I like this post, even though it doesn't add much to Paul Graham's original essay.

I debated whether to bother writing it, but in the end I felt it was worth it to:

• Compress the content explaining each level of heirarchy
• Include DH7, which was at the time only available on Internet Archive
• Give concrete examples from actual articles

Why are my opponents ignoring what I say because I said it angrily, or sadly, or confrontationally, or in passing, or whatever?

The way you say something may signal that you are trying to diminish their status. If you say it with a sufficiently negative tone, it may even be taken as a signal (a generally reliable signal) that you care more about diminishing their status than about having a truth-seeking discussion.

In other words, what wedrifid said, but less simply and more explicitly.

Sometimes, talking about tone is merely a poor rebuttal — a DH2 argument. Sometimes, it's a request for a more pleasant conversation: it's simply unpleasant to have a casual chat with someone who comes across as contemptuous, hopeless, or bigoted. Tone does exist, after all, and it is possible to be an unpleasant, hostile conversationalist; so sometimes when people talk about tone, they really mean it.

(For instance, it is insufferable to have a conversation about (say) race and IQ with someone who keeps using racial slurs in the conversation; or about the relative importance of different academic disciplines with someone who keeps referring to engineering students as "pencil-necked dorks" or liberal-arts students as "poem-fag hipsters". Obviously, their choice of tone does not prove anything about their actual arguments; but it does come across as hostile and unpleasant. People having a casual conversation cannot be expected to put up with arbitrarily high levels of unpleasantness.)

The tone argument becomes seriously toxic, though, when what the tone-arguer means by it is: your argument is wrong; therefore, gathering and presenting evidence for it, and making your argument clearly and boldly, are signs of a character flaw on your part.

For instance, consider the following exchange:

A: Gostaks are distimming doshes! We should stop them!
B: I don't believe you. What's the big deal?
A: Well, I've gathered all this evidence of a hundred different cases just in the last year where a gostak distimmed a dosh. Take this one case, for instance; the dosh in question was in a coma for six weeks and to this day faints at the sight of a distimming-widget.
B: Wow, you're really obsessed and hostile about this. I mean, what kind of person would go and gather "evidence" to accuse gostaks of supposedly distimming doshes? You must really hate all the doshes who get along just fine with gostaks. And if there was a problem, well, seriously, you'll get more flies with honey than you will with vinegar. I don't have to listen to any more of this anti-gostak ranting.

Why are my opponents ignoring what I say because I said it angrily, or sadly, or confrontationally, or in passing, or whatever?

Because for most practical purposes how you say it is the important part.

It upsets me that people are replying to this comment as though it were a problem I still have.

To put it another way: You are upset that they are misinterpreting what you say because of your tone. Instead, you could recognize that you are speaking their language incorrectly. That tone seems important to other speakers of the language and not to you is not a problem with their understanding of the language.