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SilasBarta comments on Applied art of rationality: Richard Feynman steelmanning his mother's concerns - Less Wrong
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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.
I don't see how the following conversation is NOT an example of Richard steelmanning.
Mom: You could get bubonic plague!
Richard: (refutes that concern, and then...) A more reasonable concern would be my getting Tuberculosis. Here are the reasons I can't...
As I said above, I'm not doing steelmanning here, so comparing this to what they actually said is irrelevant.