>No, you're right, Well Actually Guy. It's not just used by emotional abusers. It's also used by socially tone deaf people who seek to belittle the experiences of others in order to score debate points, or force their way into a discussion that has absolutely nothing to do with them.
This seems much too assuming; sometimes technicalities are important to a good discussion, and of course this ties into the concept of sealioning[0] too, but revealing sealioning is a better tool to use against such people. Sealioning is where people don't recognise that you don't want to debate everything, so they continue to pester you. But once committed to a discussion, the tools of skepticism, doubt and rigor are all very useful. They may be useful (within some margin some of us might find agreeable or disagreeable) on a site almost expressly for interesting perspectives - Hacker News.
Often I'm happy that there's a "well actually" guy to provide nuance where it might be needed. Maybe it's not needed, but often it is. There is a time and place, and many of the author's examples are examples of the wrong time and place to "well actually". It doesn't mean the points are wrong.
This seems much too assuming; sometimes technicalities are important to a good discussion, and of course this ties into the concept of sealioning[0] too, but revealing sealioning is a better tool to use against such people. Sealioning is where people don't recognise that you don't want to debate everything, so they continue to pester you. But once committed to a discussion, the tools of skepticism, doubt and rigor are all very useful. They may be useful (within some margin some of us might find agreeable or disagreeable) on a site almost expressly for interesting perspectives - Hacker News.
Often I'm happy that there's a "well actually" guy to provide nuance where it might be needed. Maybe it's not needed, but often it is. There is a time and place, and many of the author's examples are examples of the wrong time and place to "well actually". It doesn't mean the points are wrong.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sealioning