The notion of "steelmanning" or criticizing the "strongest version" of something you disagree with seems harder to pin down that I used to think. So often a critic's strongest version is just the version that most appeal to them personally, from their own perspective.

Spitballing a bit, one way to be charitable in interpreting something you disagree with is to assume you've misunderstand something that seems obviously stupid. Another is to try and understand what you're missing that would make it more defensible.

It's funny how morality and interpretation become so interpenetrated. To me what this all boils down to is commitment to the idea that other people are human beings just like you and that you're just as likely to have missed what makes sense of their perspective as the opposite.

Even if you have very good reasons to believe that the one making the argument is doing so for entirely cynical reasons, if the argument has purchase beyond that person, it's pretty questionable to attribute such cynicism to a supermajority of their audience.

You do your best to really understand what people see in the argument, perhaps testing out variations in ways to understand some of it or some of the details of it.

In the best case of course you're having an actual conversation with someone you trust who thinks there's something to it. That way you don't have to shoulder the whole responsibility yourself; you can have someone help keep you honest.

In order to be really open to another perspective, you have to risk that understanding it will change you in some way. Engaging in "good faith" often means precisely taking that leap of faith, taking on that risk that you will be changed.

Anyway this is all very slippery stuff and in a situation where no one trusts anyone, no amount of attempted "steelmanning" is going to do it. One thing I did a few times back in the day is actually have the people I was criticizing review my pieces before I published.

If they said they didn't recognize their own argument in what I was criticizing, I wouldn't publish until I'd revised it into something that they did recognize. I had the luxury of taking that approach, which is rare, but I did learn a lot, and they did trust my criticism.

Anyway, I'm not really going anywhere with this thread. Spitballing, as I said. I think people want a cheat code of some kind w/r/t steelmanning and such. But it really is a moral commitment, a leap of faith. And you might fall short, or pull it off & still be mistrusted.