# The Usefulness of Strawmans Okay, here's an interesting thought. When debating someone who you have a shared trust with, sometimes a straw man argument can actually be useful if you genuinely don't understand maybe your opponent's view fully and you are trying to help them pull... basically you're trying to help them anchor on a specific problem. So you may say, "Hey, here is this, you know, here I believe this is, you know, your idea." Well, if that is the case, here's a simple counter example that, you know, for example, someone say you're arguing someone who thinks superintelligence is, you know, guaranteed. You could say, "Well, okay, I don't see any good argument for that. What's your argument?" And it's like, "Well, we keep building these things jbetter and better and it's only a matter of time." And then you can say, "Okay, here is a counter example to that. I believe it is a straw man, but I think you should be able to answer this to help me understand what you're actually... what evidence and argument you actually have." So that the straw man that you could provide is, "Well, imagine we were saying we want to get to the moon and we kept building our ladder higher and higher and we kept saying, "Well, fuck, we are getting closer and closer." Like, you know, I mean, at this rate, it's just a matter of time. And you're... but you're relying entirely on the ladder building technology. You're not relying on understanding how rockets work or, you know, propulsion, etc. And so then you're left saying, like, "Oh, okay, well..." You basically use that to the person to say, like, "Okay, realistic, I'm sure there are a ton of non-analogous components of that analogy." Where I'm basically comparing, trying to get to the moon via a ladder is equivalent to trying to get to super intelligence or AGI or whatever via current LLM technology. Well, what you're doing is you're not actually trying to say, "Hey, I don't actually think this is the case." What I'm trying to do is I don't know what's in your head. I don't know the arguments you have. I don't know why exactly you feel as strongly as you do, but there's a shared trust between us and I believe I can learn something here. Let me provide kind of a, you know, a little opponent that you need to kind of beat down. Your idea needs to beat down. And by doing so, I can help kind of, like, warm your idea, you know. It's like envision getting into the boxing ring and you're just like, "Well, I don't want to, you know, go in cold." So let me actually give you some, like, some things that'll kind of get your idea out and help you. So again, a strawman can be used to help someone. It just very regularly is used in bad faith, so to speak. More generally, this is just about the usefulness of criticism. --- Date: 20250417 Links to: [Strawman Argument](Strawman%20Argument.md) Tags: References: * []()