Why I’m skeptical of “steelmanning”

That's not how steelmanning is generally described. It's usually described as, "construct the best possible form of your opponent's argument." If they made some weak points in their argument, steelmanning would involve either ignoring those or reconstructing them to be stronger.

"Avoid attacking points that your opponent never made" is just the absence of strawmanning, it's not steelmanning.

There are a few takes on this:

- If someone's just bullshitting you straight up, and you can find multiple instances of this by examining the more straightforward parts of their statements, then you can choose this route. This also often applies where there is no there there --- where an "argument" is simply an endless firehose of muck, as with the Qanon case.

- If the core is solid, and your goal is gaining knowledge rather than Winning Imaginary Internet Points (or playing at more substantive rhetorical games, of which there are in fact many) ... then you've won by learning something.

- If the core proves difficult to untangle or validate --- pointing this out is a valid criticism as you're putting additional valid burden of proof on the party arguing that case. Without substantiating their points, the argument is based on confusion, uncertainty, or ignorance rather than empirical merits.

- In many ways, empiricism is a Steelman argument of the form "evidence trumps theory". If there's some theoretical argument and you can show that the evidence clearly contradicts it ... I'd argue that's a form of steelmanning. Of course in reality such evidence may be tremendously hard to obtain, or not clearly decisive, or require extensive interpretation to judge.

- There are arguments which come down to statements of values. As was pointed out on the Ezra Klein podcast earlier this year, it's really hard to definitively argue for the superiority of one set of value judgements over another (though not necessarily impossible). You can point out that this is the nature of the disagreement, however. In the sense of steelmanning, this would be a case of pointing out begging the question in its correct sense --- if you presume that your argument's conclusion is a superior value, then you cannot invoke that assumption to prove the conclusion as the argument is the conclusion. I'd had a recent discussion of tenant vs. landlord rights on HN where this seemed to be the case. You can state that property rights are important, but if you're using the assumption to prove that property rights are superior to tenancy rights ... you don't have a logically sound argument.

Now someone should steelman his position.

Honestly I see "steelmanning" as an emergent property of a completely broken discourse in the first place. The whole concept derives from the idea that we need specific terminology for when we're going to actually discuss things in a reasonable manner. It's basically a response to a group of public intellectuals who have emerged on the internet that spend more time building their brand and dunking on their opponents within their own echo chamber than actually trying to persuade people. And these public intellectuals are so well-read that they reinvented devils-advocate in their own bubble. It also stems from a kind of silly idea that the things we disagree over boil down to finding logical errors in each others positions, rather than emerging from deep-rooted differences in values.

In the example in the article there is just a fundamental difference in how those people see the world. One person thinks that by and large people are free to openly disagree with the consensus and would do so if they wanted to, and the other person thinks that disagreeing with the public consensus on controversial topics has such a high price that people choose not to do it. Depending on your experience in the world either of those two views can be right. In fact, you can pull examples on both sides of this - where contrarians have successfully changed the consensus and are celebrated for it, or have spoken out and been stigmatized for it. These opposing positions stem from such a deep difference in world views it's useless to talk about Ivemectin. So the issue here isn't steelmanning, it's that you're not actually discussing the point of contention.