4 ms·
I don't think "steel man" has entered the common vernacular yet. At first I thought it was a typo.
by khazhoux 4y ago
I don't think "steel man" has entered the common vernacular yet. At first I thought it was a typo.
- civilian 4y agoit's entered the tech vernacular :) do you grok it now?
- astrange 4y agoThat's because it's another term reinvented by people who want to do philosophy without studying any of it. The traditional term is "argument reconstruction".
- Noumenon72 4y agoThis seems like a case where a field settled on undescriptive jargon (like "Type I error") and needs to be disrupted by a useful vernacular (like "false positive"). If you hear "steel man" once, you'll never forget it. I've forgotten "argument reconstruction" already.
- astrange 4y agoThe problem is that now people think the concept didn't exist before hearing the word "steelman", and can't lookup any preexisting literature about it. Although if you think that term is hard to understand, I'm sorry to inform you about literally anything written by Europeans, which is more or less made to be impossible to understand on purpose.
- scarmig 4y agoThanks Noumenon, you really get at how choice of language helps us connect the thing-in-itself to our intuitive understandings.
- nwiswell 4y agoI agree. > people who want to do philosophy without studying any of it strikes me as unnecessary gatekeeping. The context here is fairly basic logic and critical thinking that clearly does not require formal study. I hope that more people who haven't ever been formal students of philosophy employ critical thinking, not less!
- astrange 4y agoBy “studying it” I’d be fine with, like, reading Wikipedia articles. The people who say “steelman” a lot aren’t just busy with other things. They’re like full time bloggers and write huge essays constantly about their own system of critical rationalism and thinking correctly and all that, all philosophical topics. Avoiding the literature is more intentional. Part because they want their community to use all different words so they’ll sound different and engineer-y. Part because they’d be annoyed that midcentury philosophy already tried their project and now thinks it doesn’t work.
- aaaaaaaaaaab 4y agoLuckily, it’s easy to tackle them: just mention Roko’s Basilisk and they automatically self-destruct.
- pythonguython 4y agoI was able to deduce what “steel man” meant. “Argument reconstruction” isn’t a descriptive name - it’s philosophy jargon.
- PoignardAzur 4y agoHoneslty, this whole "people should exlusively use our field's words instead of coming up with new words to describe concepts of interest to them" attitude always struck me as incredibly elitist. Language is mutable and redundant. Different people come up with similar concepts independently over centuries and that's fine. Nobody has a copyright on philosophy.
- RC_ITR 4y agoIt also makes no sense. Straw man refers to building scarecrow to argue against. Making your scarecrow out of steel doesn't make them a better arguing partner.
- the_only_law 4y agoI was able to guess from the context, but yeah I think it’s not too common. I may have seen it once or twice before, probably here.