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tom_cr comments on Dangers of steelmanning / principle of charity - Less Wrong
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Not sure if I properly understood the original post - apologies if I'm just restating points already made, but I see it like this.
Whatever it consists of, it's pretty much the definition of rationality that it increases expected utility. Assuming that the intermediate objective of a rationalist technique like steelmanning is to bring us closer to the truth, then there are 2 trivial cases where steelmanning is not rational:
(1) When the truth has low utility. (If a lion starts chasing me, I will temporarily abandon my attempt to find periodicity in the digits of pi.)
(2) When the expected impact of the resulting update to my estimate of what is true is negligible.
No doubt, there is need for some skill to estimate when such cases hold.
I think the point is that while steelmanning can get you closer to the truth about the conclusion of an argument, it can unintentionally get you further from the truth about what argument a person is making. If I say "X is true because of Y" and you steelman it into "X is true because of Z", it's important to remember that I believe "X is true because of Y" and not "X is true because of Z".
Thanks, I was half getting the point, but is this really important, as you say? If my goal is to gain value by assessing whether or not your proposition is true, why would this matter?
If the goal is to learn something about the person you are arguing with (maybe not as uncommon as I'm inclined to think?), then certainly, care must be taken. I suppose the procedure should be to form a hypothesis of the type "Y was stated in an inefficient attempt to express Z," where Z constitutes possible evidence for X, and to examine the plausibility of that hypothesis.