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Vulture comments on 6 Tips for Productive Arguments - Less Wrong
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The most important tip for online arguing, for anything which you expect ever to be discussed again, is to keep a canonical master source which does your arguing for you. (The backfire effect means you owe it to the other person to present your best case and not a sketchy paraphrase of what you have enough energy to write down at that random moment; it's irresponsible to do otherwise.)
For example, if you are arguing about the historical Jesus and your argument does not consist of citations and hyperlinks with some prepositional phrases interspersed, you are doing it wrong. If I'm arguing about brain size correlation with intelligence, I stick the references into the appropriate Wikipedia article and refer to that henceforth. If I'm arguing about modafinil, I either link to the relevant section in Wikipedia or my article, or I edit a cleaned-up version of the argument into my article. If I'm arguing that Moody 2008 drastically undermines the value of dual n-back for IQ on the DNB ML, you can be sure that it's going into my FAQ. If I don't yet have an article or essay on it but it's still a topic I am interested in like how IQ contributes to peace and economic growth, then I will just accumulate citations in comments until I do have something. If I can't put it in LW, gwern.net, or Wikipedia - then I store it in Evernote!
This is an old observation: healthy intellectual communities have both transient discussions (a mailing list) and a static topical repository (an FAQ or wiki). Unfortunately, often there is no latter, so you have to make your own.
I think we all seem to be forgetting that the point of this article is to help us enage in more productive debates, in which two rational people who hold different beliefs on an issue come together and satisfy Aumann's Agreement Theorem- which is to say, at least one person becomes persuaded to hold a different position from the one they started with. Presumably these people are aware of the relevant literature on the subject of their argument; the reason they're on a forum (or comment section, etc.) instead of at their local library is that they want to engage directly with an actual proponent of another position. If they're less than rational, they might be entering the argument to persuade others of their position, but nobody's there for a suggested reading list. If neither opponent has anything to add besides a list of sources, then it's not an argument- it's a book club.
Also, make sure that position is closer to the truth. Don't forget that part.
And that's another important point: Trading recommended reading lists does nothing to sift out the truth. You can find a number of books xor articles espousing virtually any position, but part of the function of a rational argument is to present arguments that respond effectively to the other person's points. Anyone can just read books and devise brilliant refutations of the arguments therein; the real test is whether those brilliant refutations can withstand an intelligent, rational "opponent" who is willing and able to thoroughly deconstruct it from a perspective outside of your own mind.