I’m in a similar situation—I can, technically, recognize that someone fits the profile of ‘troll’, but my brain doesn’t like to actually use that information for anything. (It’s not just an issue with trolls, it’s a general inability to use different scripts for people based on categorizing them.) What I’ve found works, in my case, is to be more aware of subtleties in peoples’ behavior, rather than trying to categorize them. I still wind up feeding trolls sometimes (and in fact tend to enjoy doing so in those cases), but if someone is being logically rude or otherwise offensive, that’s a thing worth noticing and reacting to whether they’re ‘a troll’ or not.
Another trick that’s useful sometimes is backing out of the argument a bit and looking at the bigger picture. Sometimes that shows patterns that aren’t otherwise obvious, and that can make it clear that the person isn’t worth continuing to deal with. For example, in the most recent case, the individual was defying the evidence in an irrational and not very obvious way. Once I noticed that, it seemed obvious to me that without a more thorough understanding of when that is and isn’t a reasonable thing to do, they weren’t going to stop doing it to any evidence that we gave them, and thus the argument at hand was not going to resolve anything, so it was pointless. It’s a lot easier to walk away in a situation like that, when you can see that it’s impossible to actually get the goal you were aiming for.
I’m in a similar situation—I can, technically, recognize that someone fits the profile of ‘troll’, but my brain doesn’t like to actually use that information for anything. (It’s not just an issue with trolls, it’s a general inability to use different scripts for people based on categorizing them.) What I’ve found works, in my case, is to be more aware of subtleties in peoples’ behavior, rather than trying to categorize them. I still wind up feeding trolls sometimes (and in fact tend to enjoy doing so in those cases), but if someone is being logically rude or otherwise offensive, that’s a thing worth noticing and reacting to whether they’re ‘a troll’ or not.
Another trick that’s useful sometimes is backing out of the argument a bit and looking at the bigger picture. Sometimes that shows patterns that aren’t otherwise obvious, and that can make it clear that the person isn’t worth continuing to deal with. For example, in the most recent case, the individual was defying the evidence in an irrational and not very obvious way. Once I noticed that, it seemed obvious to me that without a more thorough understanding of when that is and isn’t a reasonable thing to do, they weren’t going to stop doing it to any evidence that we gave them, and thus the argument at hand was not going to resolve anything, so it was pointless. It’s a lot easier to walk away in a situation like that, when you can see that it’s impossible to actually get the goal you were aiming for.