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David_Gerard comments on Please Don't Fight the Hypothetical - Less Wrong
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People are very good at fighting hypotheticals because hypotheticals are typically an attempt to elicit a response that can be used against them. This infuriates tutors in Philosophy 100 classes, of course ...
Sure. It used to infuriate me, too.
I have since then adopted the habit of responding with some variation of "I observe that you're fighting the hypothetical; I infer that's because you don't trust my motives in bringing it up. That's fair. Perhaps we can drop this subject for now, and return to it at some later time when I've earned your trust?"
That's brilliant. Or looks brilliant, anyway - how does it tend to work out in practice?
Poorly.
Though better than anything else I've ever tried.
The only thing I can really say in its favor is it keeps me from getting quite so infuriated.
Edit: More precisely... the thing that works better is not approaching people who don't trust my motives with hypothetical questions. But assuming I've screwed that up, it works better than anything I've tried.
Heh. Oh well, it looked good!
Maybe that's so, but people need to lighten up a bit. On a discussion board such as this one, if you concede a point and later think better of it, there is nothing stopping you from explicitly revising your position. And actually learning something in the process.