Straw Man, Steel Man, and All Those Other Men
Hey beautiful people,
I am hosting a salon at Anna Gat’s Interintellect tomorrow at 3 PM ET. The salon is titled …
Will Stoicism Save the World? The Case for Being a Stoic During the Meta-Crisis
I will be giving an introduction to Stoicism, then I will present three arguments as to why I think Stoicism is a philosophy that is well-suited for the meta-crisis.
The Interintellect team has set the price for the salon at $20 USD. If you’d like to purchase a ticket, you can do so here.
I sense it is going to be a pretty dope session. Here is a peek at one of the slides …
Tomorrow’s event:
Live Journaling w/ Peter Limberg. Daily @ 8:00 AM ET. Patreon event. 90 mins.
Shadow Sensemaking w/ Arran Rogerson and Alyssa Polizzi. May 19th, and 26th @ 6:00 PM ET. RSVP here. 60 mins.
Newly posted events:
Straw Man, Steel Man, and All Those Other Men w/ Ryan Nakade and Peter Limberg. June 1st @ 6:00 PM ET. RSVP here.
An event to get excited about:
Doomer Optimism: Antifragility, Localism, and the Limits of Labels w/ Joe Norman. May 25th @ 12:00 PM ET. RSVP here.
The doomer optimists return to The Stoa, this time bringing Joe Norman along with them. They will discuss how doomer optimism relates to antifragility and localism, and they will address the challenges in navigating the complexity of the world via a focus on home and land.
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May 18th, 2021
I am inspired to continue to journal about reasoning today. Yeah, I am a nerd, but do not worry, I will do my best to make this entry super sexy. Today will be about the infamous straw man fallacy and its steel man counter, and all of the other men associated with the two.
Ryan Nakade is returning to The Stoa, and he will be joining me to talk about a taxonomy of some of these men. Ryan was active in the ‘memetic mediator’ scene, and he was a regular at the ‘Memetic Mediator Campfire’ at The Stoa when that was a thing. I think he was trained as a real mediator as well, so he is the perfect man for me to do this with.
He recently coined two cool terms: the titanium man and polarity man, which I will get to in a moment. We are going to present a family of concepts that have the word man tagged at the end of them. I am a tad self-conscious of the gendered language here, so feel free to swap the word man with 'woman' or something gender-neutral like 'human’ if that will help you grok the concepts better.
The concepts we will introduce are the following: straw man, weak man, hollow man, steel man, titanium man, and polarity man. We’ll use the ‘signal and noise’ mental model to organize these six men. The signal here means meaningful information that comes from some communication and noise means information that interferes with that meaningful information.
The two categories in which we will place these men: filtering out the noise, and boosting the signal. The former category is about spotting ‘informal fallacies’ in arguments, not dismissing the argument completely but recognizing that good faith is probably not present. The latter category is about finding the best in an argument, or even making it better.
I will put forward six definitions now. The definitions from the first category are from Scott Aikin and Robert Talisse’s excellent, ‘Why We Argue (And How We Should): A Guide to Political Disagreement in an Age of Unreason,’ and the two definitions from the second category are from Ryan’s articles.
Filtering Out the Noise
Straw man: “A distortion of a given argument so that it is represented as worse than it was.”
Weak man: “Picking out the weakest of the opposition’s arguments and refuting it, and thereby implying that this is the final word.”
Hollow man: “Attributing a view to the opposition that not only none hold but that bears no resemblance to views they hold.”
Boosting the Signal
Steel man: “The strongest, most accurate representation of one’s argument. This involves reinforcing one’s position as they have articulated it.”
Titanium man: “Taking the core of one’s argument and rearticulating it at a higher level of nuance, sophistication, abstraction, and complexity. The argument is buttressed with more perspectives, contexts, and variables.”
Polarity man: This is about seeing the polarity that the argument exists within, to see the whole of an issue, in service to harmonizing the space that the issue resides in. Ryan goes through three steps on how to engage in polarity manning in his article, The Polarity Man: Transform Conflict into Wisdom.
We are going to discuss these in more detail and with exercises, which should be fun. I hope to do more of these types of sessions at The Stoa, and who knows, perhaps some kind of reasoning or memetic mediation course thingy can emerge from these experiments.
I would like to add another category though, which we might not address in the presentation. There is only one man in this category, and he is a good man...
Seducing the Connection
Communitas man: Seeing that the spirit of the person’s argument is coming from a deep desire for connection, and there is no deeper connection than communitas.
Sure, the person who puts forth an argument or opinion can be going about their desire for connection in a maladaptive and acutely flawed way, and maybe it is best not to attempt to manifest an active relationship with them, especially if they have hungry ghost tendencies. In those cases it is wisest to set firm personal boundaries, fast.
That being said, despite whatever the wisest move is for the situation, one can feel into their desire for connection, and be grateful for it, and feel warmth towards the person because of it. I have been doing this lately, even to those silly ‘one-upmanship’ tweets that often occur on Twitter, and it has been filling me with a warm loving energy.
So there you go fam, here is the ‘seduce the culture’ algo that all the sexy meta kids are enacting: filter out the noise, boost the signal, then seduce the connection.
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