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Notes -
Are you sanewashing weakmanning?
There is an obvious incentive to “continue deploying the magnifying glass” whether your source is the sun or, uh, a flashlight.* Scott says it right in the title—Weak Men are Superweapons. It sure is convenient when one’s enemies are as vicious as they are stupid. Any honest and rational believer should be very suspicious indeed.
Not that it’s wrong to hammer on a specific factual claim! But you’re risking getting dragged into a definitional dispute. Surely no true Scotsman would believe X, or Y, or Z. It’s defining by exclusion.
Fortunately, the truth does actually exist. An accusation of weakmanning probably looks like “but most people don’t believe that!” I think it’s better to respond with “okay, what do they (or you) believe?” Not only is this more charitable, but it gets people to anchor on actual predictions. By all means, shoot holes in their arguments, not the ones they aren’t even making. If they try to sanewash, ask whether that motte supports other parts of the bailey. The more time they spend carefully thinking, the better.
Say you have a hypothetical segregationist with the sincere belief that black people deserve fewer rights than everyone else. When you ask him about this, he denies any ill will towards black people, and accuses you of weakmanning him as one of those extremists. I don’t think it’s very practical to go after policies one by one and explain how they fit your suspicion. Instead, you should let him attempt to set up his sanewashed stance, then take it apart. “You claim to only want more control over who gets your tax dollars. Explain how this justifies anti-miscegenation laws?” Either you get him to disavow the more extreme, less consistent positions, or you generate a lot of cognitive dissonance. Give him the rope to hang himself.
* As much as I like the term “sanewashing,” given your choice of analogies, you really should have gone with something like “Bleached Ideas.” Kind of has a LessWrong sound to it, no?
I think your approach is clearly the right one when engaged in a particular debate with a particular person, and OP says as much. But I think ymeskhout’s post is directed more to the scenario where someone is writing about a movement or argument in general instead of engaging with a particular person. In such cases the weakmanning concern is more real.
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You make some good points. The question of how I may effectively debate a suspected sanewasher is distinct from whether the prevalence of sanewashers means I should disbelieve something.
The most relevant Scottposts are in the Conflict vs. Mistake series, but I don’t know that he argued we actually have similar goals. (That does sound like a LessWrong position…) Scott seemed to recognize that the conflict-mode was way more realistic for things which could be considered “values differences.”
I framed it as individual conversations in part because of ymeskhout’s last paragraph, which I assumed meant debate. It does make more sense if he’s talking about blogposts or other one-sided constructions. Even so, it strikes me as rather…conflict-theorist. Is there really no legitimate reason why an opponent would accuse you of weakmanning? If I really am tilting at windmills, then I’ve done something wrong.
As for bleaching…fair enough. I was thinking of Tvtropes’s Bleached Underpants, referring to a very particular sort of censorship. Though I will say the negative connotation of bleaching is still appropriate for sanewashing. I think sanewashing is more an accusation than a self-description. In that context, it makes sense that the (deceptive) sane version gets the negative connotation, even if the insane versatile is also despised.
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Failure to recognize that some of your enemies are evil is why rationalism is so full of quokkas.
And like drinking wine in moderation, or selfishness/selflessness, or all the other ideas to which this applies, some people need to see fewer of their enemies as evil, and some people need to see more of their enemies as evil.
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