Updated Hierarchy of Disagreement

Which Lukeprog argues should be the top layer called: "Improve the Argument, then Refute Its Central Point"

That's the alien spaceship* above the pyramid.

*The Enterprise would work as well.

You don't want your interlocutor to feel like you are either misrepresenting or humiliating him. Improving an argument is still desirable, but don't sour the debate.

There are a couple different things I sometimes see conflated together under the label "steel man".

As an example, imagine you're talking to the mother of a young man who was killed by a drunk driver on the way to the corner store, and whose life could likely have been saved if he had been wearing a seat belt. This mom might be a bit emotional when she says "NEVER get in a car without your seat belt on! It's NEVER safe!", and interpreted completely literally it is clearly bad advice based on a false premise.

One way to respond would be to say "Well, that's pretty clearly wrong, since sitting in a car in your garage isn't dangerous without a seat belt on. If you were to make a non-terrible argument for wearing seat belts all the time, you might say that it's good to get in the habit so that you're more likely to do it when there is real danger", and then respond to the new argument. The mother in this case is likely to feel both misrepresented and condescended to. I wouldn't call this steel manning.

Another thing you could do is to say "Hm. Before I respond, let me make sure I'm understanding you right. You're saying that driving with a seat belt is almost always dangerous (save for obvious cases like "moving the car from the driveway into the garage") and that the temptation to say "Oh, that rarely happens!"/"it won't happen to me!"/"it's only a short trip!" is so dangerously dismissive of real risk that it's almost never worth trusting that impulse when the cost of failure is death and the cost of putting a seat belt on is negligible. Is that right?". In that case, you're more likely to get a resounding "YES!" in response, even though that not only isn't literally what she said, it also contradicts the "NEVER" in her statement. It's not "trying to come up with a better argument, because yours is shit", it's "trying to understand the actual thing you're trying to express, rather than getting hung up on irrelevant distractions when you don't express it perfectly and/or literally". Even if you interpret wrong, you're not going to get bad reactions because you're checking for understanding rather than putting words in their mouth, and you're responding to the thing they are actually trying to communicate. This is the thing I think was being pointed at in the original description of "steel man", and is something worth striving for.

I like how the top level is floating above the rest of the pyramid. This version of the hierarchy could be symbolized with the Eye of Providence.

Surely there should be a level for "changing your mind" or "putting forth the most reasonable case given all available evidence." As it as the top level goal is still about winning and not about truth-seeking.