In this scenario, I would posit that both sides would basically never feel that their arguments have been dunked on.
To be clear, I was using "dunked on" as a shorthand for "finding, in some way, that their argument was substandard or otherwise unconvincing". A common way in which that happens is when the argument quickly faces a rebuttal that is more compelling than the original argument (thus making the person feel like that argument was a net loss), but could come from other avenues such as simply not having the desired effect on people. If one were to make an argument that relies on something making intuitive sense, and then you find out that people who disagree with you do not find that thing intuitive, then it's a swing and a miss, and you won't try that same tack in the future since you'll know that the intuition gap would need to be crossed for your point to be compelling.
I also, particularly, am not thinking about specifically highly-principled discourse between agents rational enough to boil their positions down to crux after crux, or those two agents maintaining the same discourse session until they reach consensus, or even really
the same two people coming back to debate each other.
I'm speaking, more, from experience. I did not always have the beliefs I currently do, on a variety of topics, and I got to experience exactly what it feels like to be on the provably-wrong side of debates. Against different, scattered people across the internet, in forums and private conversations and wherever I went that the conversation was happening. I felt in real-time, though I did not recognize it without retrospect, the process of discarding unhelpful lines of argument after debates in which I felt they did poorly. I felt myself hesitate to bring up rhetoric that I knew had recently been countered by someone else. It wasn't that I had boiled my opinion down to cruxes - this was largely before I had organized my thoughts well enough to do such a thing - it was that I had followed an incentive gradient called "do not argue poorly" and it demanded I abandon poor arguments along the way.
Eventually, I did not have enough left to debate with. And so, I didn't. I'd just stay silent and watch the debates unfold instead, because I stopped feeling like I had strong, compelling arguments to contribute. And then, gradually, peacefully, slowly enough that I didn't notice until long afterwards, my priors realigned, and I favoured the opposite position instead. I never conceded defeat in those arguments I fought, I never changed my mind in the moment and admitted I was wrong, but yet I still credit those arguments as a major factor in my change of heart. I had to shatter my spears and watch my shields buckle before I realized I did not have a compelling position, which was vital for me being open enough to opposing arguments that they could persuade me.
I must stress, though, this experience was me against many and varied people, most of who I had no prior history with and did not ever expect to meet again. This is a much more flexible scenario than two intelligent people locked in a room together until they come to agreement. I entered each argument as a blank slate, judged only by what I brought to the table, and after each argument I had the opportunity to self-reflect on the coherency of my position in general, unconcerned about what my past-opponents thought of my prior arguments or what our shared history might imply for future rounds of discourse. I think this does make a substantial difference, especially between people who do not have their thoughts well-ordered enough to boil everything down into structured cruxes.
I wouldn't say it's really all that nebulous; the effect is often very easy to see.
Fair point, it
can be very clearly true that there is a receptive audience watching the debate to see what arguments make sense. I was more trying to emphasize that it's much harder to prove that
nobody is watching and updating off your argument, which in turn makes it very easy to
claim you are just appealing to the audience when in truth you have no real expectation that such an audience exists or that your continued efforts have any impact on their opinion at this point. That's why I hold reservations about the line, because it reads as an easy all-purpose excuse in any remotely-public forum: you can't
prove there aren't silent observers watching our spat, so clearly it's totally fine if I say I'm just trying to convince them and not at all salty about failing to convince you, the person I'm directly speaking to.
Because of how generally-applicable it can be as an excuse, to save face in an otherwise socially awkward situation, it's the kind of argument I reflexively shy away from automatically approving of. The difference between "there is a sizeable undecided audience on this contentious topic that is credibly listening to us" and "even though we're twenty replies deep in a reddit comment chain it's not impossible that someone other than us is still reading" is very significant and I generally think that a statement asserting the current situation belongs to the former category instead of the latter category should be provided if someone wants to convince me they are
actually primarily appealing to the crowd and not just using a hard-to-disprove excuse to avoid looking like they fell prey to sunk costs.
But yeah, in this case I do agree that people were watching and genuinely paying attention, and attempting primarily to appeal to them is a coherent thing to say. I just don't like accepting that rationale as an excuse in-and-of-itself. It's clever, in that dangerous way where it lets you dance around the truth as easily as it lets you convey it.
(And I'd say this approach isn't really an asymmetric weapon of the truth. It can be: assuming that both sides' proponents are roughly equally rhetorically skilled on average, then indeed, the ones whose arguments are more robust due to being true would tend to win over the hearts of the audiences. But that breaks down if some invalid position is advantageous for more rhetorically skilled people to argue, such that the median proponent of that position is more skilled than the median proponent of the other positions. For example: the position that people who can stylishly dunk on their opponents in a debate should be given power. And that's how societies can go astray.)
Also fair, I linked to that article not to suggest that this is an asymmetric weapon of truth, but more just because I felt the quote itself was a good mapping to my personal experience and yet I felt people would want to know where that quote came from. Indeed, the article explicitly includes rhetorical skill as an asymmetric thing that the people in the wrong can wield just as easily as the people in the right.
And yet I do think it's fair to say that some topics do manage to carry the asymmetry into an advantage in rhetoric. When one side just actually does indeed have better evidence to cite, clearly and provably, that's an advantage that can be easily wielded against the people with the incorrect position. But again, that's mostly besides the point. I was not trying to say that it is always Good that prevails through rhetorical success, I was trying to communicate that effective rhetoric can indeed help change the mind of people who in the moment reject the rhetoric and disagree with you.
Whether it's for good or ill, one can - as you put it - "bully them into realizing that
all their lines of argumentation are weak" and "plunge their entire side of the debate into the abyss of low status." I would say that's correct, and it happened to me when I was younger and held positions that I know now to be wrong. I argued, I fought, and I realized that my lines of argumentation were weak one by one, until I started to feel as if I could not voice a compelling opinion on the topic, and that trying to engage would likely result in me being the low-status person in the room. This was remarkably effective at getting me to stop actively defending that viewpoint, at which point I observed the argumentation more neutrally, eventually changing my mind. It doesn't always happen this way, and the end result need not be the more true position, but it is still a direct causal connection between me losing internet arguments and me changing my mind to eventually adopt the position I once fought.
Circling this all back to the original topic, that's why I don't really agree with the premise that "trying to convince my opponent is useless" and why I reflexively dislike the followup "but it is not embarrassing to continue to argue anyways, because I am just trying to convince the bystanders". The latter line is just far too general a counterargument for my tastes, and I have personal experience that outlines a model in which the former line may also be an oversimplification.
