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> At minimum you have to filter out 90%+ of people that simply don't have the mental faculties to evaluate what is and isn't a valid argument, before you even get started.

I don't think this is true. There are times when I do think it's true, and when I start feeling that way I know it's time to step back because I can no longer engage constructively.

Text is a hard medium to have a back-and-forth in. The features that make it useful for explaining also make it easy to feel ignored and insulted.

I think a lot of people also go online and write things when they feel argumentative, so comment sections self-select for people who want to argue.

Whenever I feel intellectually superior to someone, I try to remind myself that I can barely change the oil filter in my car, and there's a lot of people out there who can't write a line of Python but who save tens of thousands of dollars doing their own maintenance.

The problem, fundamentally, is that unlike a computer program that won't compile if there's syntax errors, or that will crash on null pointer dereference, etc.

There's no such mechanisms in place to ensure logical consistency and coherance of made claims.

Thus the onus is on you to quickly realize that the other party "doesn't have what it takes" and bail out, or you're arguing with a person that doesn't have the mental capacity to recognize syntax errors and subtle bugs, they are simply interested in arriving at their destination and couldn't care less if they arrived there with an unbroken chain of valid chess moves.

> I don't think this is true. There are times when I do think it's true, and when I start feeling that way I know it's time to step back because I can no longer engage constructively.

I love how you don't even care if it's true, merely how you think at any given moment (and this changes with mood) and how those thoughts makes you feel.

If you're unable to entertain the idea significant amount of people don't have "what it takes" (which is a fact, btw), have you ever been able to engage constructively?

One of the hallmarks of a person who isn't interested in playing chess is a person who focuses not on what IS true, but "what they think" or "how they start feeling" about chess moves at any given time, etc. Ie. focus is about vibes.

> 1. Infinite supply of people.

Untrue. On the internet there are no people, only computers.

As the great Marshall McLuhan once said: the medium is the message.

Most importantly, modern platforms are optimised to maximise your attention and engagement, and nothing's more engaging than fear, anger and superiority. Your comment sorting algorithms find that the statements most reacted to are the most outlandish and direct.

Agree, mostly. On the internet, I like to be selective about only addressing new substantial claims.

In person, at work, etc, it makes sense to spend more energy, be more patient to get on the same page, and you get more benefit if you succeed.

It's generous to assume all the difficult accounts you encounter are lacking mental faculties. Many are participating with the goal of wasting your energy.

This site in particular is infested with accounts that seem to have some real intelligence behind them, but they use that intelligence to respond to the most absurd and frustrating interpretation of your comments.

If they take the most absurd interpretation or nitpick about irrelevant details that doesn't take away from the crux of the point you're making - and that's the best they can do - are they really intelligent?

Or are you simply dealing with people that "don't have what it takes" to do better?

They simply don't have the faculties to make a better argument or approach from a different angle, it's the best they can do, and the best they can do is just not enough.

> It's generous to assume all the difficult accounts you encounter are lacking mental faculties.

It's also not uncommon for people who are arrogant to think that most people who disagree with them are stupid. They assume they're right so disagreement is a sign of a defect (and helps avoid uncomfortable thoughts like, "could I be wrong?").

> Many are participating with the goal of wasting your energy.

> This site in particular is infested with accounts that seem to have some real intelligence behind them, but they use that intelligence to respond to the most absurd and frustrating interpretation of your comments.

That sounds like software engineers being software engineers. They often think they show off how smart they are by missing the point and nitpicking on some quibble.

> "They assume they're right so disagreement is a sign of a defect"

Take a step back and look at the original linked blog post through this lense, and you'll see an article where the author is a priori correct and other people are only wrong because they are too irrational and emotional to accept the author's flawless logic. There's no mention that author might be wrong about anything, e.g. for the author to argue so that they can learn things and change their mind. There's no room for the author failing to change someone's mind because the author's communication skill, reasoning, logic, isn't strong enough, only because the other person is defective and cannot be reasoned with. (Having taken those positions, the author declares themselves humble).

(Let's quickly address "the moment you insist on standing on the high ground, you’ve created the low ground someone else must stand on" by observing that we can all stand on "murder is bad" and nobody needs to stand on "murder is good"; and wonder how the author managed to miss that. (My answer: because this isn't about logic; if not-arguing is doing other people a favour, then it's a virtue and the author can feel good about it. It's a defense so the author doesn't need to change)).

> [article] "Worse, most people don’t learn from advice at all. They learn from consequences. They have to touch the stove themselves. Words bounce off; pain sticks"

That this is an example which applies to children. Adults do not have to jump off a cliff to accept that jumping off a cliff is a bad idea. But it's still a weak argument. The experience of being burned by a stove includes the sensation of hot metal, pain, burnt skin, burnt hair smell, lingering pain, blistering, scabbing, healing... to suggest that the words "it will burn you" is the territory, and that the words adequately communicate the lived experience to someone who has not had that experience, is the Detached Lever fallacy[1]; it's something that a person who lives with text would argue.

[1] https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/zY4pic7cwQpa9dnyk/detached-l...

Many people just don't care about honoring the integrity of the game, if they can gain advantage in the meta game. Of course motivation for the game dissolves under such conditions.

Tying a tangible score number to 'vague social approval' hits very hard. There's a sense in which people care about that by default, but have to make themselves care about the inner game. But appearing to have integrity about the inner game is a good move in the meta game, so of course the default move of those who don't care about the game but want to appear to for the sake of the meta game is to put up a front: the trick is that it's not real. If playing the inner game faithfully, it becomes trivial to disassemble their (fronted) position. But it's not really a game, because they're not playing but pretending to play. You're costing them meta-score! How dare you!

Anyway, I digress. This dynamic falls out of the incentive structure of sites like HN/reddit/etc which embed discussion/argumentation into quasi-anonymous social-approval-point-ranked contexts. Moderation can temper the most egregiously obvious of such behavior, but only that.

A reasonable strategy if you're interested in actually playing the inner game is to carefully check if there's any meta game focused cheesing going on before bothering to enter against someone. Do they make mistakes in rule adherence due to inexperience, or do they make mistakes in rule adherence that conspicuously always puts them in a meta game advantage? Do they adhere to rules even when it's _disadvantageous_? That kind of thing.

To return to the chess analogy... Don't play with people who blatantly return their own downed pieces to the board (or similar hijinks). They're just there to look like they're the kind of person who wins at chess, not to play chess.