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Luke_A_Somers comments on Applied art of rationality: Richard Feynman steelmanning his mother's concerns - Less Wrong
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Comments (26)
I do not see how this is steelmanning. It seems to be replying carefully, but I do not see him improving her arguments. If we saw the original, perhaps I would perceive deficiencies he shored up.
Here is an example. She apparently suggested that he or his students can contract TB. Feynman took it seriously, discussed it with his father, considered a way to check the validity of this suggestion and:
Now, a "normal" person in his place would take it as "my mom certainly doesn't care about some random students, she is just throwing everything she can think of at me in a hope that some of it sticks". Because that's almost certainly what it was. Yet he turned this random throw into a real valid argument and took pains to investigate it fully, then refute it.
If this is not steelmanning, I don't know what is.
As far as I can tell, that's simply taking a facile objection seriously.
Steelmanning would be if she said that he could get, say, bubonic plague from her - and then he addressed not only that but also concerns about tuberculosis.
I am surprised by how high the parent is upvoted, given that my reading of the situation is quite different: RPF interpreted his mom's argument charitably (as in, "she may well care about random students, and if she doesn't, I certainly ought to, and I didn't think it about it until she pointed it out", the latter being admitted to in the P.S.) and then steelmanned it by carefully investigating the conditions of when TB is likely to be transmitted, then refuted it by determining that the danger of transmission to Feynman or his students would not go up from the contact as described.
Admittedly, he probably took pains to go an extra mile in addressing the argument because it was his mother's, but that does not change anything.
I don't see how this constitutes steelmanning.
If his mother's allegation is "You'll be at risk of tuberculosis," then a refutation of her argument as she presented it demands that he assess the risk of tuberculosis he'd be subjecting himself to, and demonstrate that it is in fact low.
A steelmanning of her argument would, as Luke indicated, entail addressing not only her concerns about the risk of the disease that she mentioned, but also address other hypothetical risks which would appear plausible.
I surprised too, both it and its grandparent. I think I'm right, but wow.
I think steelmanning would instead be if you listed more realistic dangers of that place rather than more extreme dangers: for example, "TB is not a threat, but let's look at what the biggest danger would be, and see if the concern is still justified. How about the danger that people may not want to be around you if you go there too much [probably closer to what she actually had in mind] ..."
I think you missed what was going on there. In the hypothetical, Feynman's mom was concerned about the plague and for the steelman Feynman corrected it to TB. The assumption there is that TB is a more realistic threat than the plague.
I see that now. It didn't help that Luke_A_Somers, in defending what he did as steelmanning, kept insisting that he was "making the original argument worse".
(In any case, I don't think TB was the "steelest" man you could make here, nor the mother's real rejection.)
That would work too. Note that I was making what he did steelmanning by way of making the original argument worse - we're working on opposite ends but I think we agree on definition.
I don't think we're agreeing on definition: I thought steelmanning was necessarily making the argument better, not worse.
We're talking about Feynman steelmanning, not me.
Feynman would have been steelmanning if she had made a worse argument to begin with yet he responded to it and a better one.
Right, and we're talking about what true steelmanning would be in this case, right?
Yes. We both tweaked matters so that the example became a steelmanning. You changed what Richard said. I changed what his mom said. We both changed something, and after either or both of our changes, it was an example of steelmanning.
Right, except yours missed out on the whole "make it a better argument that you're refuting" thing.