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.

If the original work is itself a satire, do you try to make a humorless version of it?

Hmm...

"In the seminal Zucker, Zucker, and Abrams opus Airplane!, one character, played by Leslie Nielsen, asks another to pilot an passenger airliner in an emergency. The would-be pilot responds with incredulity, but is coolly rebuffed by the Leslie Nielsen character. This evinces laughter from the audience, as the exchange involves a confusion between two near-homophones."

Heh, heh... still funny.

For less goofy, more drily satirical stuff, I think that making a satire of the satire is still a viable option.

If somebody enjoys something that they read or experience alone, then they must get some utility from art that isn't connected with the associated social signals. I suspect that there are many people who are capable of appreciating art without talking about it.

(This does not apply if they read something alone, brag about it, and try to signal super-high status and nonconformity by only liking obscure things. THAT is the status game that I associate with hipsters.)

I consider that sort of social signaling basically orthogonal to liking art for being pretty, funny, thought-provoking, or sublime. Art that is liked solely for social reasons is unlikely to survive a change in social environment.

(EDITED for pronoun trouble)

That's common to every art, apart from perhaps cinema or literature. Modern art? Just a load of paint thrown at canvases and unmade beds. Modern music? Just a load of random notes strung together. Modern poetry? Doesn't even rhyme.

I'm not sure which is worse - liking all modern art because one is supposed to like it, or hating all modern art because one is supposed to hate it. Either way, the category lines are not being drawn usefully. As the original post notes, there ought to be more to this than just going along with social signals.

I dislike The Catcher in the Rye, feel as if I ought to like Animal Farm, and genuinely like Moby-Dick. I can see why other people would dislike Moby-Dick, but I still like the damn thing.

My hypothesis: Because I was not taught Moby-Dick in school, I did not associate reading it with work, but with relaxation. This is borne out by my love of David Copperfield (read alone) and only vague enjoyment of Great Expectations (assigned in school).

The article says:

Second-order simulacra, a term coined by Jean Baudrillard, are symbols without referents, that is, symbols with no real object to represent. Simply put, a symbol is itself taken for reality and further layer of symbolism is added. This occurs when the symbol is taken to be more important or authoritative of the original entity, authenticity has been replaced by copy (thus reality is replaced by a substitute).

If I'm reading this correctly, it leaves me even more leery about the value of second-order simulacra.

Also from the article:

Baudrillard argues that in the postmodern epoch, the territory ceases to exist, and there is nothing left but the map; or indeed, the very concepts of the map and the territory have become indistinguishable, the distinction which once existed between them having been erased.

... did you intend for me to read this charitably? At best, it's a descriptive statement that says that people no longer care about the territory, and talk about maps without even realizing that they are not discussing territory. At worst, it says that reality has ceased to be real, which is Not Even Wrong.

If you want me to understand your ideas, please link me to clearer writing.

I am going to avoid using race or sex examples. I appreciate that you used Simulacraton as an object-level example, as it made your meaning much clearer, but I'd rather not discuss race when I am still unhappy with the resolution of the candy bowl problem.

I will revise my question for clarity:

"What is a reasonable second-order simulacrum of the contents of that basket of candy, and why? If no reasonable second-order simulacrum exists, why not?"

Second-order simulacra will always fail when you use them in ways that they are not meant to be used: such as actually being representative of individual instantiations of a thing: I.e.;, when you try to pretend they are anything other than an abstraction, a mapping of the territory designed for use as high-level overview to convey basic information without the need for great depth of inspection of the topic.

True, but none of the above reservations apply to the bowl of candy.

• I am not claiming that the second-order simulacrum should represent the individual candies in the bowl. It may be wrong in any individual case. I am simply trying to convey a useful impression of the POPULATION, which is what you claim that SO S's are useful for.

• I am not pretending that a simulacrum is anything more than an abstraction. I think it is a kind of abstraction that is not as useful as other kinds of abstraction when talking about populations.

• I DO want a high-level overview, not a great depth of information. This overview should ideally reflect one REALLY important feature of the candy bowl.

(The statement that I would use to map the basket's population in detail would be "Ten of the sixty candies in the basket contain razorblades." The statement that I would use to map the basket broadly, without close inspection, would be, "Several of the candies in that basket contain razorblades."

if I had to use a second-order simulacrum, I would choose one of the candies with razorblades as my representative case, not the candy without. But this seems to break the plurality rule. Or perhaps, if feeling particularly perverse, I'd say "The candy in that basket contains one-sixth of a razorblade.")

I believe that second-order simulacra fail badly in the case of the candy basket. And if second-order simulacra can't handle simple hypothetical cases, shouldn't I be at least a little suspicious of this mapping strategy in general?

Wait, wait, I think I see something here. I think I see why we are incapable of agreeing.

If and only if you meant "always" in the first place and want to be less than perfectly accurate. "In the majority of cases" is an inaccurate method of expressing how S-O S's work -- as I mentioned above, with "the largest minority" being the representative entity of the body.

This seems more like a description of how S-O S's fail.

Can you offer any reason why I should treat S-O S's as a useful or realistic representational scheme if my goal is to draw accurate conclusions about actual, existing people?

Let me try to make my confusion clearer:

If I come upon a Halloween basket containing fifty peanut butter cups without razorblades, and ten peanut butter cups with razorblades, what is the second-order simulacrum I use to represent the contents of that basket? "A basket of delicious and safe peanut butter cups?"

Is this even a legitimate question, or am I still not grasping the concept?