Simple examples of playing dirty:
Someone links a URL but it is broken in an obvious way. If you truly interested in arguing for the sake of argument, you could fix the URL and go to their link. But you could also take the opportunity to complain that they are just wasting your time and aren’t really serious.
Sometimes, there is a finite amount of time or space for your opponents to reply to you in. You can pick arguments whose articulation is economic, but whose rebuttal is not. This puts a huge volumetric burden on them such that they will be unlikely to be able to reply to all your points. Later you can point out that they “ignored many of your best arguments”. This is an old debater’s trick.
You’re going to have a live debate online for a public audience. 45 minutes beforehand, you receive an e-mail from your opponent indicating that they are having difficulty connecting to Skype and suggest the debate be moved to Omegle. You can play nice and get the debate to happen, or you can pretend that you didn’t see the e-mail in time and then gloat that your opponent didn’t show up because of “technical difficulties” har har har.
Abuse the last word. If you’re in the final stretch of a debate, bring up new issues that your opponent cannot address because they are out of time. This technique is actually heavily penalized in high school debate competitions, but people get away with it regularly because adults are more biased than teenagers.
As someone who actually does academic research and has spent countless hours reading the fine details of “prestigious” publications, 90% of the material out there is total garbage, and it is difficult to know if a paper is garbage just by reading the abstract. Peer review doesn’t help either because review boards are lazy and will never double check any of your actual footwork. They will never read your code, rerun the algorithms you claim you used, etc. A simple glitch can change the sign of your answer, but you typically stop looking for glitches in your 10,000 lines of code once the answer “looks right”.
So, if there is any controversy on the issue, remain agnostic. Like a 90⁄10 split in academia is totally reasonable once you factor in the intellectual biases/laziness/incompetence of researchers and publishers. All an article tells you is that somewhere out there, someone with an IQ >= 110 has an opinion they are publishing to further their career. I don’t place very much weight on that.
Don’t become one of these “reserch sez...” people who just regurgitate abstracts. You’ll wind up worried about the dangers of red meat, getting too much sunlight, doing 45 minutes of cardio every day, etc.