Debates and persuasion.

[Heyo]

"Winning" a debate might be satisfying, but is it really a "win" if nobody actually considers your viewpoint nor reevaluates their own? Due to wounded egos, people tend to double down rather than shift their position regardless of how thoroughly you pummel them with facts and logic, especially if they've conflated their very identity with it.
So what is the most effective way to be persuasive and influential in this regard? How do you break through to get people to think critically and objectively?

Calling them "dumdums" or "bootlickers" isn't an effective way to coax them into tasting your food for thought.

A winning debate is one that furthers knowledge, either in the debaters or the audience.

 

[Augustus]

akin to medieval ruminations on how many angels can dance on the head of a pin.

Medieval people didn't actually argue this of course, it's an invention of the 17th C that has become accepted as fact.

Like most of these common tropes that show medieval Christianity in a ad light, it began as anti-Catholic polemic

William Sclater (1575–1626). Commenting in 1619 on medieval papists’ predilection for ‘doting about curious questions’, he adduces the specific example of their enquiries about angels:

...they fell to Disputations about the time of their Creation; whether it were before, or with the visible World; whether on the first day, or when they were created. Touching their Orders, what, and how many they were, their number, whether more fell or stood: whether they did occupie a place; and so, whether many might be in one place at one time; and how many might sit on a Needles point; and six hundred such like needlesse points.5

The examples cited by Sclater are all genuine topics of scholastic disputation except the last, which seems to have been introduced solely for its rhetorical value as a clever pun. Chillingworth, who shared Sclater’s contempt for the obscurity and vanity of scholastic philosophy, did not labour the pun in his subsequent 1638 reference. But he probably did not need to. Given that ‘needles’ appears in the Saxon genitive form (that is, without the now familiar possessive apostrophe) and that ‘needles’ was an acceptable seventeenth-century spelling of ‘needless’, astute readers would have been alert to the paragram. There were also subsequent authors who made the pun obvious

Source

 

[Revoltingest]

Medieval people didn't actually argue this of course, it's an invention of the 17th C that has become accepted as fact.

Like most of these common tropes that show medieval Christianity in a ad light, it began as anti-Catholic polemic

William Sclater (1575–1626). Commenting in 1619 on medieval papists’ predilection for ‘doting about curious questions’, he adduces the specific example of their enquiries about angels:

...they fell to Disputations about the time of their Creation; whether it were before, or with the visible World; whether on the first day, or when they were created. Touching their Orders, what, and how many they were, their number, whether more fell or stood: whether they did occupie a place; and so, whether many might be in one place at one time; and how many might sit on a Needles point; and six hundred such like needlesse points.5

The examples cited by Sclater are all genuine topics of scholastic disputation except the last, which seems to have been introduced solely for its rhetorical value as a clever pun. Chillingworth, who shared Sclater’s contempt for the obscurity and vanity of scholastic philosophy, did not labour the pun in his subsequent 1638 reference. But he probably did not need to. Given that ‘needles’ appears in the Saxon genitive form (that is, without the now familiar possessive apostrophe) and that ‘needles’ was an acceptable seventeenth-century spelling of ‘needless’, astute readers would have been alert to the paragram. There were also subsequent authors who made the pun obvious

Source

I should get some credit for already knowing that.
(I've long used it only to illustrate the concept of
something being non-disprovabe / non-provabe,
ie "nicht einmal falsch".