelmanning, you need to assume the same assumptions as your opponent, thus precluding alternate possibilities.

But, in steelmanning, you need to ask the opposing side if your understanding of their point is correct, and also list out all the assumptions made along the way to get to that claim.

Once the assumptions are spoken out loud, it's easy to identify and focus on the first branch of disagreement. It saves a lot of time. That's the true power of steelmanning a hostile opponent.

I couldn’t agree more, well said

I agree with your assessment, but if your opponent is truly hostile it's not going to work. One person steelmanning and the other person strawmanning has a tendency to suffer from the same problem as always: to a superficially interested or poorly educated audience, defending against strawmen looks weak.

If you discover you operate from different axioms, or that even your ideas of how to evaluate the value of an axiom differ, what is the next step?

Draw parallels to other domains where those axioms come into conflict, to try and get some references on how to weigh them. Eventually you just live with the fact that some people have different moral axioms and weightings. It’s a big part of what it means to know someone well, and does not at all preclude having a strong relationship with someone.

As I commented when that article was posted to HN last time[1], it's important to recognize that there is an important distinction between accepting an argument and contemplating it as a hypothetical.

As long as one is able to maintain this distinction -- something most mature individuals should be perfectly capable of -- I think Andrew Gelman's criticism falls short.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31244792

I think the "mature individuals" part precludes the possibility of even contemplating the position of others, for most people. I may be wrong though.

This; it’s been one of the biggest disappointments in my adult life to realize how many legal adults are so incredibly immature, with such inflated yet fragile egos, that merely apologizing to even someone in their own family is totally out of the question. Another is realizing how many people are so willfully ignorant yet dogmatic. I had some suspicions growing up, and even into my twenties I was still quite naive. Being surrounded by nerdy friends who were also generally professionals in a technical field definitely insulated me from the general public enough that it took another decade for it to really sink in. These days it just all feels a bit lonely (especially with COVID), but the spark of meeting kindred spirits still makes it worth it to attempt to have a social life. True friends are rare.

> how many legal adults are so incredibly immature

Yeah, some of us are like that. I think I've finally matured at about 30-34, now I'm 38 but still learning.

I think that you use "maturity" to mean "being perfect person" or term of approval rather then anything having to do with actual maturity.

It's a problematic word. Barring death or a rare physical condition, all human children biologically reach maturity. The colloquialism of 'mature' (or as the opposite of 'immature') varies notoriously person to person, to the point one could argue that it's immature to use it sincerely in debate.

I agree on it being a problematic word

As far as I am concerned, if one actually cares about the debate they should just replace "mature" for what they think it means or implies for the behaviour of the individual

Replacing the symbol for a definition is quite handy. People get all defensive over being called privileged, but change "privileged" for "having good circumstances" ( or similar ) and they don't feel called out for it despite having the same meaning

IMO it's something of a shame how much the human cognition is crap at that kind of stuff

From https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/privileged :

    1 : having or enjoying one or more privileges, privileged classes
    2 : not subject to the usual rules or penalties because of some special circumstance

"having good circumstances" does not have the same meaning. For example you can have good circumstances by luck, or by good timing, without having any privileges.

I use the term "endorsement" to quotate when I believe a belief and whether I am merely acting as if I believe it when I discuss it.

There seems to be two subtly different definitions of steel manning.

The first one, and the one I think should always be done, is to engage with the best argument that has actually been presented by someone holding the opposing view.

The second version, and this one I don't fully understand, seems to involve defining your own strongest argument for the other view.

This version, in my experience, can go a few directions. Most often it turns into a more elaborate version of strawmanning ("and so we see, even with this strongest possible argument it still fails!"). It can also be a way toward compromise ("so if you're right, this much more limited form of my proposal still has value"). Or it can go to talking past each other (refuting vegetarianism without touching on the suffering of animals because you don't care about that, but many vegetarians do).

The first version is a requisite for truly debating rather than sloganeering. The second version is a mixed bag.

I think you've nailed why I've always felt slightly uncomfortable with "steelmanning" and I vastly prefer the alternative mentioned in the above rebuttal, "benefit of the doubt". So often "steelmanning" is indeed just another form of strawman, because at some level it's usually easy to misunderstand the perspective from which someone else is arguing (often the whole reason for getting into a heated debate in the first place). Giving someone the benefit of the doubt doesn't require any (possibly false) projection of having mutual understanding, but simply an attitude that "I may not understand it, but your argument is probably just as valid as mine". IMHO the real way to oppose the strawman fallacy or any other is simply to argue coherently in good faith, not to adopt a new potential fallacy on principle.

I think the second form is supposed to be a superset; you try to find all the best arguments you can for every position. That includes the ones other people are using, but if you can think of a better case to make for them then you should answer that as well. In no event should you ever say "you're arguing X but Y is a better argument and that's false so you're wrong" without also answering X, but "you're arguing X, which is wrong because X', but a better argument for your position is Y" is still legitimate.

he seems to present it as giving the "benefit of the doubt", but that's not correct. What you are doing is trying to make the best version of the argument before critiquing it. This avoids strawman type situations. It doesn't mean discarding weak arguments, but you may end up dropping weak parts of the argument that aren't necessary to the central argument. Basically it try's to avoid needless back and forth that doesn't really address actual argument at hand.

I think he's confusing accepting a conclusion with accepting a premise. Which is what steelmanning is supposed to be, granting your opposition a premise and then pointing out why even in that scenario, why their conclusion is still wrong. Or maybe it's not. In which case, you need to investigate/challenge the premise.

And then there's the issue that for some people, they just don't want to be reached. They want to believe a specific way on a specific issue for whatever personal reasons. You can't steelman crazy.

And let's not forget, steelmanning isn't about others, it's about yourself. It's about trying to find out if you are wrong.

> You can't steelman crazy.

THANK you.

I still can't rightly tell the difference between (the most generous definition of) steelmanning and just thinking things all the way through in a balanced way.

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