If I come up with $flaw in $argument, how I endorse presenting $flaw depends on my goal.
If my goal is to learn more about $argument, I endorse asking a question which prompts others to provide me the information I want. (E.g., "How does $argument address $flaw?") I also endorse doing this if I think others might benefit from that information, even if I won't.
If my goal is to expose weaknesses in $argument for the benefit of others, I endorse asserting that $flaw is a flaw in $argument. I am of course aware that there exists a social pattern whereby in this case people ask a question instead, either to more effectively stage a social attack or to do so with impunity (aka "rhetorical question"). I increasingly reject this pattern, and endorse consistently using question-syntax to request information and statement-syntax to make assertions, in the spirit of clear communication. That said, I do recognize that there are scenarios where making a successful social attack is more valuable than communicating clearly.
If my goal is to manage/signal my own status (e.g., showing off how smart or well-informed or compliant-to-norms or contrarian I am) I'm less clear what I endorse. At a minimum, I endorse being clear in my own head that this is my goal, even if I don't admit it out loud.
At a minimum, I endorse being clear in my own head that this is my goal, even if I don't admit it out loud.
This may make you less effective at showing off.
So, one more litany, hopefully someone else finds it as useful.
It's an understatement that humility is not a common virtue in online discussions, even, or especially when it's most needed.
I'll start with my own recent example. I thought up a clear and obvious objection to one of the assertions in Eliezer's critique of the FAI effort compared with the Pascal's Wager and started writing a witty reply. ...And then I stopped. In large part because I had just gone through the same situation, but on the other side, dealing with some of the comments to my post about time-turners and General Relativity by those who know next to nothing about General Relativity. It was irritating, yet here I was, falling into the same trap. And not for the first time, far from it. The following is the resulting thought process, distilled to one paragraph.
I have not spent 10,000+ hours thinking about this topic in a professional, all-out, do-the-impossible way. I probably have not spent even one hour seriously thinking about it. I probably do not have the prerequisites required to do so. I probably don't even know what prerequisites are required to think about this topic productively. In short, there are almost guaranteed to exist unknown unknowns which are bound to trip up a novice like me. The odds that I find a clever argument contradicting someone who works on this topic for a living, just by reading one or two popular explanations of it are minuscule. So if I think up such an argument, the odds of it being both new and correct are heavily stacked against me. It is true that they are non-zero, and there are popular examples of non-experts finding flaws in an established theory where there is a consensus among the experts. Some of them might even be true stories. No, Einstein was not one of these non-experts, and even if he were, I am not Einstein.
And so on. So I came up with the following, rather unpolished mantra:
If I think up what seems like an obvious objection, I will resist assuming that I have found a Weaksauce Weakness in the experts' logic. Instead I may ask politely whether my argument is a valid one, and if not, where the flaw lies.
If you think it useful, feel free to improve the wording.