Just give up already

I cannot say how many arguments I've had where this would have prevented hurt feelings. Often, after the argument, I discover the other person persisted in arguing for about 10 minutes after they realized they were wrong, all the while getting more angry at me for shooting down ever worse rationalizations.

To be fair, the way this happens isn't that the person persists in arguing for something they know to be false; instead, they drop a subtle hint that maybe they might be wrong and we should stop talking about it now (presumably so they can save face). I invariably miss this hint (well, I'm better now that I know to be looking for it, but not a lot) because it's usually in the form of a ridiculous but hard to disprove objection, to which I (because I'm weird) will come up with a medium-good response. This pisses my interlocutor off, because I missed their social cue, and because I've now forced them to defend a belief (their lousy objection) that they don't actually hold.

This behavior is very understandable; once I noticed others doing it, I noticed a tendency in myself. It's surprisingly hard to say, "Oops, I guess I'm wrong," or, "I can't see a good counter argument to what you're saying; maybe I need to reconsider."

Anyway, I'm saying this because the article linked by the quoted phrase wasn't quite what I was hoping for on the subject. :)