I can respect the person I’m arguing with, and consider them to be truth-searching, and still not want to antagonize the part of their hardware that likes winning. I also dislike having my primate hardware antagonized unnecessarily; I tolerate it for the sake of truth-seeking, but it’s not fun.
I see two likely cases here:
A) I come up with a tougher version of their argument in my head, in order to be as careful as possible, but I still have a good way to refute it. This is DH7.
In this case, announcing the tougher version doesn’t get us any closer to the truth. A dead steel man is as dead as a dead straw man. I might as well refute what was actually said, rather than risk being unnecessarily smug.
B) I come up with a tougher version of their argument in my head, and I can’t actually defeat the tougher version.
In this case, I definitely ought to announce this problem.
But this is not DH7 as posted. This is my actual purpose in making a steel man—the possibility that the steel man may actually force me to change my mind. I’m not trying to argue with my opponent on a higher level when I do this, I’m trying to argue myself out of being cognitively lazy.
A good rule of thumb: DH7 should be really really REALLY hard to do well if you’re arguing with reasonably smart people who have thought carefully about their positions. In fact, it is so hard that anybody who could do it consistently would never need other people to argue with.
EDIT: In the interests of dealing with the worst possible construct, I should add:
A) In the case where openly announcing DH7-level arguments lets both parties see that they’ve misinterpreted each other, going to DH7 is a net win.
B) An expert DH7-level arguer may still need other people to argue with if they have been exposed to very different sets of evidence.
But generally speaking, the cognitive effort needed to communicate a steel-man version of someone else’s position is better spent on expressing one’s own evidence.
If you come up with a better version of the other person’s argument but keep it to yourself and only refute the original version, then later on they may think “Now, in all honesty Gil was right about X … but no, wait a moment, that’s just because I didn’t get it quite right. If I’d said X’ instead then his argument wouldn’t have worked.” and stick with their position rather than changing it.
I doubt that this outweighs the effect of antagonizing them at the time by saying “You should have said X’, and I’m now going to refute that” in most cases, though.
Ideally, a reasonable counterargument that applies to the strong form will also apply to the weak form without significant editing. If the person one was arguing with would have been receptive to DH7 in the first place, that alone should stop them from making the strong form argument—the countering evidence has already been provided.
Where this fails… well, I said “at first” in my thread-starter for a reason.
Some DH7, or at least DH7-like thinking, can be relatively easy. For instance, there will often be gaps in someone’s argument that they do not consider significant, or a general case they hadn’t bothered to think of. You can’t make it perfect, but you can patch it up a bit.
I can respect the person I’m arguing with, and consider them to be truth-searching, and still not want to antagonize the part of their hardware that likes winning. I also dislike having my primate hardware antagonized unnecessarily; I tolerate it for the sake of truth-seeking, but it’s not fun.
I see two likely cases here:
A) I come up with a tougher version of their argument in my head, in order to be as careful as possible, but I still have a good way to refute it. This is DH7.
In this case, announcing the tougher version doesn’t get us any closer to the truth. A dead steel man is as dead as a dead straw man. I might as well refute what was actually said, rather than risk being unnecessarily smug.
B) I come up with a tougher version of their argument in my head, and I can’t actually defeat the tougher version.
In this case, I definitely ought to announce this problem.
But this is not DH7 as posted. This is my actual purpose in making a steel man—the possibility that the steel man may actually force me to change my mind. I’m not trying to argue with my opponent on a higher level when I do this, I’m trying to argue myself out of being cognitively lazy.
A good rule of thumb: DH7 should be really really REALLY hard to do well if you’re arguing with reasonably smart people who have thought carefully about their positions. In fact, it is so hard that anybody who could do it consistently would never need other people to argue with.
EDIT: In the interests of dealing with the worst possible construct, I should add:
A) In the case where openly announcing DH7-level arguments lets both parties see that they’ve misinterpreted each other, going to DH7 is a net win.
B) An expert DH7-level arguer may still need other people to argue with if they have been exposed to very different sets of evidence.
But generally speaking, the cognitive effort needed to communicate a steel-man version of someone else’s position is better spent on expressing one’s own evidence.
If you come up with a better version of the other person’s argument but keep it to yourself and only refute the original version, then later on they may think “Now, in all honesty Gil was right about X … but no, wait a moment, that’s just because I didn’t get it quite right. If I’d said X’ instead then his argument wouldn’t have worked.” and stick with their position rather than changing it.
I doubt that this outweighs the effect of antagonizing them at the time by saying “You should have said X’, and I’m now going to refute that” in most cases, though.
Ideally, a reasonable counterargument that applies to the strong form will also apply to the weak form without significant editing. If the person one was arguing with would have been receptive to DH7 in the first place, that alone should stop them from making the strong form argument—the countering evidence has already been provided.
Where this fails… well, I said “at first” in my thread-starter for a reason.
Some DH7, or at least DH7-like thinking, can be relatively easy. For instance, there will often be gaps in someone’s argument that they do not consider significant, or a general case they hadn’t bothered to think of. You can’t make it perfect, but you can patch it up a bit.
Point taken—in some cases, the significance of the gaps is more evident to the outside view.