Most arguments are about ego, not ideas

One minor "yes and"...

Quote

> You’re challenging their sense of self.

More specifically, you're challenging their identity.

Further, people have identities, not beliefs.

Which is why persuassion (marketing, propganda, fads, fashion) works where agrument does not.

TBH I've struggled to accept all this squishy stuff. But it has made some things a lot easier to handle, so there is an upside.

Not because I think I'm right (I think I'm aware of my flaws), but because I realize I don't feel like arguing about it, maybe my reply is closer to a belief of mine I've no wish to defend, and I suspect any snarky replies might incite a bad back-and-forth that never ends well online, bet it HN or elsewhere. So having gotten the reply out of my system, I delete it before anyone has a chance to reply.

Somehow my brain gets tricked into thinking I've replied, and allows me to drop the whole conversation in peace. It's a neat trick.

And what I can be certain about is what my internal reality is.

And if you think I cannot be sure of that, I think I can be certain about I think my internal reality is.

And if you think I cannot be sure of even that, I think I can be certain about I think what I think my internal reality is.

It's perception all the way down, recursively. The reality is result of this taken to infinity.

Even worse, it's very likely the author wasn't even right most of the time. They claim a frequent occurrence is that "the room" turns against them. Now, their rationalization is that they are ego-driven, yadda yadda, no other possibility of why "the room" is often against their position. If they were rational as they claim to be, maybe they could show some insight or introspection into the possibility they are wrong about some or all of the details, at least some of the time.

But no, their conclusion is that humans are ego-driven and it's best to disengage and only debate with truly smart people.

This reminds me of the joke about the guy who's driving and hears a warning on the radio: "beware of a madman driving the wrong way on Av XYZ", and he replies "ONE madman!? There are HUNDREDS of them!"

> "Biblically accurate angels descend onto earth, to everyone, and submit themselves to scientific testing, which conclude they are made of something non-physical."

You would easily agree that something which can be seen, touched, measured, interact with the sky, your eyes, and measuring equipment is "non-physical"? You wouldn't suspect the angels are instead aliens?

> "Divinity is proven to be a measurable and testable attribute of reality."

At this point, if it happened then it's unlikely to be in the macro-scale world that we could all test with an easily available and usable thermometer or film camera or alkalinity measuring strip, because we would probably have noticed that by now. Imagine instead it's a paper from CERN and the Large Hadron Collider where in some extreme situation there's a deviation of 0.0000000% from an expected value and experts in Quantum Theology claim that's a testable, repeatable, measure of Divinity. Are you tempted to believe this could happen, or are you already full of reasons to dismiss it?

> "Reality warping magic, demonstrated to not be any sort of trick or technology, and limited to those devout to said religion."

Mass warps spacetime and curves light rays. That's neither trick nor technology. It's arguably "limited to those devout to physics" in the sense that Flat Earthers might not accept it and primitive/uneducated tribes have no grounds for understanding what it means at all and no ability to build machines to test it. Similar with Young's double slit experiment, Lorentz contraction, entanglement, and others (reality warping, or brain warping?).

> "God shows his ass to everyone, the only part of him that - according to the bible - won't make a human insane."

What would it take for you to agree that that's whose ass it was?