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gimpf comments on Open Thread: March 2010 - Less Wrong
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Speaking as someone who gets in internet arguments with religious people for (slightly frustrating) recreation, I know some really simple tactics you can use. Find out the answers to this question:
What does the person you're talking with believe, and what is the evidence for it?
Maintain proper standards of evidence. The existence of trees is not evidence for the Bible's veracity, no matter how many people seem to think so. If someone got a flu shot in the middle of flu season and got flu symptoms the next day, this is more likely to be a coincidence than to be caused by the vaccine. If you understand how evidence works -- and you certainly seem to -- then this is a remarkably general method for rebutting a lot of silly claims.
This is the equivalent of keeping your eye on the ball. It's a basic technique, and utterly essential.
[Backup strategy: Replace whatever beliefs the person you're talking to holds with another set, and see if their arguments still work equally well. If the answer is yes, then Bayes says that those arguments fail. For example, "Look at all the people who have felt Jesus in their hearts" can be applied just as strongly to support most other religions just by substituting something else for "Jesus". Or, most arguments against gay marriage work equally well against interracial marriage.
Backup backup strategy: quickly follow a rebuttal with an attack on the faulty foundations of your interlocutor's worldview. Be polite, but put them on the defensive. If you can't shake them with rationality, you can at least rattle them.]
Ah, then it sounds like your real problem is that you're not yet skilled enough at explaining what evidence means, in an easy-to-grasp sort of way. In the case of your homeopathy example, I would say that the thing that matters is: what percentage of patients given homeopathic remedies get better? Is is better than the percentage who get better without homeopathic remedies, all other things being equal? (Pause to hash this out; it's important to get the other guy agreeing that this is the most direct measure of whether or not homeopathy works.) Then you can point at the many studies showing that, when we actually tried this experiment out, there wasn't any difference between the people who were treated with homeopathy and the people who weren't.
Oh man, I ran into that when I was a teenager, too. To this day I have no idea how to respond to that; it's like running into somebody who thinks that Mexicans are all p-zombies, except more socially acceptable. I don't know that there's really anything you can possibly say to someone who's that nuts, except maybe try talking about what it's like to not believe in god, and try to inject some outside context into their world.
I admit, most of my debating tactics are aimed at lurkers watching the debate, not the other participant. That's usually the most effective way to do it online, but in one-on-one discussions, I agree with you that such tactics could be counterproductive. Even then, though, you may be able to get people to retreat from some of their sillier positions, or plant a seed of doubt. It has happened in the past.
Anyway, I still think that applying the other guy's logic to argue for something else is a good way of getting them thinking. I remember asking a bunch of people "why are you [religion X] and not [religion y]? Other than by accident of birth." and getting quite a few of them to really pause and ponder.