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DSimon comments on Secrets of the eliminati - Less Wrong
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Some can. Mitchell Porter, for example, saw which philosophical threads I was pulling on, even if he disagreed with them. (I disagree with them! I'm not describing my beliefs or something, I'm making an attempt at steel manning religionesque beliefs into something that I can actually engage with instead of immediately throwing them out the window because one of my cached pieces of wisdom is that whenever someone talks about "souls" they're obviously confused and need a lecture on Bayes' theorem.)
"Steel manning" isn't a term I've heard before, and Googling it yields nothing. I really like it; did you make it up just now?
I don't like it because I think it obscures the difference between two distinct intellectual duties.
The first is interpreting others in the best possible sense. The second is having the ability to show wrong the best argument that the interlocutor's argument is reminiscent of.
I recently saw someone unable to see the difference between the two. He was a very smart person insistently arguing with Massimo Pigliucci in an argument over theist claims, and was thereby on the wrong side of truth in a disagreement with him when he should have known better. Embarrassing!
Edit: see the comments below and consider that miscommunication can arise among LWers, or at least that verbosity is required to stave it off, as against the simple alternative of labeling these separate things separately and carving reality at its joints.