> I wonder ... how often might this sort of thing occur, and with what consequences ...?

I started trying to answer this directly but I wonder if it's more helpful to go meta here. I haven't tried to check this against past posts to see how parallel it is, but the feeling of trying to answer this sequence (does it happen, how often, and to what effect) reminds me of something I've noticed several times when thinking about questions in your comments (to me and others).

It starts off with a question that seems (to me) to have an obvious answer. I can't figure out, in context, whether to read them as purely rhetorical but tend to give the benefit of the doubt. Then I have trouble charting a course to an answer that feels charitable. The tack-on questions tend to balloon to something quite relevant, but seemingly unanswerable without hubris or a mountain of research that I suspect doesn't exist.

This leads me back around to indecision between taking the whole chain rhetorically and whether it's possible to answer charitably. By the end, I end up a bit frustrated.

On this chain of questions: These things happen all the time (see my earlier amorphous notes on how hard I think both precise thinking and communication are). I can't imagine a meaningful answer about the consequences, but I do agree it's a meaningful exercise for the reader to imagine what the consequences may be.

Whether you're hoping for this kind of conclusion or hoping for an answer that actually tries to imagine the frequency and consequences, I suspect you can wring a little more luck out of your approach by narrowing the scope of some questions (probably by making them more local/personal), factoring some of them out into direct statements, or even adding a disclaimer.

1. I can't pretend to have tried to nail this down up to now. Projecting this hard also makes me uncomfortable, but I guess I can make a post hoc effort.

It seems like you're trying to make sense of the absurdist conflict rituals you see playing out. I think you're trying to call attention to the ritual (and its absurdity) as a means of making sense of it (finding other people who agree, prompting new people trying to do the same, testing ideas, getting opinions). I think you see the ritual turning more on psychology than logic, and want to understand the psychology (and promote understanding of the psychology) to light a path forward.

If this isn't too far off base, I have a few closing thoughts:

- I expressed this before in different terms, but I do feel like you're looking for conscientious objectors in the middle of a battlefield. There's nothing wrong with that. You will find a few of us here. And you'll find a few people who are open to persuasion. But you'll mostly find people who are trained to shoot at anything on the wrong horizon.

- I have a pet theory about how to model people who seem irrational: I suspect most people make approximately rational decisions if you know/understand the inputs (values, perceptions, experience) and how they weight them. This doesn't mean you (or they!) can know all of their inputs, but it does imply a few things that I find more productive/tractable than just perceiving them as irrational agents: a) there's value in trying to imagine what inputs could justify someone's decision/behavior; b) it's humbling to assume you might decide/behave the same way with the same inputs; c) if they are a willing, self-reflective participant, the processes of mutually teasing out and challenging inputs and weightings is less inherently fraught/adversarial/condescending than the process of figuring out why they are irrational/illogical.

2. I regularly ask people in my life for scales, but always with a twist. I might rephrase this like "On a scale from 1 to crazy, how am I?" or "How would you rate me on a scale from tall to crazy?" I do this for fun, but also because I'm very leery of dichotomies (especially ranked dichotomy scales) and what they do to our thinking. I haven't thought of you as crazy.