You tell them to fuck off because you engaged with it and found it completely meritless/abhorrent, not because you're above engaging with it. If they present new evidence for lizard people, you should skeptically examine the evidence and tell them to fuck off when it doesn't hold up.

You don't have to engage with them and waste your time debating them, but you absolutely should be open to challenge your own positions.

But those examples are extreme on purpose

Yes they were! And you’re right, we need to allow ourselves to be challenged, to consider ideas outside of our comfort zone, but we also need to able to reject ideas that are not being posited in good faith.

This is the joy of debate, to question statements and receive nuanced answers in reply.

Confirmation bias is an incredibly stubborn human trait (and a near universal one at that). The particular issue this post is engaging with is called attitude polarization: two groups of people diverging more and more in their opinions despite being presented with the same evidence.

Why are humans like this? I think it’s a survival trait that people conform to the opinions of their in-group and are reluctant to let go of opinions that are most central to their world-view. They’ve already invested a lot in both their in-group and their world-view, so rejecting all that is more costly to them than rejecting the truth about some particular fact (that they may not even care about that much).

When you consider that beliefs and openly held opinions have different costs and different benefits depending on which group you belong to, it becomes a lot less obvious that abandoning a position is the right move.

It’s a good counterpoint. In my first example I definitely have thought about it previously.

In my second example it’s clearly stupid so I’m not going to engage with it. I haven’t thought about it previously (I have now !), but I don’t think that makes me an intellectual nepobaby.

I've never witnessed an atheist making such an argument. Usually it's the theists getting hung up on him because they are used to appealing to authority figures and project.

I unironically think the braindead atheism online greatly contributed to the rise of Christian nationalism we've been seeing in the past decade...

Great example is when people refer to Richard Dawkins' books as proof that there is no god

As was said earlier by someone else, that which is asserted without evidence can be dismissed without evidence.

People who can't rotate an apple in their head. In the context of the video - people who don't interact with abstract arguments and think you're talking about specific things or people instead

There is no compromising with an ideology that is inherently uncompromising in nature. It's the paradox of tolerance. Realists will never make room for experiences that defy their idea of objective reality. If they did, they wouldn't be realists. That's why in order to create room for everyone's experiences and freedom, we must destroy consensus reality. We need to kill objectivism in order to have a subjective multiverse with free exchange of ideas. Realists violate that social contract.