Isn't that also known as "Steelmanning" (as opposed to "strawman")?
In that, you take an opponent's argument, and you improve upon it, to make it the best argument it can be, and then you make your best argument against it.
I hadn't heard that term before! It's not necessarily for oppositional purposes, but another way of critically examining something. Yeah, when exploring an idea, sometimes the best posture isn't to argue against it, but to extend it.
There's also a chapter in The Art of Memetics which talks about the "hapkido of ideas" -- how in hapkido (akido? IDK), you never meet force with force. You wait for your opponent to punch, then you dodge, grab their arm, and pull in almost same direction as the punch, using their own effort to throw them off balance.
As far as the topic is concerned,
A mix of college and Internet forum culture instilled me with this oppositional bite - when engaging an idea, I approach it critically, that is, scanning for weakness. There was a time when I took a multi-year break from this forum because it was enflaming that tendency in me - my friends commented that they felt like when they explained something to me, I was too hung up on scanning for the weakness, finding the axis of disagreement, focusing on why things are wrong. In retrospect, it made me annoying to be around.
Part of my cure for this was to practice "the believing game".
When you encounter a new idea, before you've really thought about it, there is something that happens in your intuition. You make an emotional decision about the idea - you decide to either explore it or defeat it, and
then your rational mind starts building up support structures for that decision.
When I was stuck on the Doubting Game, I was doing more defeating than exploring, more challenging than embracing. I was convinced that I was just being super rational - until that "rationality" started to feel like the walls of a black iron prison cell.
