I am unable to say when you are playing games and when you are not
I don’t see this as a problem :-) Moreover, I think that “playing games or not” is not a binary choice, but rather a position on a continuous scale—I like conversations that operate on multiple levels simultaneously with a certain level of ambiguity.
I just have a rule of thumb of avoiding debates with people whom I suspect of playing games
Sure. I’m not jumping around yelling “Debate me! Debate me!”. If you don’t want to, well, just don’t. Like I’m free to comment on your public postings, you are free to entirely ignore my comments.
my lack of trust
What do you have at stake so that you need a lot of trust?
I think that “playing games or not” is not a binary choice, but rather a position on a continuous scale—I like conversations that operate on multiple levels simultaneously with a certain level of ambiguity.
Partially playing games is basically just playing games, for the same reason that a barrel that is half full of wine and half full of sewage is basically full of sewage.
So you can’t imagine someone being other than (a) completely, 100% dead serious; or (2) obviously joking and not trying to communicate anything but ha-ha funny? No intermediate stages at all?
If someone is half serious and half joking, and it isn’t very obvious which parts are jokes and which are not, that leaves him in a position where he can act as though something is serious up until he gets called on it, at which point he can switch to saying “of course that was bad logic/bad sources/ad hominem/etc., it was just a joke?” So you’re better off acting as though it’s jokes all the time.
I don’t see this as a problem :-) Moreover, I think that “playing games or not” is not a binary choice, but rather a position on a continuous scale—I like conversations that operate on multiple levels simultaneously with a certain level of ambiguity.
Sure. I’m not jumping around yelling “Debate me! Debate me!”. If you don’t want to, well, just don’t. Like I’m free to comment on your public postings, you are free to entirely ignore my comments.
What do you have at stake so that you need a lot of trust?
Partially playing games is basically just playing games, for the same reason that a barrel that is half full of wine and half full of sewage is basically full of sewage.
So you can’t imagine someone being other than (a) completely, 100% dead serious; or (2) obviously joking and not trying to communicate anything but ha-ha funny? No intermediate stages at all?
If someone is half serious and half joking, and it isn’t very obvious which parts are jokes and which are not, that leaves him in a position where he can act as though something is serious up until he gets called on it, at which point he can switch to saying “of course that was bad logic/bad sources/ad hominem/etc., it was just a joke?” So you’re better off acting as though it’s jokes all the time.