That’s if you are trying to learn. Many of these know exactly what they’re doing, on purpose.

yep, i just wrote an overly long comment that was trying to get across what you said in a paragraph. if its a random online, dont over think it. i started to pay way more attention to the real world people in my life and im much much much happier for it.

> 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

> 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.

That doesn't read as a complaint, it's a realization, and the argument is articulated enough.

Are you challenging the idea that echo chambers facilited by modern tech are harmful, or that people get better at expressing themselves as they get older? From here it looks like you're doing neither, just taking a stab at the comment's author.

That's how claims work. Why would I argue against nobody? Happy to engage if you disagree with the claim.

I only somewhat disagree with the post in the second part, with reasons enough to start the conversation.