Intellectual denial of service attacks - Techiavellian

I’ll describe one of these attack vectors in this post.Say that you stumble upon an idea, X, that contradicts widespread consensus views. You take your idea, and you present it to one or more of them as a challenge: “here is why you’re wrong about Y.” They’re likely to respond indignantly, as you’ve just attacked their competence and expertise, perhaps even their livelihoods. The X crowd inundates the Y crowd with more demands for evidence and challenges of their expertise.The Y’s may start off by responding politely to each challenger, but they will run out of energy at some point. As experts in the Y camp become increasingly defensive and hostile, the X camp gains prominence through attrition. A feedback loop forms: pro-X people attack the experts, who eventually get exhausted and give up. Once assembled, counter-arguments may be misinterpreted or simply ignored (remember, this is a conversation between experts and non-experts), representing wasted effort on the part of the expert.Every minute spent refuting X takes away energy that could be spent refining Y.