What is an argument you got into recently and preferred it was better to lose?

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Any argument where I don’t really care about the outcome of, I’m happy to lose. This includes most political or religious arguments.

For example, if someone wants to shut down a discussion about religion by demanding proof, I’m happy to concede the argument and let the other guy win. It’s just not worth the effort to dive into a semantic exploration into the nature of proof and rationality with the vast majority of people.

In my times on Internet forums dating back to the late nineties, there was this ‘Wild West’ of bombastic debate where style counted for far more than substance. You just didn’t back down from those debates, you needed to come up with ways to back down with style.

It was all great fun, some people just couldn’t keep up with the speed and pace of the point-counterpoint, couldn’t tease out the nuance of just when it was appropriate to start taking the debate personal and when to keep it to the subject matter. You had to be a good sport with such people, giving them the kid-glove treatment until they could get up to speed.

As someone who mostly missed out on all that kind of ego-driven interaction in high school, the ability to weave storytelling elements into the interaction and the sense of getting up on a stage, even if it was just online, was just really compelling. Sometimes you played the villain, sometimes the hero. It just wasn’t fun unless you took it really really seriously, way more seriously than the subject matter merited.

These days, if I sense I’ve triggered someone, I’ll immediately disengage. Heated discussions just aren’t worth it unless you can get up on a stage and improvise a performance any more. I hope one day to create custom forum software that can accommodate that kind of interaction again.