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In defense of strawmanning: there's nothing wrong with wanting to check if someone else is making a mistake. If you forget to frame it as a question, e.g. "Just wanna make sure: what's the difference between what you're thinking and the thinking of what my more obviously bad, made-up person who speaks similarly to you?" Then the natural way it comes out will sound accusatory, as in our typical conception of strawmanning.
I think most people strawman because it's shorthand for this kind of attempt to check, but then they're also unaware that they're just trying to check, and they wind up defending their (actually accidental) apparent hostility, and then a polarization happens.
Strawmanning happens when we take others' judgments as plausible evidence of more general models and habits that those judgments play a part in. By asking for clarity of what models inform a judgment, we can get better over time at inferring models from judgments. It can become a limited form of mind reading.
Yes, I can see some benefits to responding to straw-manning as if it were misphrased enquiry. I do think that at least 90% of the occasions in which straw-manning happens, it isn't.
Most of the times I see it happen are in scenarios where curious enquiry about the difference is not a plausible motivation. In my experience it has nearly always happened where both sides are trying to win some sort of debate, usually with an audience.
That aside, the proposed mechanism for straw-manning was that it is a particular kind of mistake, so I would expect to see at le... (read more)