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I like this post, even though it doesn't add much to Paul Graham's original essay. I mean, I wouldn't have seen this content if it were not posted on Less Wrong.
For all of my life until this year, I've been confounded by DH2 arguments against myself. Why are my opponents ignoring what I say because I said it angrily, or sadly, or confrontationally, or in passing, or whatever? Well, I don't like when people do that, but it doesn't change the fact that people do it, so I've started to adopt a more pleasant, acceptable tone.
I still don't like it. I don't like that I have to adopt a certain style to be taken seriously. But oh well.
Edit, 4/04/12:
I was deluded when I said this.
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.