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Sam Harris mentioned this theory of it being pointless to engage people who have their own theories because you'll be faced with a never ending stream of "yeah but did you read this random 90 page paper on X?" and all kinds of other questions even the best professional can't counter without wasting huge amounts of time.

It's great you changed your mind but I bet there's plenty of people who haven't. Like I wonder what Bret Weinstein now thinks.

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That is lazy. Indeed, there is no point in refuting a random 90 page paper. However, a good professional should be able to quickly summarize the state of the area touched by the paper and provide a short list of key citations and publications. A good professional should also be able to say "this is outside of my area of expertise" and point to the general direction of where expert feedback can be sought.

There's another saying along the lines of "you can't reason someone out of a belief they didn't reason themselves into".

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