I dislike this, sometimes (esp. NTs) we are merely testing the argument/idea. If you fold, then we might decide your argument/idea is wrong... and a good idea is lost.
If you're putting up a lot of roadblocks to good ideas, then that's your problem. Not mine.
Anyway, if there is a clear and obvious wrong and right, then presumably the issue can easily be resolved by citing an appropriate authority and thus there's no reason to argue about it. (The other person can research the authority if they need to know more.) On the other hand, if there's no clear right and wrong, then for practical purposes it almost doesn't matter if the argument is resolved or not. Agree to disagree, and all that.
Example: If a religious person really wants to know about my beliefs as an atheist, then I'll give them a quick exposition. If, after that first exposition, the other party takes the approach of picking at every possible little flaw in my exposition, then I'm done arguing at that point. That critical approach can be (and frequently is) applied ad nauseum, and indeed there's no need to resolve that particular argument at all (atheists and believers live together just fine). Meantime I can think of lots more productive uses of my time than arguing an issue like that.
To be honest, I spent a lot of time in the past debating people on message boards oriented toward politics, religion, and social issues, and at the end I felt it was largely a waste of time. A
little bit of that kind of debating can be recreational and informative; it's interesting to find out how much or how little one is able to influence others' thinking on subjects like that. But it quickly becomes a drag and kind of addicting in a negative way. I've come to appreciate the old saying that one should never debate politics, religion, and sex. By extension, I've even decided that it's not worth spending a lot of time debating
anything that can't be resolved fairly quickly (e.g., by referring the other party to an authority and letting the other party do their own research on that basis).
Here's another way to put it:
I understand that an adversarial approach is the best way to debate things under certain circumstances (for example, in the courtroom where the two parties have direct and opposing interests with tangible rewards and punishments at stake, or in the workplace where hard choices have to be made on how to allocate limited material resources). But in my opinion an adversarial approach seems silly and artificial outside of those kinds of restricted frameworks. If I'm engaging in intellectual discourse on the Internet, then it seems more reasonable to me to take a scientific approach: i.e., take an information-gathering approach and willingly investigate alternative hypotheses. That can be done cooperatively, and I don't mind providing information for those who are genuinely curious about my viewpoint and/or asking my own questions about the viewpoints of others.
But if we can't investigate each other's viewpoint cooperatively, then let's just agree to disagree. In my experience, adversarial debates about intellectual points usually aren't productive. People
say that they will be open-minded in an adversarial debate, but it rarely works out that way in practice. In my own experience, the adversarial approach has a momentum of its own that works against open-mindedness in practice. Like I say, I've done a lot of that kind of debating in the past, and eventually I decided that I have better things to do with my time than argue some abstract point on an adversarial basis.
FL