That's slightly different as I feel like the core of that is "do you have a good theory of mind of your opponent". If I had to pretend I'm a believer of something I'm not I wouldn't necessarily go for the median - I would go for what I, specifically, would be like, if I bought into the core premise. It's the perspective I can empathise with the most, the minimal deviation from my current self.
what I, specifically, would be like, if I bought into the core premise
Interesting how ITT could be thought of as exploring various modes of being for a person, rather than about the content of various worldviews. Keeping identity small makes this quite an alien perspective (where even a lot of factual understanding fails to graduate to the level of endorsed factual belief). But ITT as modes of being is closer to the framing needed to develop an accurate theory of mind about people who don't try to keep their identity small.
Ideological turing tests tend to fail because of
Inability to use the opposing side's shibboleths, regardless of how well you mimic their reasoning.
Cases where someone's reasoning is flawed enough that to imitate them you need to imitate specific modes of flawed reasoning--for instance, I would have a hard time imitating a homeopath on this basis, or a Holocaust denier.
As for the idea of "fleshman" itself, it is a reasonable concept but a bad piece of jargon which makes weird people here sound weirder. It isn't hard to say things like "people usually take this to mean" or other synonyms for "typical believer". Jargon has a cost.
I suppose it sounds a bit gross! I think the "they're made out of flesh!" old sci-fi story was in my head when I thought of that.
I like this fleshman framing as it lacks the following issue:
Steelmanning makes a great deal of sense in terms of first order effects, but what I observe is that once a diverse group is in the habit of steelmanning, the group is exploitable where its more effective to vaguepost in such a way that all the factions steelman you into their camp, than to clearly spell out your belief. Incentive gradients against clear writing are like, pretty bad.
Fleshmanning picks the median instead of the extreme and it seems like factions can agree on median, or at least not predictably disagree like they do when picking best, where this predictable disagreement gets them pwned
How about engaging with the actual ideas that the actual proponents actually propose? I am not seeing how constructing a fictional proponent improves on this.
At some point (after grasping the referent/intent/desiderata), the proponents should become irrelevant to the further study of the ideas, unless you are primarily studying the proponents rather than the ideas.
They are the primary source for the ideas. The more you engage with them, the more you may learn, because they are not you. They have not yet said all the things that they might. Wrestling with the other, you may develop your ideas in ways that you might not otherwise discover.
Inventing things that they might say can generate only a monologue. Good for practice, perhaps, but still requiring testing against the real world.
Some ideas are meaningful on their own merits, and can be developed according to their own nature. Why engage with the kinds of ideas that are not like that and require an exogenous "primary source" that can't be grasped? Studying that "primary source" seems like a valid reason, but then it's not about the ideas.
I've been pretty clear though that the fleshman isn't about inventing ideas, it's in fact meant to be more empirical than the steelman and something you have to go and observe the movement to extrapolate. The point I'm trying to convey is more about the "median" aspect. Some people are quite content to go on X/Twitter, find the Dumbest And Craziest Member of the outgroup, and point at it as a sign that the outgroup is Obviously Bad. This is technically "engaging with the outgroup" - the craziest member is still a real member! But it's also a form of cherry picking evidence. Similar things can happen with the steelman - out of epistemic humility you might go and find the most sane, thoughtful representative of the idea you're arguing against, someone so well articulated that you have a hard time finding fault in their version of the idea at all. That's also engaging. But should you let that kind of thing discourage you from ever opposing that group again, on account of, they do have a point after all?
This is the thing I'm stressing. The opinion of the typical member is something you can only glean by observation, not pure thought, and is the one thing that's going to matter the most. A classic example of this would be seen in many religious beliefs - the most educated theologians and scholars are not a good proxy of how it feels like to live in a society dominated by those beliefs. The typical believer is.
This is technically "engaging with the outgroup" - the craziest member is still a real member!
This is not centrally the case. You don't need to go for the median to draw a sensible boundary and then retreat from it to the inside, with some margin. There will remain a lot of variation, on both content and quality, but you won't risk the failure modes of non-centrality.
the most sane, thoughtful representative of the idea you're arguing against, someone so well articulated
The criteria that grade arguments as sane/thoughtful/well-articulated should be suspect, because something might be such from your point of view, but not from inside the target worldview. If you optimize too strongly, you risk goodharting on your alien proxy measures of quality and pick a non-central representative as a "steelman" source.
so well articulated that you have a hard time finding fault in their version of the idea at all
Failing to find fault is very different from understanding an idea, digesting it well enough to keep developing it on your own. The purpose of steelmanning, in the (more useful, I think) distortionary variant of its meaning, is to build your own ideas regardless of whether they accurately represent and should be attributed to their original source/inspiration. This doesn't work at all if you merely "have a hard time finding fault".
This is not centrally the case. You don't need to go for the median to draw a sensible boundary and then retreat from it to the inside, with some margin. There will remain a lot of variation, on both content and quality, but you won't risk the failure modes of non-centrality.
I mean, I really have no objection to this - any kind of understanding of a whole distribution is always better than just understanding of individual simplifications of it (be average, median, or what have you). And it's not like most of this stuff is literally something you can draw on a single 1D numerical axis, except for some very rare and specific policy positions such as "what tax rate in % should be applied to people above £100k" or such.
I was more gesturing at this "try to grasp what the common position is" concept. If you have a huge bimodal distribution where the movement is split almost 50/50 between two major interpretations of the belief then sure, both of those are more relevant than the rather meaningless mid-point. Apply pinch of salt and common sense as necessary.
The criteria that grade arguments as sane/thoughtful/well-articulated should be suspect, because something might be such from your point of view, but not from inside the target worldview.
Ultimately yes but there's only so much relativism I can engage in. If someone posits a completely different worldview from mine down to "empirical knowledge isn't valid", what can I even do? Maybe it makes sense for them, but for me it's insanity and as such disqualifying. This is different from "ok they share with me the basic principles of how the world works and how knowledge is accrued, and merely have different information, so if we engaged in enough mutual exchange we might come to an agreement or at least understanding". Otherwise you're not steelmanning, you're just passively acknowledging any idea as just as good as any other, because for any idea there could be someone who thinks it's perfectly coherent and sensible (for starters, usually, the person who voices it).
The purpose of steelmanning, in the (more useful, I think) distortionary variant of its meaning, is to build your own ideas regardless of whether they accurately represent and should be attributed to their original source/inspiration.
Steelmanning is used a lot of time as a way to engage with ideas/groups by giving maximum grace. Basically trying to play devil's advocate to make sure that your own criticisms aren't facile or purely the result of blind outgroup distrust, but grounded in genuine rational thinking. It's not how you recommend to use it, but people do this, so I'm responding to that mainly.
unless you are primarily studying the proponents rather than the ideas.
It seems you are studying the proponents, since the "fleshman" is their median belief/argument.
The proponents of anything cover generally a whole spectrum. The point is more "pick something that is meaningfully representative of that spectrum".
Yes, they're not as far gone as the strawman would suggest. They understand nutrition. But also they're not as conservative and rigorous in their considerations as the original study.
I just want to point out that it's their belief(s) that you're evaluating, not their arguments (steel or straw) for those beliefs.
Belief 1: Apples are healthy.
Belief 2: We should redirect funding.
Why do you need to know the group's median argument/justification? You can just evaluate each belief.
I mean my point is that having a stronger-than-justified belief in the healthiness of apples leads to certain conclusions that are wrong because the belief itself doesn't correct map to reality. And knowing the ways in which that happens is important to predict what mistakes they might make.
OP has a theoretical point but let's fleshman and not steelman it and then it seems to me, it is for most bits and purposeses simply too abstract. In most cases where we like to steelman an idea it is because we want to give the subject matter, the core idea itself the benefit of the doubt, maybe exactly - and for good reason - to separate it from its flawed proponents. This could theoretically be stupid in some cases but in most I think it's exactly the careful conversational rule that can help prevent talking past each other or ignoring useful insights.
Say: Marx still to be taken seriously? Don't hang the idea with it's brutal historic fellows, or with it's well-meaning but heart-not-brain-led current advocates' rosy claims. Let's see whether in absolute, his core tenets and claims may hold true under today's or tomorrow's unmovable parts of the technological and biological framework conditions. Let's steelman it to see whether we can really fully or only mostly throw him out without regret
Yes, whether we'd actively support _a specific group_ of course would more depend on fleshwomaning but I don't think that's most often the point of discussion (even elsewhere than on LW), and where it is, I don't think the "steelmanning" as concept tends to sneak in.
Maybe one could say much of OP's intuitive traction therefore hinged on strawmanig a bit steelman's case.
My point isn't that the steelman has no purpose. They're tools for different situations.
As you say, "Is Marx still to be taken seriously?" requires a steelman. If Marx passed muster then that might mean we're supposed to build a new rationalist socialism that is as close as possible to that idealised and strengthened version of the argument.
But "should I support current Marxists as they exist" requires a fleshman.
and where it is, I don't think the "steelmanning" as concept tends to sneak in.
Personally I've seen this happen often. Though often with the other end of the political spectrum. People engaging with the smart version of an idea even when the median supporter is very, very dumb and there's no way anything that will be done in their name even comes close to that smart version anyway.
I agree that the proposed 'fleshman' view point is quite abstract and very different in its use from the other two. It seems to me that the main way to make it not as abstract is given in the conclusion: as a means to predict what a group might do or how the group might evolve.
People can believe and follow good causes (steelmanned version of an idea) for partially wrong reasons (fleashmanned version). Debating whether the actual idea is good or bad is one thing, looking at what actions the followers of that idea will take is another.
In a way, given a distribution of beliefs in a movement, the strawman is the lower bound (easy to attack), the steelman is the upper bound (great to use to prove wrong), but the fleshman reflects the actual distribution of opinions between those two, which helps not debate the idea, but understand real world cases.
It's easy to take a belief held by real people and straw/steelman it into oblivion to an extent that no-one in the group actually recognises the idea anymore.
In the beginning was the strawman. Given a certain ideology or position one might want to criticise, the strawman is a bad faith representation of that position which makes it easy to attack without engaging with any seriousness. It can be entirely made up or it can be derived from nutpicking - every movement has some stupid and/or crazy member, and you can always rely on them to provide an absolutely deranged interpretation of their ideology. Isolating and elevating these is a great way to have an easy target to disparage. This is rightfully considered not a good practice, but it sadly works.
On the other end of the spectrum, in these parts, we love our steelmen. The steelman is the opposite of the strawman - one plays Devil's advocate and actively tries their best to summon up the strongest, most defensible version of an idea to then engage with it. This is useful because it gives us a ceiling; if you can tear down that version then surely every more imperfect one doesn't stand a chance, and you have found a structural flaw. Similarly but in reverse to the strawman, the steelman may be entirely made up by us, or it may be picked from the most thoughtful and rigorous representatives of a given ideology, such as the philosophers who have originally inspired it.
In our incessant material science research for new kinds of rhetorical men, I hereby propose the usefulness of the concept of a fleshman.
The fleshman is neither too weak nor too strong. The fleshman is meant to represent the version of an idea or thought held by the median believer. This is less useful in rhetorical terms per se and more as a tool to understand the dynamics and effects of a movement.
Here's an example. Suppose there was a huge political following and polarisation around the idea that apples are a healthy food. A critic might strawman the Apple Party by sneering at how they want us to subsist on apples alone, which is impossible because they lack all the required proteins and minerals to support human life. That is of course nonsense. A more honest debater might pick a steelman straight from Dr. Cox, the nutritionist who started the movement by releasing a large study about how the vitamins and fibre from apple consumption improve various health outcomes, such as reducing bowel cancer. Looking at this, they might come to the conclusion that yes, the movement is right, and maybe the Apple Party should indeed win the elections.
But that's not necessarily a good way to look at it. Suppose that the Apple Party had gone viral thanks to a TikTok video in which someone bit into an apple and sang "an apple a day keeps a doctor away". The slogan has spread, now people march with signs that show it and buy t-shirts with it. A significant fraction of the Party's membership has pretty much made up this one battle their own identity. Yes, they're not as far gone as the strawman would suggest. They understand nutrition. But also they're not as conservative and rigorous in their considerations as the original study. This median version of the belief is the one that will have the most impact on the world. If a politician is to conquer the votes of this new group, they have to propose policies that will appeal to the majority of them[1]. And these policies might include things such as "redirect funding from health care to apple farming", because of course, if apples are so healthy they reduce the need for doctors, that's a logical thing to do. Even if Dr. Cox himself started screaming that this is wrong and not what he meant to promote (assuming he's not just going to go along with it to keep his position of thought leader), it probably wouldn't be enough to change course. And so this version of the belief might cause real harm, even if in its strongest version it was entirely correct.
That version of the belief is the fleshman.
When is it relevant?
I believe the fleshman is most relevant when discussing politics. This can be a very broad category (I don't just mean electoral, nation-wide politics, but virtually any instance of "groups of people who have to decide how to do things", including e.g. online communities), but it's not infinite. There's no particular reason for fleshmanning of an idea that isn't also trying to turn into action in some way. But a lot of ideas actually do.
While strawmanning is a bad habit for sure, I feel like sometimes steelmanning introduces a different kind of problem - people giving way too much grace to some positions or movements based on the fact that if you steelman them hard enough (sometimes, so hard that you need to come up with the argument yourself, because literally no actual member of the actual movement ever thought about it as deeply as you), they can be kind of defensible. But that would only matter if a sizable amount of people actually held the steelman version of the belief! In practice, different versions of the same belief are still different beliefs - they merely belong to the same broad family. They have slightly different implications and can inspire different policies. That's the problem the fleshman is supposed to address - you don't look just at "how could this idea be improved", but also "what is this idea like right now, and what would happen if it had a major influence on our life". It is, I would argue, a better guide to action than a steelman.
What are its problems?
The main one is that, even more than its cousin the steelman, the fleshman can be really hard to pinpoint. With the steelman the question is "have I really made this argument as strong as possible while still retaining its core identity?". With the fleshman the question is more statistical: what do people actually believe? Along what axis should I even look at gauging the "median" belief? While the steelman can be an exercise in pure thought, the fleshman is empirical: there's no finding it out without going out there and looking, and sadly the data is often polluted (for example social media posts might bias your perception by having an ideology's wingnuts being overrepresented). Properly honing in on it requires rigour, and I would recommend being conservative with it (better err a bit towards the steelman than towards the strawman). But it being hard doesn't mean it's not necessary. I would argue the risks of never even trying to consider the fleshman are higher than those of sometimes making a mistake in estimating it.
Conclusion
The fleshman is the version of a belief held by a typical or median believer. Its purpose is not epistemic but empirical. It serves us in predicting what a movement is most likely to actually do, and it can only be estimated by observing said movement. It's a useful antidote to the classic rationalist trap of falling into sanewashing and basically strengthening your opponents' positions too much by using your own wits until you're unable to find fault in them. It helps us define useful action plans. In the case in which we apply it to ourselves (as rationalists or as members of another group) it helps us tell which directions we should try to move towards.
You strawman when you want to score cheap points and don't care about intellectual honesty, and you steelman when you want to glimpse at ideal truths with a higher standard of rigour. But here in the world, where history happens and life gets messy, most of us are made of simple flesh.
I will actually make a bit of a statistical aside here. I described the fleshman as the median belief. In a model in which a range of beliefs can be represented as one-dimensional along an axis from very moderate to very extreme, and in the assumption that policy P will conquer the support of anyone who is at least that extreme, then the median is indeed the cutoff point for winning over a majority of a group. However this is just an extreme simplification, not only there often isn't a single axis, but also a sufficiently extreme policy might even turn off some of the more moderate representatives, so there's not even a guarantee of a single policy that wins over 50% of a group existing at all, let alone being at the median. A more general phrasing could be that the fleshman represents a typical belief. In most movements, this will be roughly in the neighbourhood of a median, but some may break this rule.