>The reason you steelman opposing arguments is to make your arguments look strong and convincing, not to be "charitable and kind." I agree it's nothing to do w

>The reason you steelman opposing arguments is to make your arguments look strong and convincing, not to be "charitable and kind." I agree it's nothing to do with kindness but I disagree that it's (entirely) to do with making your arguments look strong and convincing. I think it's a good practice because (in my experience) people tend towards strawmanning even if they don't mean to. We're so used to adversarial debates where you're trying to "win" the argument by presenting the opponent's argument in a poor light that it's helpful to consciously avoid that by attempting the opposite. If we don't then arguments tend to degrade rather quickly. The comments to the original article contains a good example of a common argument pattern. Someone makes a point about antibiotics not being a miracle drug and one reply is "So you’ll just dismiss millions and millions of years of life saved, untold suffering prevented, and vast economic and qualify [sic] of life benefits by virtue of availability of antibiotics because antibiotics aren’t perfect". It feels unlikely anyone would dismiss millions of years of life being saved so if they've been in anyway ambiguous we should apply the principle of charity (which is not directly to charity in the normal sense) and assume they don't mean that.