I'm a new reader, and I thought you might like to know that this is the post that made me feel like it might be okay to get involved in the LW community. My initial instinct when I started looking around here was trepidation--it reminded me of some people I know who are very smart, intellectual, and rational, who love to debate and analyze ... and to argue with people who might not want to, and who are hopeless at understanding people less rational than themselves, don't acknowledge their own emotions, and don't see how irrational it is to think and behave that way. Before joining the conversation, I needed to hear that this place was not for those people--not an intellectual wankfest but something actually practical, even when it comes to the less reasoned parts of ourselves. So, thanks for that.

Now to salvage the relevance of this comment.

As a practical suggestion for ourselves and each other, it might be interesting to experiment with non-argumentative ways of conveying a point of view: tell an illustrative story, express your idea in the form of an epigram, or even quote a poem or a piece of music or a photograph.

I would have worded this more strongly, myself. In my experience, people who are themselves inclined towards reasoned debate, even civilly, drastically overestimate how much other people are also inclined towards debate and argument. They are of course generalizing from one example, but in this particular case they're also doing intense harm to their social relationships and to the point they're trying to communicate. In their minds, they're engaging in a way which displays and encourages intelligent thought, but to people who dislike a heavily oppositional mode of conversation, they come off as belligerent prats.

The point here is that those who enjoy an adversarial style of heated conversation might find their communication more effective and more readily listened to by a dissimilar audience if they choose to present their ideas in a way that seems to them to be more indirect--perhaps not quite to the level of writing a sonnet about it, but by speaking in general terms, avoiding language which invokes an accusatory tone whether or not personal accusation is intended, and so on. In short, intellectuals that no one will listen to have a lot to learn from poorly-educated but widely-admired poets.

Also, at the risk of exposing my unintellectual taste, my "O Isis Und Osiris" is the bassline of Jet's "Are You Gonna Be My Girl." I briefly worked in QA at EA (many of you know the reputation of that job and also that company, and those who don't can infer it from the tone of this parenthesis). I was testing the original Rock Band, and when I was having a rough morning and didn't want to be there, I'd play through that bassline a couple of times and I'd be doing all right.