Please don’t take the following as seriously as it appears:
Just wanna make sure: what’s the difference between what you’re thinking, and naïve idiocy that sincerely holds that every time people engage in straw-man behaviour, they’re really trying honestly to discern what the other person is thinking and just inadvertently completely misrepresented their position in the worst plausible way and forgot to put a question mark on it?
Obviously this is a straw-man presentation of your thesis, yet follows the form of the “nothing wrong with wanting to check” alternative. Is it actually any better with the question than without? My suspicion is that there isn’t a lot of difference.
I guess the true test will be to wait and see whether this comment thread devolves into acrimonious and hostility-filled polarisation.
My response to it is: What makes you think it is naive idiocy? It seems like naive intelligence if anything. Even if the literal belief is false, that doesn’t make it a stupid thing to act as if true. If everyone acted as if it were true, it would certainly be a stag-hunt scenario! And the benefits are still much worthwhile even if the other does not perfectly cooperate.
Stupid uncritical intolerant people will think you look childish and impertinent, but intelligent people will notice you’re being bullied and you’re still tolerating your interlocutor, and they will think you’re super-right. You divide the world into intelligent+pro-you and stupid+against-you.
Also I might note that your attempted counter-example has an implied tone which accuses naive idiocy, rather than sounding curious with salient plausibility. The saliently plausible thing, in your attempted counter-example, is an implicit gesture that there is not a difference.
Yes, I can see some benefits to responding to straw-manning as if it were misphrased enquiry. I do think that at least 90% of the occasions in which straw-manning happens, it isn’t.
Most of the times I see it happen are in scenarios where curious enquiry about the difference is not a plausible motivation. In my experience it has nearly always happened where both sides are trying to win some sort of debate, usually with an audience.
That aside, the proposed mechanism for straw-manning was that it is a particular kind of mistake, so I would expect to see at least some significant fraction of cases where the same kind of enquiry was intended, and the mistake was not made. I haven’t observed any significant fraction of such cases in the situations where I have seen straw-man arguments used.
I agree that the fictional example I wrote does have a tone that implies that there is no difference between my caricature and your position. That matches the majority of cases where I see straw-man arguments being used. We could discuss the special case of straw-manning where such implication isn’t present, but I think that would reduce the practical scope to near zero.
Please don’t take the following as seriously as it appears:
Obviously this is a straw-man presentation of your thesis, yet follows the form of the “nothing wrong with wanting to check” alternative. Is it actually any better with the question than without? My suspicion is that there isn’t a lot of difference.
I guess the true test will be to wait and see whether this comment thread devolves into acrimonious and hostility-filled polarisation.
My response to it is: What makes you think it is naive idiocy? It seems like naive intelligence if anything. Even if the literal belief is false, that doesn’t make it a stupid thing to act as if true. If everyone acted as if it were true, it would certainly be a stag-hunt scenario! And the benefits are still much worthwhile even if the other does not perfectly cooperate.
Stupid uncritical intolerant people will think you look childish and impertinent, but intelligent people will notice you’re being bullied and you’re still tolerating your interlocutor, and they will think you’re super-right. You divide the world into intelligent+pro-you and stupid+against-you.
Also I might note that your attempted counter-example has an implied tone which accuses naive idiocy, rather than sounding curious with salient plausibility. The saliently plausible thing, in your attempted counter-example, is an implicit gesture that there is not a difference.
Yes, I can see some benefits to responding to straw-manning as if it were misphrased enquiry. I do think that at least 90% of the occasions in which straw-manning happens, it isn’t.
Most of the times I see it happen are in scenarios where curious enquiry about the difference is not a plausible motivation. In my experience it has nearly always happened where both sides are trying to win some sort of debate, usually with an audience.
That aside, the proposed mechanism for straw-manning was that it is a particular kind of mistake, so I would expect to see at least some significant fraction of cases where the same kind of enquiry was intended, and the mistake was not made. I haven’t observed any significant fraction of such cases in the situations where I have seen straw-man arguments used.
I agree that the fictional example I wrote does have a tone that implies that there is no difference between my caricature and your position. That matches the majority of cases where I see straw-man arguments being used. We could discuss the special case of straw-manning where such implication isn’t present, but I think that would reduce the practical scope to near zero.