Literally every stranger I argue with on Twitter just recites memorized refutations of arguments I'm not making. Anyone else who also thinks enough to put together uncommon arguments also notices this (eg @ARIOSOPHY).

It's not strawmanning. It's a new phenomenon where you strawman on accident not by actually misrepresenting your opponent's argument, but by refuting an unrelated argument without even bothering to misrepresent anything.

They do it because the way a modern normie learns to argue mostly involves reading what smarter people with the same stances as them say. Someone on /r/atheism has memorized 20 refutations of specific "fundie" arguments, but will be completely lost if you go off-book.

Generally the ones they've memorized refutations of are the ones that are flawed, and no others (since that would be harder), so if you think of ANY non-flawed argument, they just repeat the phrase they know that would BTFO the closest argument they know one for.

This is new with the advent of the internet. With so many answers at their fingertips, very few people learn how to figure out an answer themselves. They only know how to memorize and learn steps/answers for specific processes.

It's actually directly connected to how bad modern people are at applying concepts in math/science. Memorize steps; get confused if a slightly different problem requires slightly different steps; learn the steps for that slightly different variation; repeat.

Prior to textbooks, people didn't do things that way because it wasn't possible. You actually had to figure out the steps yourself every time. The only thing you'd be told by a book was "here are the basic building blocks" (if lucky).

This is ESPECIALLY noticable in new programmers. Just-out-of-college CS kids literally can't solve a problem that doesn't have a stackoverflow answer. They cannot relate it to a similar problem they know of. They cannot derive an algorithm that wasn't taught in Structures&Algs.

(this is the third time ive written this thread because it still perplexes me that there are so many people who actually qualify as NPCs and don't seem conscious)