Your steelman doesn’t seem very different from “I didn’t have strong views on whether either of these opinions were true. My aim was just to introduce the two of them, and let them have a conversation and take it from there.”
I think if all he’d said was “My aim was just to introduce the two of them, and let them have a conversation and take it from there”, I’d have found that a satisfactory answer. It’s also not something I considered to need justification in the first place, although I hadn’t looked into it very much. I’m inferring from the fact that Will gave a full paragraph explanation of why this seemed high EV indicates that he thinks that reasoning is important.
Your steelman doesn’t seem very different from “I didn’t have strong views on whether either of these opinions were true. My aim was just to introduce the two of them, and let them have a conversation and take it from there.”
I think if all he’d said was “My aim was just to introduce the two of them, and let them have a conversation and take it from there”, I’d have found that a satisfactory answer. It’s also not something I considered to need justification in the first place, although I hadn’t looked into it very much. I’m inferring from the fact that Will gave a full paragraph explanation of why this seemed high EV indicates that he thinks that reasoning is important.