I consider steelmanning to be a safeguard against reversing stupidity, especially in political contexts. If my opponent says X, I am likely to say non-X for many bad reasons such as: my opponent defends X using arguments I disagree with.
But if you show me that X can also be defended using arguments I would agree with, then I will be less likely to automatically throw X away, and I will be more able to consider X on its own merits.
Steelmanning is good for understanding “X can also be defended by good arguments”, and is dangerous because it provides a bad model of my opponent. (Unless my original model was so bad that the steelmanning didn’t make it worse; which wouldn’t be completely unexpected in a political debate.)
In your example, the time-travelling Roman would get a completely bad idea about why Obama wants to increase unemployment benefits. But he would get a useful insight about why he might want to support increasing unemployment benefits. It’s bad for modelling Obama, it’s good for thinking about possible consequences of the unemployment benefits. (If you were an Annona-worshipping Roman, you would want to realize she would be happy about the unemployment benefits.)
Analogically, steelmanning Reactionary ideas is bad for modelling Reactionaries, but it could be good to think about some topics they raise. It may help you identify parts of their set of ideas which may have value for you, outside of the original set.
But this difference is really not obvious, and people are likely to get it wrong. Perhaps it would be good to say it explicitly when steelmanning anything: “This is not why those people defend their ideas, but it’s why someone else might find the same ideas meaningful.”
Analogically, steelmanning Reactionary ideas is bad for modelling Reactionaries
This doesn’t follow. Many reactionaries are either intimately involved in LW culture or are sympathetic towards it, so an LW member trying to model a reactionary is probably doing a much better job than a Roman modeling Obama.
This is interesting because I sort of see most Reactionary positions as already being steelmen—putting beliefs that most people think are based on superstitious, bigoted, backwards modes of reasoning into consequentialist, logical, LW-style rhetoric.
(Is there a notable difference between the politics held by someone described as “Reactionary” and someone described as “far-right”? I can’t figure this out. “Reactionary” seems to me like basically meaning “far-right, but smart”.)
(Is there a notable difference between the politics held by someone described as “Reactionary” and someone described as “far-right”? I can’t figure this out. “Reactionary” seems to me like basically meaning “far-right, but smart”.)
“Far Right” implicitly invokes the Overton Window; most anything you can″t comfortably say in public anymore is Far Right, even if it is actually thought by the majority of people or was itself a leftist position a few decades ago. Saying something is Far Right or Far Left from an assumed neutral position can be useful to elucidate the boundaries of conventional thought, or to exploit anchoring in an unsophisticated audience, but provides little information on it’s own.
In general, Reactionaries want to reboot society[1] to before some big event which symbolizes the beginning of visible civilizational decline (Like May 1968, Reconstruction, the French Revolution, the English Civil War, the Protestant Reformation, the Edict of Milan, etc.), whereas Conservatives try to keep the status quo from deteriorating further with constant patches. That said, today’s conservatism becomes tomorrow’s reaction as the traditions they failed to conserve are destroyed fully in the next Great Leap Forward.
I realize that’s general to the point of vagueness but it’s tough to hit a moving target in the first place even when you know what you’re aiming at. Golden Dawn and the Tea Party are both “far right,” and neither are particularly reactionary IMO, but they’re also fairly dissimilar so comments about one don’t apply much to the other.
[1]One big stumbling-block to understanding this is the wrongheaded idea that technological advance and moral “progress” are inseparable, seeing the return of (for example) an ancien-regime style aristocracy as somehow necessitating turning off the internet or throwing away antibiotics. Culture and technology are certainly linked, so you should expect large shifts in one to affect the other, but human nature itself changes fairly slowly and it is very suspicious to see alterations to social organization racing ahead of the demographic changes which naturally guide them.
The comparison doesn’t have a great connotation, given that “fundamentalist” is typically an epithet, but it’s not too far off in terms of the denotation.
Personally though, I would say it’s more of an Exoteric / Esoteric split; conservatives seem to spend most of their effort preserving outward forms and rituals of their cultures in an effort to keep the fire going, where reactionaries see it as burnt out already and so look back for the essential (in both senses of the word) elements to spark a new one. A good example is comparing Chesterton’s Catholic apology with Evola’s promotion of Tradition, not to imply that you can’t be a Catholic reactionary but just as an example of a differing mindset. Of course, esoterica being what it is, it’s a bit tough to get a grip on and much easier to talk about than to understand fully.
IANAR, but “fundamentalist” connotes strong deontological beliefs to me, and in particular a stance wherein anything violating some established creed X is definitionally considered evil. That tends to imply at least self-perceived reaction within religious contexts, since most religions’ moral contents were developed relative to mores at the times and places of their founding; also because many religions include doctrine describing some sort of lost golden age. But the reverse doesn’t seem to be true: we can imagine wanting to rewind parts of society to some prior state on strictly consequentialist grounds, without invoking any particular deontology.
(Indeed, given the amount of variation over time it would be surprising if there weren’t historical situations we’d prefer, unless we believe in some sort of ethical teleology or an Yvain-style deal where the ethical sophistication we can get away with supporting scales with technical capability, at least in agrarian/industrial societies. I find the latter somewhat convincing, myself.)
The words have been used inconsistently throughout the centuries, but the etymology is that a reactionary wants to roll back a change, while a far-right person might have the same politics, without the implication of having noticed where society is.
I sort of see most Reactionary positions as already being steelmen—putting beliefs that most people think are based on superstitious, bigoted, backwards modes of reasoning into consequentialist, logical, LW-style rhetoric.
… and then finding the steelman so persuasive you convert to the other side.
“Reactionary” seems to me like basically meaning “far-right, but smart”.
But the point is, is steelmanning someone making a better model of them than just taking them at their own words? If the point is in fact to understand them, rather than to challenge your own position, and they are arguing competantly and honestly, it probably is. Edit: Meant “is not”!
I consider steelmanning to be a safeguard against reversing stupidity, especially in political contexts. If my opponent says X, I am likely to say non-X for many bad reasons such as: my opponent defends X using arguments I disagree with.
But if you show me that X can also be defended using arguments I would agree with, then I will be less likely to automatically throw X away, and I will be more able to consider X on its own merits.
Steelmanning is good for understanding “X can also be defended by good arguments”, and is dangerous because it provides a bad model of my opponent. (Unless my original model was so bad that the steelmanning didn’t make it worse; which wouldn’t be completely unexpected in a political debate.)
In your example, the time-travelling Roman would get a completely bad idea about why Obama wants to increase unemployment benefits. But he would get a useful insight about why he might want to support increasing unemployment benefits. It’s bad for modelling Obama, it’s good for thinking about possible consequences of the unemployment benefits. (If you were an Annona-worshipping Roman, you would want to realize she would be happy about the unemployment benefits.)
Analogically, steelmanning Reactionary ideas is bad for modelling Reactionaries, but it could be good to think about some topics they raise. It may help you identify parts of their set of ideas which may have value for you, outside of the original set.
But this difference is really not obvious, and people are likely to get it wrong. Perhaps it would be good to say it explicitly when steelmanning anything: “This is not why those people defend their ideas, but it’s why someone else might find the same ideas meaningful.”
A nitpick:
This doesn’t follow. Many reactionaries are either intimately involved in LW culture or are sympathetic towards it, so an LW member trying to model a reactionary is probably doing a much better job than a Roman modeling Obama.
This is interesting because I sort of see most Reactionary positions as already being steelmen—putting beliefs that most people think are based on superstitious, bigoted, backwards modes of reasoning into consequentialist, logical, LW-style rhetoric.
(Is there a notable difference between the politics held by someone described as “Reactionary” and someone described as “far-right”? I can’t figure this out. “Reactionary” seems to me like basically meaning “far-right, but smart”.)
“Far Right” implicitly invokes the Overton Window; most anything you can″t comfortably say in public anymore is Far Right, even if it is actually thought by the majority of people or was itself a leftist position a few decades ago. Saying something is Far Right or Far Left from an assumed neutral position can be useful to elucidate the boundaries of conventional thought, or to exploit anchoring in an unsophisticated audience, but provides little information on it’s own.
In general, Reactionaries want to reboot society[1] to before some big event which symbolizes the beginning of visible civilizational decline (Like May 1968, Reconstruction, the French Revolution, the English Civil War, the Protestant Reformation, the Edict of Milan, etc.), whereas Conservatives try to keep the status quo from deteriorating further with constant patches. That said, today’s conservatism becomes tomorrow’s reaction as the traditions they failed to conserve are destroyed fully in the next Great Leap Forward.
I realize that’s general to the point of vagueness but it’s tough to hit a moving target in the first place even when you know what you’re aiming at. Golden Dawn and the Tea Party are both “far right,” and neither are particularly reactionary IMO, but they’re also fairly dissimilar so comments about one don’t apply much to the other.
[1]One big stumbling-block to understanding this is the wrongheaded idea that technological advance and moral “progress” are inseparable, seeing the return of (for example) an ancien-regime style aristocracy as somehow necessitating turning off the internet or throwing away antibiotics. Culture and technology are certainly linked, so you should expect large shifts in one to affect the other, but human nature itself changes fairly slowly and it is very suspicious to see alterations to social organization racing ahead of the demographic changes which naturally guide them.
Do you think this is a good parallel (if we are borrowing terms from religious studies):
conservatives == traditionalists
reactionaries == fundamentalists
?
The comparison doesn’t have a great connotation, given that “fundamentalist” is typically an epithet, but it’s not too far off in terms of the denotation.
Personally though, I would say it’s more of an Exoteric / Esoteric split; conservatives seem to spend most of their effort preserving outward forms and rituals of their cultures in an effort to keep the fire going, where reactionaries see it as burnt out already and so look back for the essential (in both senses of the word) elements to spark a new one. A good example is comparing Chesterton’s Catholic apology with Evola’s promotion of Tradition, not to imply that you can’t be a Catholic reactionary but just as an example of a differing mindset. Of course, esoterica being what it is, it’s a bit tough to get a grip on and much easier to talk about than to understand fully.
Of course, “reactionary” was also traditionally a derogatory term. So perhaps that isn’t surprising.
In the context of religious studies “fundamentalist” is not derogatory but descriptive.
Most epithets start out as descriptive terms with some sort of negative connotation.
IANAR, but “fundamentalist” connotes strong deontological beliefs to me, and in particular a stance wherein anything violating some established creed X is definitionally considered evil. That tends to imply at least self-perceived reaction within religious contexts, since most religions’ moral contents were developed relative to mores at the times and places of their founding; also because many religions include doctrine describing some sort of lost golden age. But the reverse doesn’t seem to be true: we can imagine wanting to rewind parts of society to some prior state on strictly consequentialist grounds, without invoking any particular deontology.
(Indeed, given the amount of variation over time it would be surprising if there weren’t historical situations we’d prefer, unless we believe in some sort of ethical teleology or an Yvain-style deal where the ethical sophistication we can get away with supporting scales with technical capability, at least in agrarian/industrial societies. I find the latter somewhat convincing, myself.)
The words have been used inconsistently throughout the centuries, but the etymology is that a reactionary wants to roll back a change, while a far-right person might have the same politics, without the implication of having noticed where society is.
… and then finding the steelman so persuasive you convert to the other side.
Zing!
But the point is, is steelmanning someone making a better model of them than just taking them at their own words? If the point is in fact to understand them, rather than to challenge your own position, and they are arguing competantly and honestly, it probably is. Edit: Meant “is not”!