This is a reasonable argument that might be close to what some people are thinking (and as a “sketch” seems fine), but I think when you’re trying to pass an ITT with the sort of person literally saying “But the secession referendum is ILLEGAL!”, phrasings like this: ”It’s sometimes useful for agents to be able to make agreements which place some restrictions on their ability to later opt out of the agreement.”
Feel like they’re fundamentally missing the mindset of the person. (i.e. they might be implementing the game theory as you describe, but are almost certainly doing so so subconsciously, and I doubt that describing their position in terms of game theory probably wouldn’t lead them nodding and saying “yes, this guy gets it!”
(This is part of a general concern I have about steelmanning and ITTs that focus on translating the argument into “something that makes sense to you” instead of on actually presenting the argument the way the speaker really intended)
There is a broad set of practices involving is something like “understanding other people’s reasons”. We currently don’t have good terminology for carving up that space. The two terms that have caught on, ITT and steelmanning, refer to pretty specific activities within that space and the thing-to-do often isn’t either of those.
In this case, I read OP as saying that he didn’t see any overlap between a) the set of relevant considerations for deciding whether to support or oppose Catalan secession and b) the set of things that might cause a person to emphasize that the referendum was illegal according to the Constitution of Spain. My comment was an attempt to gesture at something that seemed like it might be in the intersection of those two sets. It was intentionally left relatively vague—the point is to see if there’s something there, not to flesh out precisely what it is or to capture what exactly is going on in the person’s head.
This seemed like a useful move to make within “understanding other people’s reasons” space, in this context. It is not an attempt at the ITT, and as far as I know doesn’t have a concise label. The OP framed his post in the context of the ITT (saying something like: I don’t even see how I could get started with constructing an ITT entry), so I did too (saying something like: well here’s a sketch of an argument which you can use to get started on constructing an ITT entry).
This is a reasonable argument that might be close to what some people are thinking (and as a “sketch” seems fine), but I think when you’re trying to pass an ITT with the sort of person literally saying “But the secession referendum is ILLEGAL!”, phrasings like this:
”It’s sometimes useful for agents to be able to make agreements which place some restrictions on their ability to later opt out of the agreement.”
Feel like they’re fundamentally missing the mindset of the person. (i.e. they might be implementing the game theory as you describe, but are almost certainly doing so so subconsciously, and I doubt that describing their position in terms of game theory probably wouldn’t lead them nodding and saying “yes, this guy gets it!”
(This is part of a general concern I have about steelmanning and ITTs that focus on translating the argument into “something that makes sense to you” instead of on actually presenting the argument the way the speaker really intended)
There is a broad set of practices involving is something like “understanding other people’s reasons”. We currently don’t have good terminology for carving up that space. The two terms that have caught on, ITT and steelmanning, refer to pretty specific activities within that space and the thing-to-do often isn’t either of those.
In this case, I read OP as saying that he didn’t see any overlap between a) the set of relevant considerations for deciding whether to support or oppose Catalan secession and b) the set of things that might cause a person to emphasize that the referendum was illegal according to the Constitution of Spain. My comment was an attempt to gesture at something that seemed like it might be in the intersection of those two sets. It was intentionally left relatively vague—the point is to see if there’s something there, not to flesh out precisely what it is or to capture what exactly is going on in the person’s head.
This seemed like a useful move to make within “understanding other people’s reasons” space, in this context. It is not an attempt at the ITT, and as far as I know doesn’t have a concise label. The OP framed his post in the context of the ITT (saying something like: I don’t even see how I could get started with constructing an ITT entry), so I did too (saying something like: well here’s a sketch of an argument which you can use to get started on constructing an ITT entry).