Most arguments are about ego, not ideas

Since this is at the top of Hacker News: this article is not good advice generally. Here's what I do (and mentor people to do the same):

1. Don't start with the argument, start with the data. Debates/arguments/discussions etc. are what to do about the underlying data, but I've found very often the disagreement stems from people having different bits of data. Before you get into how to marshall an argument, you have to start with collecting what ground truth is. Many people don't practice this intentionally, so they get into a debate over some decision the team is making without having all the facts.

2. Form opinions easily, be ready to discard them quickly. I am quite happy to share my understanding of some technical matter, and I almost always provide that understanding with an invitation for people to tell me why I'm wrong.

3. Over the short term, yes, it's hard to change people's minds. Over the long term, you don't have to change people's minds, you can change the people you work with. You can vote with your feet or (if you're more senior) you can influence how your organization hires and promotes people. I actively seek out working with people who disagree with me in interesting ways. Not pedantically, and not over minutiae, but in ways that change how I see a problem. It turns out, when you seek out people who are good at productively disagreeing, you don't run into some of the problems OP writes about as often.

4. One of the ways to help sift out who the people are you want to work with is by offering feedback. Most people are terrible at giving feedback, so it's important to first get good at giving feedback. The author says that people don't learn from feedback, people learn from consequences. One of the effective ways of delivering feedback is to structure it as "Here was the situation, here are facts about what happened, here is the outcome." However, once you get decent at giving feedback, some of the benefit of giving the feedback is in the signal of how the person responds. The people I want to work with generally take this feedback well, and in turn offer me similar feedback.

5. Debate what matters. A lot of technical debates engineers engage in are either not important to the end product are easy to change later. Don't waste your time on those.

It is not always a good idea not to argue, even given all the points that the author has made. If you have a meeting, and someone proposes something: if you don't speak up, it means you agreed to it.

Let's say you're discussing the next release and someone brings up some disastrous idea. You know he won't listen so you decide to keep quiet. The release comes, things blow up as expected.

Don't be surprised if you find your manager at your desk a bit later asking you to work late shifts to fix it. After all you are all in the same team, and you didn't speak up when the plan was discussed.

So in a meeting, speak up and don't give in if you are sure you are right. I have learned this lesson the hard way.

My style of online participation has been shaped by 2 ideas:

1. I rarely fully understand my own positions on minutia 2. Writing is rewriting.

I write forum posts to solidify my understanding of my own interests, beliefs, and reasoning. I often edit them multiple times before moving on and ignoring the responses thereafter. I can reference them and have to other people who ask my opinion. Sometimes I do respond back to replies immediately, and sometimes I revisit days later, after I've had time to put it in my day-to-day context. It's not a hard and fast rule.

Posting stopped being about convincing someone else maybe 20 years ago (around age 30). I do post to look back and understand myself. To others, I'm sure this sounds like existential navel-gazing and self-centered blathering, but I don't mind.

would you like to argue about this?

1. yes they are objectively wrong, a persons belief does not need to be tied to a fact

2. death as in death of the body, it's very much inescapable

3. the last part is just uncertainty, hardly an argument against objective reality