Steelman is the reverse of strawman, so you take the best argument the other side could have made and attacked that, so if a neo-nazi says ‘I want to kill those degenerates’ you make up some story on how dunno I’m not going to steelman that. It is a Rationalist habit, and it just opens your mind to the worst ideas because of a fear you might dismiss a good idea which was presented badly. It has gargantuan failure modes, and if you want to start a cult teaching people to steelman is prob a good idea.
And yeah we can be a bit unfriendly, esp when this place goes ‘this tech is bad’ and then people go defend the tech, or miss the point. We prob also picked up some bad habits (this is me saying nay, it is not just you, we also suck at times).
Personally I think the whole reddit model of the internet where you had an /all and not just subforums was a mistake. It worked a bit for SA (I’m not a goon btw), but in SA it at least was somewhat clear where you were posting. The reddit/facebook/twitter ification makes everything one big goo where it is unclear you walked into a longer conversation, a different style of having conversations, or a nazi bar etc.
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