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Culture War Roundup for the week of May 22, 2023

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Because people are emotional and will cling to their prior conclusions if at all possible.

If you can destroy, utterly humiliate, their Y1 argument which is why they hold Y belief in the first place, but have a much harder time arguing against Y2, you will be much easier to dismiss in the latter case. And they'll want to dismiss you, because everyone wants to have always been right all along.

I'm not convinced that "is a better argument" is always meaningful. If you're weighing evidence, an argument which brings up more and better evidence can be better than one which doesn't. But arguments which try to use logical reasoning, rather than probabilistic inferences, are either correct or not. You can't have a "better" argument of that type. You can have a more convincing one, but that's not the same thing.