It sounds stupid, but I believe it. The flow of a lot of arguments make sense if you assume neither side understands practical empathy (not a comment on objectives, just they can't hold 2x perspectives in mind at once so a lot of the conversation is invisible to them).
Just means that they have limited imagination, no?
I'd hesitate to label anything as steelmanning even if I believed that was what I was doing.
Somebody else coming up with a slightly better argument than my labeled steelman would undermine my entire point.
That said, successfully presenting an opponents steelman argument as well or better than they would and then countering it is very effective.
Limited enough to not imagine the possibility there's something they don't know.
Explicitly labeled steelman is just "argument from arrogance", and that's one reason people often react badly to it. Some times the arrogant person does know better than everybody else, but statistically those two are negatively correlated.
The purpose of dialogue is to explore differences in thinking and possibly emerge with a new shared understanding.
To me, steelmanning is offering the other person the courtesy of the same thing you just insisted they “should” do if they want to have a discussion with you.
For years, a big part of my process for evaluating a new idea was to ask questions and mentally argue for and against various propositions. This might force me to read or think a bit more, but that process almost inherently tries to find the strongest (by whatever values constitute 'strong' to me) version of a point of view.
Is it foolproof? No, I find new arguments and facts.
But I do generally find it easier to see where other people are coming from in a discussion because I can usually reference back to my own interior dialogue to see where the idea at least could have come from (whether it did or not).
Is that steelmanning? I have no earthly idea, but it works for me.
It seems the hard part is convincing people that this kind of dialogue is important.
However, if I say A and I know 90% of people counter A with B then I'll say A and counter with steelmanned B and then counter that all at once so we can quickly jump to C.
C would either be a less predictable counter or no counter at all.
Thats kind of the whole point of steelmanning.
To me steelmanning is more of a better version of restating the others point in order to verify you understand their point. The best steelmanning is often proceeded by that. (do I understand the other parties meaning, and what is the strongest version of that meaning.)
Most often though I just find that steelmanning is just ignoring fallacies in otherwise decent efforts at conversational debate. In order to not devolve into back and forth "thats a fallacy!".
In which case the responsibility is on the steelmanner to demonstrate conclusively why the best possible argument differs from the original argument by discussing what makes the original argument weak. You can't just address it with 'it's weak.'
They might, yes. The point is to try not that you will necessarily always succeed.
This is why I said above that trying to do it but not labeling it is the best approach coz hey, maybe your steelman game sucks.
It is interesting to see how labeling a technique like this and assigning it a sense of moral superiority seems to invite the exact abuse you describe.
I’ve noticed this with the recent popularity of “steelmanning”; Many of the explicitly-labeled steelman arguments I’ve read lately are actually just strawman arguments, but the author tries to preempt criticism by labeling it a steelman and pretending it is the most robust counter argument that could exist. Often these false steelman arguments arise when the author doesn’t understand the topic as well as they think they do but they believe that “steelmanning” automatically makes them an expert on the counter arguments.