Rhetoric

The Steel-Man Principle

Let me begin with a claim that will sound counterintuitive to anyone trained in modern debate culture: if you want to win an argument, you should make your opponent’s position as strong as possible before you attempt to refute it.

This is not a rhetorical flourish. This is the foundation of serious intellectual work.

The Straw-Man Epidemic

Contemporary discourse is dominated by what logicians call “straw-manning”: the practice of replacing your opponent’s actual argument with a weaker, more easily defeated version. You see this everywhere. A nuanced position on immigration policy becomes “they want open borders.” A complex critique of capitalism becomes “they want everyone to be equally poor.” A careful argument about free speech becomes “they want to ban all disagreement.”

Why Your Hot Take Is Not an Argument

A thing happened in the world yesterday. Within minutes, thousands of people had opinions about it. Within hours, those opinions had hardened into positions. Within a day, the positions had calcified into identities, and anyone who questioned them was treated not as a fellow thinker but as an enemy.

No one, in this entire process, made an argument.

I want to be specific about what I mean by “argument,” because the word has been so thoroughly degraded by popular usage that many people believe they are making one when they are doing nothing of the kind.

The Steel-Man Obligation

There is a practice in modern public discourse that I find not merely unpersuasive but intellectually dishonest, and it is so widespread that most people no longer recognize it as a failure. It is the habit of engaging with the weakest version of an opposing argument rather than the strongest.

The name for this failure is the straw man. The remedy is what philosophers call the steel man: the deliberate construction of the most powerful, most coherent version of a position you disagree with, so that when you refute it, you have actually refuted something worth refuting.