> The person [is not super fired up and] doesn’t just want to act as a soldier for their team

This pulled me into a tangential thought:

Has anyone else noticed that a lot of people just CAN'T be wrong? They might be contrarian, cynical, narcissists, experts in their field, experiencing PTSD or other emotional disregulation, extremely online, ... Then the team-based things: political entrenchment, [colour]-pilled, conspiracy theorists, religious, Collingwood supporters (kidding) ...

Finding people who are genuinely interested in learning about things that might change their views in substantial ways is very hard. Even when you find people genuinely interested in learning, it's so common to see evidence take a back seat to political or religious views. It makes you feel crazy sometimes.

> learning about things that might change their views in substantial ways

The core problem is that the only people who have any interest in teaching about those things are doing so specifically because they want to recruit others into their political camp. "Education" is conflated with agreement with someone else's conclusion.

(And even then, sometimes they disclaim responsibility, and just seek to morally bully you into agreement.)

Often, you already know about the thing, and this knowledge hasn't changed your view; and then the people who call you ignorant of the thing are just annoying. Sometimes, you conclude that the thing has been completely misrepresented anyway.

It’s not that you’re crazy, it’s that human beings are not actually rational most of the time.

More intelligent human beings can do a better impression of rationality but in most situations they’re still using their intelligence to post-rationalise some existing feeling.

Once you recognise that you’ll see that it’s true even in yourself

Remind yourself that every single comment, post, video, update, whatever on the internet is already a selection bias for people who either aren't deterred by the fact that shouting into the void like that is inherently low value and stupid, or reject it and believe a tweet is inherently valuable.

IE, you should never ever ever treat an average of online discourse as a representative average of humanity. It is already a niche cohort before you get into specific groups.

That alone means you will see more of people who strongly believe their opinions, see more of people who like to hear themselves talk, see more of people who unironically state that "I am never wrong", etc. The comment format of the internet is also pretty much perfectly designed to support the absolute wrong kind of discussion if you want actual productive discourse.

Instead of two people going back and forth and building up that context of "Heres what I mean when I say X" and being able to ground discussion on that shared context, there is no shared context and every dumbass can leave a large drive by argument that is not in the same shared context as the rest of the conversation, leading to vacuous "point scoring" and "um akshually" and talking past each other.

Online discourse just doesn't progress, because there's nothing that drags my ass back here to respond to your point, like I would feel compelled to in reality.