[hamdingers]

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.

[Johanx64]

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.

[palmotea]

> 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.

[jodrellblank]

> "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...