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Comment by ajross | Hacker News Reader

> what did the US gain out of this?

The best steelman argument[1] is that it was a failed gamble. The protests of a few months back (also the improbable success in Venezuela) made them think they could topple the regime. They couldn't.

It's been clear for weeks now that the US has lost this war. The only question was how long it would take Trump to disengage and what the trigger would be.

And the answers appear to be "two more weeks" and "when one plausibly genocidal gaffe went too far and fractured his domestic coalition".

[1] Which... I mean, steelman analysis has its place. But really no, this was just dumb.

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> Which... I mean, steelman analysis has its place. But really no, this was just dumb.

I rarely hear people use the term "steelman" while arguing in good faith. It's basically a tacit admission that you are either advancing a position that you don't actually hold (why...?), or more likely you know it's an unpopular position and you want to argue it while having plausible deniability that you may not actually hold it (which is just cowardly).

Stepping through other peoples logic to understand why they may have a position that you do not understand/agree with is sensible for sure. But if you do that in conversation with others so often that you need to preface it with a special term I'm going to be suspicious that you're just trying to obfuscate your actual opinions.

(see also: "just playing devil's advocate here, but...")

You'd be right to be suspicious.

The term "steelman" arose from people who misunderstand the term "strawman". Such people coined it out of the idea thinking that a strawman was an an attempt to make an opponents argument look weaker than it is, while a "steelman" elevates it to it's highest state before attacking it.

In reality, a steelman is just another strawman. A strawman was never simply a matter of making your opponent's argument look weak, they're about making a separate argument that your opponent isn't even arguing, and attacking that to make it look like you're winning the argument while not actually addressing the opponent's actual argument/position. A steelman does the same. In other words, they're about fabricating an argument and making it look like it came from the opponent, before attempting to prove it fallacious. They're both failures in logic - a fallacy of relevance.

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