I've never heard of the "steelman" thought experiment

I'm familiar with the "strawman" concept that it derives from, although in my experience this is typically presented as a logical fallacy.

What is the purpose of "steelmanning" a political actor's political perspectives?

What is this supposed to achieve?

Where did you and the people responding to this comment hear about this concept? Are there articles out there making the case for "steelmanning"?

It's just that a lot of people argue badly, either because of lacking skill or lacking goodwill.

That doesn't mean their arguments are necessarily wrong. It is necessary to try to reframe such badly made arguments in a way that presents the message properly in order to be able to actually compare competing ideas and find truth.

If you compare one well-crafted argument to a poorly crafted argument, the well-crafted argument would seem to come out on top even if its underlying ideas were actually wrong.

E.g. if I say "Apples are good because my grandma loved apples and you are stupid!"

And my opponent says "Apples are bad because there are other fruits that can be grown much more efficiently and feed people better"

Then my opponent would probably "win" the argument. But that doesn't mean apples are actually bad. Try to remake the argument for why apples are good in a better way, in order to fairly compare the two sides and find the truth.

I've seen this jargon around and use it myself but now that you ask I'm not sure where I first saw it.

tl;dr - good faith requires you to understand and do your best to represent the other side, not cherry pick sneaky "wins"

When I use the term my intent is to frame the opposing argument as strongly and clearly (and fairly!) as possible so that you can make your own point strongly and fairly. The critique of a "strawman argument" is a metaphor about arguing/fighting a training dummy instead of an actual enemy, usually by addressing only part of an argument or by ignoring context or using logical fallacies like motte and baily or false dichotomies. The idea is that it's very easy to look like your point wins when you fight the scarecrow; if it's actually a good argument face it off against the knight in armor actually fighting back.

I use steelmanning to connect across cultural divides. This way I don't end up writing off half the country as deplorables. If I simply wrote them off in this way it would be contributing to the decay of our social fabric. So instead I intend to mend the social fabric by attempting to understand the emotional place that these deplorable ideas come from, which by themselves are often quite reasonable. Isolation is often how people end up with these ideas, so it's important to connect to them, and ultimately to love them.

That goes for both sides of our political system, and beyond to the rural urban divide, the gender divide, the racial divide, the class divide, etc.

I think I found out about by reading rationalist stuff. E.g. Less wrong and slatestarcodex.

See for example: https://slatestarcodex.com/2013/02/12/youre-probably-wonderi...