thomblake comments on Applied art of rationality: Richard Feynman steelmanning his mother's concerns - Less Wrong

8 Post author: shminux 04 June 2013 05:31PM

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Comment author: thomblake 10 June 2013 06:53:25PM 1 point [-]

I think steelmanning would instead be if you listed more realistic dangers of that place rather than more extreme dangers

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.

Comment author: SilasBarta 10 June 2013 09:15:01PM 0 points [-]

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.)

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