This is interesting because I sort of see most Reactionary positions as already being steelmen—putting beliefs that most people think are based on superstitious, bigoted, backwards modes of reasoning into consequentialist, logical, LW-style rhetoric.
(Is there a notable difference between the politics held by someone described as “Reactionary” and someone described as “far-right”? I can’t figure this out. “Reactionary” seems to me like basically meaning “far-right, but smart”.)
Steelmanning is not a courtesy or a service to my interlocutor. It is a service to me. It is my attempt to build the strongest case I can against my position, so I can shatter it or see it survive the challenge. The interlocutor might not agree, if I were to ask them, that my steelmanned argument is really stronger than theirs; that’s no matter. I’m not doing it for them, I’m doing it for myself.
Steelmanning is always done for your own sake. It always says something new that the original owner of the argument didn’t think of or at least didn’t say. When put back into the discussion, it should be introduced explicitly as your words.
Remember, the steelmanned argument is your creation and is meant for you, you owe it to yourself to test your beliefs with it, but not necessarily in the context of this conversation. Not because concealing it is an easier way to victory, but rather because what’s steelmanned for you might not be steelmanned or even interesting to your interlocutor. Their argument said A, and you may have found a way to strengthen it further to say B, but they might not want to claim B, to defend B, to agree that B is stronger than A. That said, if you do think the steelmanned argument would be useful to them, by all means introduce it, but explicitly as your own.
I agree, and this is sort of what I find problematic, I’ll explain in a second. (Notice that all four “risks” I mentioned are risks to the Roman and not the progressive.)
Now, going to the example in the post, where the ancient Roman chooses to interpret a progressive argument for increasing welfare as “really” carrying between lines the ancient Roman rationale. He is not doing a charitable reading of his interlocutor’s words—they would definitely not agree that this is what they meant to say. And he is not steelmanning anything either, because he hasn’t strengthened an argument against his own position; rather, he fortified his existing beliefs by manufacturing another fake confirmation. If he were to modify the progressive’s argument in some way that would make it harder for him to interpret it in the ancient-Roman sense, that would be steelmanning.
I think I was a little unclear here, sorry. Imagine that the Roman is already against increasing welfare, for whatever reason. He first reads the progressive article and thinks that the progressive’s argument is dumb. He then remembers steelmanning and re-interprets the article as arguing that welfare reform would incur Anonna’s favor. He finally realizes that the position isn’t that bad when seen in this light, and begins to be a little less certain that increasing welfare would be a bad idea. This is sort of what I was imagining when I wrote the post. The belief that’s being tested is not the entire ancient Roman worldview, it’s whether or not welfare should be increased.
The thing is, when the Roman creates the new argument “increasing welfare would incur Anonna’s favor”, that’s a completely new idea that he came up with himself, and as such it should be held skeptically. Imagine if Anonna in fact liked welfare when it was in the form of gold coins and hated it when it’s in the form of a vague baseless digital currency, and the Roman had no idea, not being an Anonnan priest. However, he might mistakenly think that the fact that the idea “we should increase welfare for equality” is fairly popular and held by smart people is authority for the idea “increasing welfare would incur Anonna’s favor”, but in fact these are pretty distinct ideas.
I feel like the steelmanning process usually outputs a new argument that you can look at and say “yeah, that kind of makes sense”. But I was reading some of the “Tupac is alive” conspiracy theories the other day, and I thought they kind of make sense. For me, an argument kind of making sense is pretty bad evidence for its truth—good evidence would be if I read the argument, then the rebuttals, then the rebuttals to the rebuttals, then the rebuttals to the rebuttals to the rebuttals, and etc. until I finally found a point where I could say “okay, that really does makes sense”. But I haven’t had the time, or likely the ability, to do this with most arguments, so I usually form my beliefs off of vague intuitions around authority. What I guess I’m afraid of is that I’ll conflate my original steelman with a superficially similar popular argument, and then these intuitions will get corrupted and I’ll be confused.
Obviously the Roman thing is a pretty dumb cartoony example and it seems too obvious to fall for in real life, but I feel like this usually works on a much more subtle, implicit level, and in fact I think that’s why I have a lot of trouble putting it into words. I find this topic really confusing to talk about, so hopefully I didn’t say anything too dumb. I think I mainly agree with your post, though, and what everyone else is saying. Again, I think steelmanning is 90% a good thing.
Two unrelated things (should I make these in separate posts or...?):
1.) Given recent discussion on social justice advocates and their… I don’t know the best way to describe this, sometimes poor epistemological habits? I thought I would post this
http://geekfeminism.wikia.com/wiki/Concern_troll
Is this it just me, or is this, like, literally the worst concept ever? It literally just means “someone slightly to the right of me” or “someone does anything that could be considering cheering for the other side”, backed with a dubious claim that these people are usually acting in bad faith. Is that even a thing people actually do, go on websites with people they disagree with and “troll” by claiming that they mostly agree except on certain issues? Outside of this context I have never seen this or had any reason to consider the possibility. Isn’t it more likely, that you know… people mostly agree with you except on certain issues?
“Concern trolling is frequently banned in feminist communities.”
“Concern trolling is frequently banned in feminist communities.”
“Concern trolling is frequently banned in feminist communities.”
I just don’t get it. How does a movement with motives so noble become this horrible? I mean, I kind of do get it, but still… fuck.
2.) How can I train myself to speak more eloquently? Like most people my generation, I say “like” every ten words or so (although I’ve gotten better at avoiding this), say um and other filler sounds a lot, and often say “you know”, “you see what I mean”, etc. I also tend to repeat phrases for “filler”—I’ll say things like “Yeah, I’ve been, I’ve been, I’ve been thinking about this a lot recently.” (This looks really weird written out, trust me, it’s not that weird in real life.) I want to stop doing this because doing so will let me sound more authoritative, and also I’m kind of disgusted by this pattern of speech even though everyone does it.
Note that I don’t want to be one of those people who fetishizes the past and goes around forcing old-timey turns of phrase like “Great Scott!” into conversation and wears (yes) a fedora. I just want to be better at communicating concrete ideas in complete sentences in my daily life.
You forgot “You will die in a way that keeps your brain intact and allows you to be cryopreserved”.
That makes sense. Even so, it seems a little excessive.
What is the point of this rule? I never understood it.
In one of his videos there’s a part where he argues that cigarettes are actually good for you. LOL
Oh, okay. For some reason I thought he was fairly respected here.
This guy was a pretty big poster on LW, I think. Best example I can come up with, I’m sure there are better ones.
I agree that this is by far the most interesting part of the piece. IIRC this site is pretty much all white men. Part of it is almost certainly that white men are into this sort of thing but I can’t help but imagine that if I was not a white man, especially if I was still in the process of becoming a rationalist, I would be turned off and made to feel unwelcome by the open dialogue of taboo issues on this website. This has the obvious effect of artificially shifting the site’s demographics, and more worryingly, artificially shifting the site’s demographics to include a large number of people who are the type of person to be unconcerned with political correctness and offending people. I think while that trait in and of itself is good, it is probably correlated with certain warped views of the world. Browse 4chan for a while if you want examples.
I think that between the extremes of the SJW Tumblr view of “When a POC talks to you, shut the fuck up and listen, you are privileged and you know nothing” and the view of “What does it matter if most of us aren’t affected by the problems we talk about, we can just imagine and extrapolate, we’re rationalist, right?” is where the truth probably lies.
Like you said, I have no idea what to do about this. There are already a lot of communities where standard societal taboos of political correctness are enforced, and I think it’s worthwhile to have at least one where these taboos don’t exist, so maybe nothing.
Would it actually be intellectually inconsistent if someone was both racist and donated heavily to African charities? Honest question.
You are positing that folks who are affected by some issues would not participate in frank, dispassionate discussion of these same issues… why exactly? To preserve their ego? It seems like a dubious assumption.
This doesn’t really seem like a dubious assumption to me, practically everyone is more motivated to preserve their ego than to think rationally.
This can’t be true, otherwise giving someone head would be fatal.
I’ve decided to live less on the internet (a.k.a. the world’s most popular superstimulus) and more in real life. I pledge to give $75 to MIRI if I make any more posts on this account or on my reddit account before the date of October 13 (two months from now).
On a related note, I was thinking about how to solve the problem of the constant temptation to waste time on the internet. For most superstimuli, the correct action is to cut yourself off completely, but that’s not really an option at all here. Even disregarding the fact that it would be devastatingly impractical in today’s world, the internet is an instant connection to all the information in the world, making it incredibly useful. Ideally one would use the internet purely instrumentally—you would have an idea of what you want to do, open up the browser, do it, then close the browser.
To that end, I have an idea for a Chrome extension. You would open up the browser, and a pop-up would appear prompting you to type in your reason for using the internet today. Then, your reason would be written in big black letters at the top of the page while you’re browsing, and only go away when you close Chrome. This would force you to remain focused on whatever you were doing, and when you notice that you’ve fulfilled that purpose and are now just checking your email for no reason, that would be your clue to close the browser and do something else.
I don’t think anything like this exists yet. I might try to make it myself—I don’t have that much coding experience, but it seems like it could be relatively easy.
would I be allowed to post it here, and would it stand a chance of being included?
There’s no “being included”, really. Post your article, and people will upvote it or not.
Since I began working out a month and a half or so ago, I’ve managed to successfully to go the gym every other day, the exceptions being when I hung out with friends and either got too high to go or ended up spending the night at someone’s house. The important thing being that at no point did I not go simply because of lack of willpower.
I also finally learned how to lucid dream in the last month and I’ve had seven or so (short) lucid dreams.
I like this thread idea. I think that bragging about charitable donations should be especially encouraged.
I don’t feel confident enough to say what the correct rational position given the evidence is, not having fully examined the evidence myself, but I cannot imagine that the correct position is comfortably inside the Overton window.
That’s very interesting that your experience was the opposite.
And yeah, I saw where Yvain wrote that he and a friend shared that experience, and I noticed that I shared it exactly as well. It also seems to match with attitudes I had seen around, so I feel like it could be fairly general.
Honestly, I feel like if Eliezer had left out any mention of the math of Bayes’ Theorem from the sequences, I would be no worse off. The seven statements you wrote seem fairly self-evident by themselves. I don’t feel like I need to read that P(A|B) > P(A) or whatever to internalize them. (But perhaps certain people are highly mathematical thinkers for whom the formal epistemology really helps?)
Lately I kind of feel like rationality essentially comes down to two things:
Recognizing that as a rule you are better off believing the truth, i.e. abiding by the Litany of Tarski.
Having probabilistic beliefs, i.e. abiding by the Bayesian epistemology and not the Aristotelian or the Anton-Wilsonian as Yvain defined in his reaction to Chapman, or having an many-color view as opposed to a two-color view or a one-color view as Eliezer defined in the Fallacy of Gray.
Once you’ve internalized these two things, you’ve learned this particular Secret of the Universe. I’ve noticed that people seem to have their minds blown by the sequences, not really learn all that much more by spending a few years in the rationality scene, and then go back to read the sequences and wonder how they could have ever found them anything but obvious. (Although apparently CFAR workshops are really helpful, so if that’s true that’s evidence against this model.)
That’s pretty much the same thing as my point #1.