Yes, there is a difference between “trying to understand precisely what this person actually meant” and “trying to salvage a potentially useful insight even from a generally horrible argument”. The former is about learning their perspective… without necessarily believing it; it may include memorizing their mistakes. The latter is about enriching your perspective… quite likely in a way they would not approve of.
It would be factually wrong to assume that everyone is secretly a rationalist just like you, only operating with a different set of priors and having different experience. Some people truly are stupid, and you can pass their ITT just by saying “har har stupid outgroup”. Most people are somewhere in between: a good argument or two, sometimes taken out of context, ignoring all arguments in the opposite direction, with a flavor of “and anyway, we are the good people (even if we occassionally make a mistake, hypothetically speaking) and they are the bad ones.”
ITT is useful—to correctly model your opponents and predict their actions; perhaps to be able to infiltrate them, and then maybe subvert towards your own goals.
Updating your map using true information that is typically only found in your opponent’s maps is also useful, in the sense that having a better map is useful generally.
Then there is also a social process somewhere in between, when you placate your opponent by showing respect to certain parts of their map that you consider useful, and then you just “agree to disagree” about the rest.
Yes, there is a difference between “trying to understand precisely what this person actually meant” and “trying to salvage a potentially useful insight even from a generally horrible argument”. The former is about learning their perspective… without necessarily believing it; it may include memorizing their mistakes. The latter is about enriching your perspective… quite likely in a way they would not approve of.
It would be factually wrong to assume that everyone is secretly a rationalist just like you, only operating with a different set of priors and having different experience. Some people truly are stupid, and you can pass their ITT just by saying “har har stupid outgroup”. Most people are somewhere in between: a good argument or two, sometimes taken out of context, ignoring all arguments in the opposite direction, with a flavor of “and anyway, we are the good people (even if we occassionally make a mistake, hypothetically speaking) and they are the bad ones.”
ITT is useful—to correctly model your opponents and predict their actions; perhaps to be able to infiltrate them, and then maybe subvert towards your own goals.
Updating your map using true information that is typically only found in your opponent’s maps is also useful, in the sense that having a better map is useful generally.
Then there is also a social process somewhere in between, when you placate your opponent by showing respect to certain parts of their map that you consider useful, and then you just “agree to disagree” about the rest.