Comment by BiteCode_dev | Hacker News Reader

Comment by BiteCode_dev | Hacker News Reader

Besides the fact this article avoids giving any concrete examples, showing the author probably doesn't use the technique himself, it's going to fail when the opposite side cannot be convinced by rationality, which is most of the time.

Indeed, you cannot "patch up the weaknesses of the other side’s proposition" of someone supporting a sports team or a religious belief. Because there is no real argument, but rather some kind of emotional commitment.

However, if you engage in the exercise a lot, you'll notice that a huge number of debates are around such notions, where ego, identity, and feelings are more important than ideas.

It's certainly true for lots of political beliefs, but also many technical ones where your social situation depends on the result of the debates more than being wright or wrong (e.g: at work).

Not to mention when you are debating, it happens regularly you win not by convincing the other side, but by winning over the popularity contest with the audience of the exchange. This again, has nothing to do with the logic of the discussion.

So even if the technique works for, say, your discussion with your physicist or philosopher friend (in which you probably didn't need it anyway), there is really little value in it if it can't work in the situations with more at stake.

Or to use a more scientific term:

I call BS.

> it's going to fail when the opposite side cannot be convinced by rationality, which is most of the time.

As many people have noted, arguing on the Internet is a spectator sport. You don't need to convince your opponent, but by steel manning his arguments and addressing them, you have a greater chance of convincing the audience.

Maybe. Or you end up doing his work of making his arguments more accessible and reasonable sounding to a general audience.

That is often my reluctance to use it, especially when talking to folks prone to confirmation bias. I'm not sure there is a way to convince people who only accept evidence that fits their existing worldview. It took me years and a lot of reading to finally seriously entertain the idea that the religion I was raised in could be false. Once I really opened up and stepped back it unraveled pretty quickly.

Yet being that open can be very socially costly, as it was for me. If I'd heard steel man arguments from opponents while still closed to inconvenient truths, then I'd just have accept them without critical thought. And any attacks on that steel man would have been dismissed with whatever was convenient. It devolves into Rube Goldberg levels of mental hoop jumping to stay in that mindset. Though if the alternative is strained relationships or losing ones church community then it becomes second nature, even unconscious.

Steel manning an argument is an extraordinarily powerful tool for rational thinking. I do it all the time, every time I encounter someone who holds beliefs I cannot understand. But I'm very hesitant to post the result of my steel-manning online, for this and other reasons. It's a private exercise.

It's also quite dangerous if you're attached to your beliefs. I rarely walk away from steel manning an argument without being persuaded to some degree into a compromise position.

>convincing the audience

I used to believe this and found myself frequently arguing for any audience that might happen by versus trying to convince my interlocutor.

But, I have come to believe that, in the "emotional" domains that GP mentions, the dynamic is largely the same for any audience as well.

That is, you're not winning them over either if their beliefs are already set and were also never based on reason in the first place.

Why would steelmanning your opponent's argument help you convince anybody that argument is wrong?

I mean, outside of some niche debate club blogs subcultures, who does thus?

When there's a presidential debate, does the debater first improve the other guy's argument that he's corrupt before denying it?

If there’s one argument counter to what you’re saying, it’s that the front pages of most social media sites are filled with clickbaits and shitposts. Including HN of course.

> You don't need to convince your opponent, but by steel manning his arguments and addressing them, you have a greater chance of convincing the audience.

I try to ask myself: "would I make this argument privately?" If not, I probably won't reply publicly. (I often fail to make the right choice, however.)

> when the opposite side cannot be convinced by rationality, which is most of the time

Which possibility is the "failure" possibility here, that the opposite side gets convinced, or that the opposite side doesn't get convinced? I'd argue the opposite side getting convinced is the failure. This one singular exchange somehow managed to convince him of your viewpoint amidst his entire lifetime of experiences that led him to conclude the opposite.

I think it's the old rationalist way of thinking to think "If your mind isn't changed by a syllogistically correct argument, you must not be arguing in good faith (or otherwise can't be convinced by rationality)."

Everyone arrives at conclusions about various topics from the data they obtain throughout their lives through a continuous complex inference process they cannot communicate. Included in this process is a judgment of which sources are credible and which are less credible. Your friend is more credible than the guy who is showing you a study that contradicts your belief, for the purpose of changing your mind. (There are lots of studies out there so it is not hard to find one that supports your argument.) Trying to distill this complex inference process into a linear argument will necessarily lead to an inaccurate representation of how they arrived at the belief.

Doesn't mean everyone's right, though. Governments, cults, and friend groups are very good at shaping the data an individual receives. Even in these cases, you can see how based on the limited information that they do receive, it is quite reasonable from that internal perspective to believe what they do believe.

Arguments would be better if by "argument" we mean some effort, no matter how difficult, to communicate how you arrived at the beliefs you have, rather than a "well" crafted linear rational argument.

> Arguments would be better if by "argument" we mean some effort, no matter how difficult, to communicate how you arrived at the beliefs you have, rather than a "well" crafted linear rational argument.

Strong point, have you. How did you arrive at the belief that an argument strengthened by such effort, would be better?

To be clear, I meant that the conversation (the argument) would be a better experience for everyone involved, not the argument itself being somehow strengthened by it.

Nevertheless, I'll try to recall how I arrived at this conclusion. The biggest influence was seeing for all my life, the left and right in America each claim the other is stupid, irrational, and un-convinceable by rational argument. When I was 16 it really did seem to me that the right was the irrational side here, but seeing everything come full circle with what's happening on the left these days, I realized it's kind of weird and unlikely that half the population, divided on a political line, is actually worse at thinking than the other half.

(See the bottom of this thread for a vivid example.)

Thanks for this. Indeed I can confirm the conversation is conceived to be stronger. That said, still I am not convinced that about half the population would not be worse at thinking, the weird it may be.

If the other side is not amenable to good faith rationale, its usually easily identifiable rapidly, say for the small population that are hyper trained for 'cloak and dagger' type operations, in which case you practice zero trust paired with due diligence verification.

The big value add to steel manning is that you can persuade yourself that your own ideas may infact be the inferior one and more concretely explain why that is the case to other people.

Oh but shoot, cats dont speak English.

Nevermind, dont try and use steelman technique against my cat Luna.

There's a difference between oral and written debate as well, and when a lot of people thinking about "arguing" or "debating" they are thinking of live impromptu discussion.

That's not a place to do detailed reasoning. Most people are bad at impromptu and have loads of shit habits. And live impromptu is not necessarily the right setting to shed yourself of shit habits either.

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