For those that don’t know, steelmanning is the opposite of strawmanning.
It means re-stating your opponent’s view in a manner that they agree “yes, that is my view” and only then you express why you disagree with it.
Failure to do so means one of two things: either you don’t actually understand the stance you claim to oppose or you’re not even in the business of finding truth and changing minds to begin with.
Not sure if this is actually unpopular, but it didn’t feel like a showerthought either.
The YouTube channel Clint’s Reptiles does a lot of steelmanning of Creationist arguments from an evolutionary perspective. He has a PhD in Biology and just happens to be a former atheist and current religious person. People accuse him of being a shill for both sides whivh is how you know you’re doing it right.
I understand the appeal of steelmanning, however linguistically the term itself promotes the illusion that other genders are less equipped to engage in debate. It inherits this bias from the figure of the strawman being the only gender considered capable of protecting crops via manning the station.
A bias I have is that conservatism seeks to generate value through competition, whereas progressivism seeks to generate value through cooperation (i.e. game theory). If that premise is accepted then progressivism implies not limiting the scope of the language one uses, in order to gain maximum insights.
I suggest the ungendered neologism Best-case Framing as a substitute. It’s potentially less binary or oppositional too as it can refer to all positions not just the us vs them I believe is suggested by steelmanning.
Additionally, Peyton Manning should change his name.
i’ve always looked up to the straw man as a woman