I tend to think people's efforts to "steelman" other people's (bad) arguments are often quite shallow and ignorant themselves.
It's more valuable to actually learn about a topic than make guesses at what the charitable version of someone's argument might be, in theory.
It's more valuable to actually learn about a topic than make guesses at what the charitable version of someone's argument might be, in theory.
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Although steelmanning does run the risk of simply misunderstanding another's position, if in good faith.
The presumption here is that everyone agrees almost exactly on what 'strong' means.
That is sometimes going to be true in private converse, but almost never in public converse (unless in a very selected subset - e.g. room with just one kind of economist in).