Interesting post!

I guess the part of your post that I'm most reacting to, here, is the vibe of flattening people out to "is evil, don't bother interacting." I think there's some version of this that's reasonable: probably our society is a good deal crazier than it needs to be because so many people _don't_ cut off conversations with people they're never going to agree with. And I admire people who have the courage of their convictions to condemn evil (while having good enough judgment to not aim this at, e.g., people who think different Star Trek characters should kiss.)

I guess I'm pretty agreeable by nature, don't use social media much, and am blessed with a pretty good social bubble. So I'm attuned to the cases where there's something to gain.

I posit that there's often an ambiguous zone between "pure" value differences and "pure" empirical disagreements. People aren't well-modeled as having distinct slots for values and epistemics, let alone consistent value or belief systems - it all gets muddled together in a weakly consistent and self-serving way.

So I think there can be alpha in helping people orient towards the better parts of their nature. Maybe that doesn't look much like "steelmanning" - my instinct is to look more for the emotional drivers that lead a person to [position X] and then propose alternative ways to satisfy those drivers.