Steelmanning

2025-02-18   mentalmodel veryimportant sketch

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Practice of reconstructing an argument in its strongest, most persuasive form—often even stronger than its original presentation—before engaging with it critically. It is the intellectual opposite of strawmanning, where one distorts an opponent’s argument into a weaker, more easily refutable version.

Charlie Munger

• "I never allow myself to have an opinion on anything that I don’t know the other side’s argument better than they do."
  

Peter Thiel, The Diversity Myth

• "There are two basic debate techniques you can have when you’re arguing with someone. You can go after the enemy at the weakest point, which in the college context is the humanities: it’s ridiculous, and you’re most likely to come away with a sort of tactical victory. But the other strategy is to go after the enemy’s strongest point: to say there’s no real science going on, that string theorists aren’t making the fundamental breakthroughs that we’re told, and that physicists have otherwise been twiddling their thumbs for fifty years. And if you can win that point, it’s game, set, and match."
  

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