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- Do not engage with someone unwilling to have a good faith convo. Most folks unfortunately, don’t even know what good faith arguments mean.
- Arguing with a bad faith counterpart makes sense when you want to explore your own beliefs further by probing them from different angles, when you’re simply having fun using your brain, and when you want to leave your argument for a third party observing the conversation.
Attempting to convince someone else directly is quite impossible online in my experience. Simply because people generally aren’t here to have good faith convos.
Leaving a convo/not replying to a rebuttal is NOT conceding your point.
IMO the most important part of learning fallacies is not to call them by name while debating. It’s to smell the bullshit from a distance. Both in the others’ reasoning and your own.
That’s what those Reddit kids are missing. This shit is not an “I won!” card. It’s a reasoning framework.
(Sometimes I do still call them out by name. But that’s usually a sign I’m already losing my patience with the muppet in question, and considering to block them [online] / turn 180° [offline] while saying “I’m not wasting my time further with you and your dumb shit”.
I don’t debate religion any more, though; unlike in my later teens + early twenties. Zealots get mentally tagged “irrational harmful avoid”, and the sort of person who believes with the brain but not the liver isn’t usually a problem.)
I feel like, if anyone calls out a fallacy and acts like it’s an “I won” card, you should just pull out the Fallacy Fallacy and uno reverse that shit. Then fuck their dad as a victory lap.
To go a step further, arguments are healthier if they’re pictured as a way to field test your beliefs to see if they hold up to scrutiny.
If you go into an argument trying to get the other person to change their mind, you’ll often be met with failure even if your points were valid simply because people hate changing their mind, and you don’t want to be tempted to use bad-faith arguments of your own just to secure that “win.”
Instead, just give your argument; if the other person has a good point, see if yours can hold up to it, and change your outlook if you find that it can’t. And if it feels like the other person is just saying whatever they think will “win,” leave, because their argument wouldn’t make a good field test anyway.
And if you did change their mind, they probably aren’t going to tell you. Or maybe you planted a seed in their mind that helps to change it years and years down the road. You don’t know! That’s the crazy thing. But people just get frustrated and give up because they had an unreasonable expectation about the argument in the first place.
My personal preference is to always respond first in good faith, even if the shit clearly stinks. Sometimes they just worded things poorly or misunderstood something. However, if their stench becomes apparent, it’s then much easier to humiliate them and dip by the second response.
Yes, I understand that you have a very compelling argument, but have you considered the fact that I banged your dad ?
“No, you’re dumb. I refuse to elaborate” is my go-to when someone tries to impose their faith onto me now.
If they really insist and I want to lose some time, I tell them I believe Goku is god and make them dismount my argument. Then I use their own points to dismount their god and they usually get pissed because “it’s not the same thing”.
I was speaking with someone about how at around age 40 to 50 you stop caring so much. Let them be “right”. It doesn’t affect me.
Also, I hope my dad enjoyed it. He deserved some good sex.
As you get older, you get better at recognizing when someone is just arguing to jerk themselves off. And if you’re really trying to change things, then your time is best spent on people who will listen.
We just finished up, your dad looks satisfied
The annoying thing about reddit/lemmy atheists is all they talk about is church and god.
It’s why despite being definitionally anti-theist, I almost never talk about it. I didn’t even intend for this post to be about religion, but about moving past the urge to be an annoying debate lord. Once you realize that the winning strategy for debates is to have a troll mindset, you waste a lot less time on fruitless conversations.
A troll doesn’t win the debate, trolls kill debates
On the other hand sometimes killing a “debate” is the best outcome.
How many times has some far right chud dropped of the radar after being absolutely humiliated?
“best outcome” yes, but not a “winning strategy”
A debate is really just a show where the people you’re trying to win over are the audience, not the other person. The way to win such a verbal fisticuffs is to make your opponent look like a fool while making yourself look good. Trolls specialize in getting under people’s skin, which allows them to shape the conversation in predictable ways. Giving your opponent the rope to hang themselves on is the winning strategy in online debates, not having a better argument than them.
