Depends on the topic. ITT-colored charity is a curiosity technique that enables more meaningful communication, gives access to others’ gears that might be harder to notice or invent yourself, and occasionally teaches frames that are more efficient at capturing a topic. Its absence is key to maintaining systematic misunderstandings and reinventing wheels, including through it remaining unnecessarily difficult to understand some topics without a more native frame for thinking about them.
Steelmanning is completely orthogonal, but superficially it doesn’t seem to be, which is why in short interactions it’s useful to keep it at a distance from efforts at understanding unfamiliar frames. It intentionally changes what someone is saying, and if they don’t understand that this is the point, they might be less cooperative at explaining what they do mean. When understanding of the point of steelmanning is secured, it regains its role as a staple of idea debugging.
Depends on the topic. ITT-colored charity is a curiosity technique that enables more meaningful communication, gives access to others’ gears that might be harder to notice or invent yourself, and occasionally teaches frames that are more efficient at capturing a topic. Its absence is key to maintaining systematic misunderstandings and reinventing wheels, including through it remaining unnecessarily difficult to understand some topics without a more native frame for thinking about them.
Steelmanning is completely orthogonal, but superficially it doesn’t seem to be, which is why in short interactions it’s useful to keep it at a distance from efforts at understanding unfamiliar frames. It intentionally changes what someone is saying, and if they don’t understand that this is the point, they might be less cooperative at explaining what they do mean. When understanding of the point of steelmanning is secured, it regains its role as a staple of idea debugging.