Very good, although I have heard similar arguments (though less elaborated) in conversation. The principle of charity (or steelmanning—never heard that term before) certainly is important, but sometimes it just goes too far. At one seminar I used to attend the seminar leader used to “re-interpret” the most confused and illogical argument, saying—“did you mean so and so”, to which the interpretee of course invariably gratefully responded yes (though of course he never in his life had come up with such an interesting argument). The whole thing was a bit of a comedy...the problem was, though, that most people didn’t see what was happening (including both the re-interpreter and the re-interpretee), so people got a false impression the re-interpretee was much less confused than he really was.
Another thing that’s seldom pointed out is that we should use the principle of charity selectively. Some people have a strong track-record for saying interesting things, so if there is something they’ve said that we think is confused, wicked or false, we should take another look at it and see if we can make more sense of it. Other people have a very poor track-record, and with them it is rather the other way around: confused, wicked and/or false claims is the normal, and we should rather take another look at our interpretation if it tells us they’ve said something deep and interesting.
Very good, although I have heard similar arguments (though less elaborated) in conversation. The principle of charity (or steelmanning—never heard that term before) certainly is important, but sometimes it just goes too far. At one seminar I used to attend the seminar leader used to “re-interpret” the most confused and illogical argument, saying—“did you mean so and so”, to which the interpretee of course invariably gratefully responded yes (though of course he never in his life had come up with such an interesting argument). The whole thing was a bit of a comedy...the problem was, though, that most people didn’t see what was happening (including both the re-interpreter and the re-interpretee), so people got a false impression the re-interpretee was much less confused than he really was.
One wonders if incidents like these contribute to the false impression that academic abilities are roughly equal, something that I discuss here: http://lesswrong.com/lw/jhy/division_of_cognitive_labour_in_accordance_with/
Another thing that’s seldom pointed out is that we should use the principle of charity selectively. Some people have a strong track-record for saying interesting things, so if there is something they’ve said that we think is confused, wicked or false, we should take another look at it and see if we can make more sense of it. Other people have a very poor track-record, and with them it is rather the other way around: confused, wicked and/or false claims is the normal, and we should rather take another look at our interpretation if it tells us they’ve said something deep and interesting.