steelman
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See also: Steelman
English
Alternative forms
Etymology
From steel + -man. For the second definition, coined as the inverse of straw man.
Noun
steelman (plural steelmen)
- A steelworker.
- A stronger version of an argument that one is about to critically analyze.
- Antonym: strawman
- 2011 October 24, Luke Muehlhauser, “Better Disagreement”, in LessWrong:
- a "steel man" is an improvement of someone's position or argument that is harder to defeat than their originally stated position or argument.
- 2012 July 7, Guy Srinivasan, “Wireheading Steelman”, in lw-seattle (Usenet):
- I want to make that strawman into a steelman, but I eliminated "the pursuit of happiness" from my to-do list so many years ago that I don't even know where I'd begin.
Verb
steelman (third-person singular simple present steelmans, present participle steelmanning, simple past and past participle steelmanned)
- To repair flaws in an argument before analyzing it critically; to refute or to weaken the force of a stronger version of an argument than what was actually given.
- 2012 July 7, Guy Srinivasan, “Wireheading Steelman”, in lw-seattle (Usenet):
- I don't agree with the argument, because of 4. If I were to steelman it, which I may try but after work or maybe during lunch, I would first try to make it impervious to this assault:
- 2015 February 11, Daniel Armak, “Re: volunteers for feb 24.”, in LessWrong Tel Aviv (Usenet):
- It is possible that while preparing for the talk I will manage to convince myself that the problem is in fact resolved or dissolved. In that case I will treat you to my best steelmanning of the problem, and its resolution.
- 2015 June 18, rndn, “Going Deeper into Neural Networks”, in Hacker News (Usenet):
- Perhaps the argument should be steelmanned in that we should generally avoid using algorithms which are so complex that they aren't glass boxes.