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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Untrue. On the internet there are no people, only computers.
As the great Marshall McLuhan once said: the medium is the message.