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Comment by pineaux | Hacker News Reader

I think people on the left and right of the political divide are not capable of doing this.

I am also sceptical it works, but it is worth a try.

I like how the left thinks the center and right can’t do this, the right thinks the center and left can’t do this, and the center thinks nobody to either the left or right of them can do this. It is almost like every group equally stakes claim to correctness and reason for itself.

Righteousness at the expense of, and over others is a flaw in many forms of thinking.

Even if someone changes the jersey of the team they're on it doesn't change their ways or mindset without meaningful inner work of reflection + contemplation.

I don't think the problem is left/right, it seems to me to be more about ego/less ego. If interlocutors are more interested in playing with ideas than with coming to a preconceived conclusion, steel manning works well.

It also works in technical discussions. Being able to fairly explain an approach you disagree with demonstrates good faith, which is often returned.

Thomas Aquinas would beg to differ. All he does is steel man and attack opponents at their strongest points. The result is an invaluable corpus of rigorous arguments. He would have accomplished nothing by being uncharitable.

Whether your audience is receptive, that's a different matter, horse brought to water and all that.

Did we read the same Aquinas? My experience with him was that all he does is repeat his unjustified starting assumptions ad nauseum, then declares he has proven that god exists or whatever nonsense he was claiming.

I don't know what you read, but this is patently false and an utterly absurd characterization (not to mention the strange contempt dripping off the screen). Did you read Aquinas himself, or some characterization all too eager to caricature him? Or, if you did read him, did you read whatever you read in the correct manner and light to do justice to the work?

I don't know what "unjustified starting assumptions" you have in mind, but a stock caricature is the whole "Everything has a cause, so the universe has a cause" thing, which neither Aquinas nor any major proponent in the tradition has ever defended. I'll just link to a post by one such proponent instead of repeating or summarizing it here [0].

[0] https://edwardfeser.blogspot.com/2014/07/clarke-on-stock-car...

I think you’re right for some people on both sides, but I suspect that there are more opportunities to find better arguments than it might appear.

Bad arguments (particularly of the opposing side) tend to get a lot of attention though social media, making reasonable people seem rare. It’s easy to be dismissive and saves time.

"You may not have heard, but jus primae noctis is legal in America again."

One just needs to reduce bad ideas to more relatable, and provable facts.

The whole notion of manipulating and monetizing other peoples misery for profit is not a sustainable philosophy. Despotic regimes in many political wing extremes traditionally rely on the same sycophantic idealism... Inspiring the naive to surrender their own responsibility to their community, and grandchildren.

I don't really think modern disagreements are about conservative/liberal economic policy, but rather keeping people distracted while everyone gets robbed.

Have a great day, =3

The article here assumes all parties are arguing in good faith, and that both sides have a reasonable starting position, or at least something that approaches one. But it's not possible to engage in good faith with the extreme sides of the political horseshoe, because that looks like this:

The left: good governance would be nice

The right: you should die and we will kill you when we get into office

You can't engage on those terms. They're either insincere or very sincere, and either way it's not solvable through dialogue.

edit: formatting

I don't think it assumes that. If one is arguing against a fundamentally bad position, the Steel Man of that position will still be bad -- and by addressing that, you will have cut off evasions at the pass. Steel Man can be used to preempt Motte-and-Bailey fallacies by better defining the point being attacked.

All of this is true, and it's the roadmap to tautological soundness.

But, in these scenarios, it's rarely about tautology or perfecting the structure of your argument. Yes, you might win on a debate stage. But, you've not moved anyone.

The way your positining the left and right suggests that you're immune to the article's technique. I'd suggest a portion of good faith if I thought it was going to help but I'm at a loss here.

This is a good point because there is no example of violence around elections from the right in recent US history and even if there was it would be a failure of reasoning to acknowledge it.

Having trouble following the snark here. Why would it be a failure of reasoning to acknowledge violence, even in the mind of those on the far right? Are you suggesting they have a different definition of reason?

I was simply restating in different words _blk’s casual implication that KerrAvon has a cognitive deficit because they mentioned the phenomenon of election-related violence from the right.

If someone (for example) wants to look or feel smart in a discussion about logic, there’s a shortcut a person can take by casually calling others stupid for even mentioning anything upsetting regardless of whether or not the thing mentioned is real. It’s kind of funny when people invent a fallacy as if language that they find personally distasteful is categorically wrong (especially when the rebuttal is basically “Nuh-uh dummy!”)

I'm not on either side, and I think the only way to have some sanity going forward might be to find a way to compromise and meet in the middle somewhere. If anything else, the left cedes one issue they don't like in order to gain a positive one for themselves, or something like that.

It comes into conflict with ideological thinking. Entertaining opposite positions invokes internal censorship, which can be painful.

don't forget the center, buddy. It's the center of politics in the USA that wants forever war. And they're in the center because they care about that more than they care about issues that matter to other Americans.

Can you elaborate? The US center seems pretty undefined to me, united only by absence of strong feelings and a propensity for the new shiny, loud, and/or charismatic.

Bill Kristol, Bret Stephens, Robert Kagan, Joe Biden, Hilary Clinton, Madeline Albright, Liz Cheney, Mitt Romney, all the neocons and neoliberals, generally would consider themselves in the 'center' between the left and right, and at the same time have never seen a war or foreign intervention they didn't like.

It is an enormous misconception that because they aren't considered 'extreme' right or left they are more rational. Both the extreme left and extreme right in the USA are more anti-war than the center and it's a huge problem in US politics.

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