I suspect that if I tried to argue with Jacob Stein, the discussion would eventually turn into something like this.
Me: “X is so.”
Jacob: “No, ~X is so.”
Me: “But experts say X is so.”
Jacob: “But these other experts say ~X is so.”
Me: “Your experts are wrong and incompetent.”
Jacob: “No, your experts are wrong and incompetent.”
ad infinitum.
That’s when you have to pull up the evidence, and compare the life’s work of thousands of scientists examining the physical world to the life’s work of thousands of people perusing a few disreputable books for meaning.
Seems like you need to go beyond arguments of authority and stating your conclusions and instead go down to the object-level disagreements. You could say instead “Your argument for ~X is invalid because blah blah” and if Jacob says “Your argument for the invalidity of my argument for ~X is invalid because blah blah” then it’s better than before because it’s easier to evaluate argument validity than ground truth. (And if that process continues ad infinitam, consider that someone who cannot evaluate the validity of the simplest arguments is not worth arguing with.)
I suspect that if I tried to argue with Jacob Stein, the discussion would eventually turn into something like this.
Me: “X is so.” Jacob: “No, ~X is so.” Me: “But experts say X is so.” Jacob: “But these other experts say ~X is so.” Me: “Your experts are wrong and incompetent.” Jacob: “No, your experts are wrong and incompetent.” ad infinitum.
We’d just contradict each other and get nowhere.
That’s when you have to pull up the evidence, and compare the life’s work of thousands of scientists examining the physical world to the life’s work of thousands of people perusing a few disreputable books for meaning.
Seems like you need to go beyond arguments of authority and stating your conclusions and instead go down to the object-level disagreements. You could say instead “Your argument for ~X is invalid because blah blah” and if Jacob says “Your argument for the invalidity of my argument for ~X is invalid because blah blah” then it’s better than before because it’s easier to evaluate argument validity than ground truth.
(And if that process continues ad infinitam, consider that someone who cannot evaluate the validity of the simplest arguments is not worth arguing with.)