Comment on Better Disagreement

Sun, 23 Oct 2011 09:36:38 GMT

I can respect the person I'm arguing with, and consider them to be truth-searching, and still not want to antagonize the part of their hardware that likes winning. I also dislike having my primate hardware antagonized unnecessarily; I tolerate it for the sake of truth-seeking, but it's not fun.

I see two likely cases here:

A) I come up with a tougher version of their argument in my head, in order to be as careful as possible, but I still have a good way to refute it. This is DH7.

In this case, announcing the tougher version doesn't get us any closer to the truth. A dead steel man is as dead as a dead straw man. I might as well refute what was actually said, rather than risk being unnecessarily smug.

B) I come up with a tougher version of their argument in my head, and I can't actually defeat the tougher version.

In this case, I definitely ought to announce this problem.

But this is not DH7 as posted. This is my actual purpose in making a steel man - the possibility that the steel man may actually force me to change my mind. I'm not trying to argue with my opponent on a higher level when I do this, I'm trying to argue myself out of being cognitively lazy.

A good rule of thumb: DH7 should be really really REALLY hard to do well if you're arguing with reasonably smart people who have thought carefully about their positions. In fact, it is so hard that anybody who could do it consistently would never need other people to argue with.

EDIT: In the interests of dealing with the worst possible construct, I should add:

A) In the case where openly announcing DH7-level arguments lets both parties see that they've misinterpreted each other, going to DH7 is a net win.

B) An expert DH7-level arguer may still need other people to argue with if they have been exposed to very different sets of evidence.

But generally speaking, the cognitive effort needed to communicate a steel-man version of someone else's position is better spent on expressing one's own evidence.

Discuss