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dspeyer comments on According to Dale Carnegie, You Can't Win an Argument—and He Has a Point - Less Wrong
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I've had bad experiences using the Socratic method on people who are trying to win. I ask a question and they wander away from it to reiterate all of their points. And now I've used up my talking quota for a while.
On people who start out wanting to learn, it can be very effective.
If someone is trying to win an argument, the odds of your convincing them are very low regardless of how right you are. The point of arguing would be to make him lose, that is, to convince the audience and not the opponent.
This is a big difference between internet discussions and in person discussions -- in real life the audience is often zero or small, and a person's wrongness will be quickly forgotten, but when someone is wrong on the internet, it is more important.
I agree. I think most people just want to talk at you, not with you, when they're determined to win, and very few people would ever follow a conversation the way Socrates' opponents do in Plato's works.