Forgive me if I am missing something obvious, but: how exactly can you steelman someone’s ideas if you do not understand them in the first place? In other words, isn’t ITT-passing a prerequisite to steelmanning…?
(Not that I necessarily endorse steelmanning as a practice, and consequently I am taking no position at this time on whether ITT-passing is necessary; but the above seems to me to be a basic confusion of some sort. Perhaps on my part, though…? What am I missing?)
In the limiting case where understanding is binary (either you totally get it, or you don’t get it at all), you’re right. That’s an important point that I was remiss not to address in the post! (If you think you would do very poorly on an ITT, you should be saying, “I don’t get it,” not trying to steelman.)
The reason I think this post is still useful is because I think understanding often isn’t binary. Often, I “get it” in the sense that I can read the words in a comment with ordinary reading comprehension, but I also “don’t get it” in the sense that I haven’t deeply internalized the author’s worldview to the extent that I could have written the comment myself. I’m saying that in such cases, I usually want to focus on extracting whatever value I can out of the words that were written (even if the value takes the form of “that gives me a related idea”), rather than honing my ability to emulate the author.
Forgive me if I am missing something obvious, but: how exactly can you steelman someone’s ideas if you do not understand them in the first place? In other words, isn’t ITT-passing a prerequisite to steelmanning…?
(Not that I necessarily endorse steelmanning as a practice, and consequently I am taking no position at this time on whether ITT-passing is necessary; but the above seems to me to be a basic confusion of some sort. Perhaps on my part, though…? What am I missing?)
In the limiting case where understanding is binary (either you totally get it, or you don’t get it at all), you’re right. That’s an important point that I was remiss not to address in the post! (If you think you would do very poorly on an ITT, you should be saying, “I don’t get it,” not trying to steelman.)
The reason I think this post is still useful is because I think understanding often isn’t binary. Often, I “get it” in the sense that I can read the words in a comment with ordinary reading comprehension, but I also “don’t get it” in the sense that I haven’t deeply internalized the author’s worldview to the extent that I could have written the comment myself. I’m saying that in such cases, I usually want to focus on extracting whatever value I can out of the words that were written (even if the value takes the form of “that gives me a related idea”), rather than honing my ability to emulate the author.