This is not centrally the case. You don’t need to go for the median to draw a sensible boundary and then retreat from it to the inside, with some margin. There will remain a lot of variation, on both content and quality, but you won’t risk the failure modes of non-centrality.
I mean, I really have no objection to this—any kind of understanding of a whole distribution is always better than just understanding of individual simplifications of it (be average, median, or what have you). And it’s not like most of this stuff is literally something you can draw on a single 1D numerical axis, except for some very rare and specific policy positions such as “what tax rate in % should be applied to people above £100k” or such.
I was more gesturing at this “try to grasp what the common position is” concept. If you have a huge bimodal distribution where the movement is split almost 50⁄50 between two major interpretations of the belief then sure, both of those are more relevant than the rather meaningless mid-point. Apply pinch of salt and common sense as necessary.
The criteria that grade arguments as sane/thoughtful/well-articulated should be suspect, because something might be such from your point of view, but not from inside the target worldview.
Ultimately yes but there’s only so much relativism I can engage in. If someone posits a completely different worldview from mine down to “empirical knowledge isn’t valid”, what can I even do? Maybe it makes sense for them, but for me it’s insanity and as such disqualifying. This is different from “ok they share with me the basic principles of how the world works and how knowledge is accrued, and merely have different information, so if we engaged in enough mutual exchange we might come to an agreement or at least understanding”. Otherwise you’re not steelmanning, you’re just passively acknowledging any idea as just as good as any other, because for any idea there could be someone who thinks it’s perfectly coherent and sensible (for starters, usually, the person who voices it).
The purpose of steelmanning, in the (more useful, I think) distortionary variant of its meaning, is to build your own ideas regardless of whether they accurately represent and should be attributed to their original source/inspiration.
Steelmanning is used a lot of time as a way to engage with ideas/groups by giving maximum grace. Basically trying to play devil’s advocate to make sure that your own criticisms aren’t facile or purely the result of blind outgroup distrust, but grounded in genuine rational thinking. It’s not how you recommend to use it, but people do this, so I’m responding to that mainly.
I mean, I really have no objection to this—any kind of understanding of a whole distribution is always better than just understanding of individual simplifications of it (be average, median, or what have you). And it’s not like most of this stuff is literally something you can draw on a single 1D numerical axis, except for some very rare and specific policy positions such as “what tax rate in % should be applied to people above £100k” or such.
I was more gesturing at this “try to grasp what the common position is” concept. If you have a huge bimodal distribution where the movement is split almost 50⁄50 between two major interpretations of the belief then sure, both of those are more relevant than the rather meaningless mid-point. Apply pinch of salt and common sense as necessary.
Ultimately yes but there’s only so much relativism I can engage in. If someone posits a completely different worldview from mine down to “empirical knowledge isn’t valid”, what can I even do? Maybe it makes sense for them, but for me it’s insanity and as such disqualifying. This is different from “ok they share with me the basic principles of how the world works and how knowledge is accrued, and merely have different information, so if we engaged in enough mutual exchange we might come to an agreement or at least understanding”. Otherwise you’re not steelmanning, you’re just passively acknowledging any idea as just as good as any other, because for any idea there could be someone who thinks it’s perfectly coherent and sensible (for starters, usually, the person who voices it).
Steelmanning is used a lot of time as a way to engage with ideas/groups by giving maximum grace. Basically trying to play devil’s advocate to make sure that your own criticisms aren’t facile or purely the result of blind outgroup distrust, but grounded in genuine rational thinking. It’s not how you recommend to use it, but people do this, so I’m responding to that mainly.