Steelmen Vs. Everymen

There are two way to spend IQ points. You can spend them fighting dumb ideas that are wrong or you can spend them fighting smart ideas that are wrong. I don't know what the proper allocation of IQ points should be to battling dumb vs. smart ideas

The term Steelman refers to the best possible argument for your opponent's position, but if that's not what most people actually believe, does it do any good? Wouldn't it be more persuasive to battle the actual objections that average IQ people make? Instead of Steelmen, shouldn't we fight everymen?

If our goal is widespread persuasion of voters/actors in society, then I think the answer is yes. But we might have other goals. If our goal is to persuade the elite - people who have more power and more influence, then we should stick with steelmen. Likewise, if our goal is to refine our own thinking, then fighting everymen is like trying to level up by fighting level 1 red slimes all day. But if we fight steelmen we're more likely to level up our own thinking into something more nuanced or sometimes entirely different.

Sam Harris occurs to me as someone who fights everymen a lot. His career can be seen as a series of arguments against fundamentalist Christianity, Islam, Wokeism, etc. He does other things too, of course, but the number of hours he has spent arguing with people who really have no place being beside him is tremendous. Is that really the most beneficial use of the Sam Harris' of our world?

Maybe. Sam Harris has piled up a ton of influence over the years that he wouldn't have gotten if all he had talked about was meditation and free will. Maybe the strategy is this: build a following by fighting dumb ideas and then lead that following into smarter ideas.

This seems like Eric Weinstein's strategy. Early in Weinstein's public life, he fought SJWs. Like many before him (Jordan Peterson's line "I've figured out how to monetize the SJWs" comes to mind), he got a lot of people on his side with this sort of rhetoric. Now that he has an audience, he hardly talks about them, instead, he talks about a lot smarter stuff.

The difference between fighting everymen and steelmen seems to be about what you wish to accomplish. If you want to gain a following and influence a lot of normies, fight everymen. If you want to develop your own thinking and move the frontier of human understanding forward, fight steelmen.