There's a saying regarding debate, especially relevant to anonymous online forum or comment thread debates which we remind you goes: "Never teach a pig to sing. It wastes your time and annoys the pig."
This wise and hilarious proverb is usually attributed to Robert A. Heinlein, and was also used by Robert Anton Wilson, although its true origin is somewhat debatable or uncertain. Its staying power comes from how elegantly it captures a fundamental truth about effort, receptivity, and discernment. On the surface, it means: "Don't try to educate, persuade, or transform someone who has neither the desire nor the capacity to receive what you're offering."
There are two losses in the attempt: Your energy is spent on an impossible task. The other person experiences your effort as irritation, not assistance. A pig doesn't resist singing because it's stubborn. Singing simply isn't part of its nature. Likewise, people can only absorb ideas that fit within their present frame of experience. Before a seed can grow, the soil must be ready. One should not mistake compulsion for service. People often think that if they simply explain one more time, find the perfect argument, or reveal one more fact, another person will suddenly awaken. Yet transformation doesn't happen through force - It occurs when curiosity appears from within. There is, however, an important caveat. The proverb can be misused as an excuse for cynicism or elitism. Someone who seems "like a pig" today may simply not yet have encountered the right experience, teacher, or moment. History is full of people who appeared unreachable until life prepared them to listen.Don't measure your wisdom by how well you can change others. Measure it by knowing where your effort can bear fruit.
While good faith debate is crucial for democracy, regarding keyboard warrior online arguing (and this also sadly applies to debate if one party is not in good faith), most internet arguments are not exchanges of information but rituals of identity maintenance. The participants are not asking, "What's true?" They are asking, often unconsciously, "Who am I, and what tribe am I in?" When you encounter someone arguing anonymously online, there are several possibilities: They are performing for an audience or they are defending an identity or they are discharging emotional energy or they are amusing themselves. Or they're getting paid by an oligarch to demonize socialism. Yet most rarely they are genuinely curious.
And the problem is that anonymity removes many of the social signals that tell us whether a conversation is cooperative or adversarial. You end up projecting a whole person onto a username and a profile picture. Then, before you know it, you're spending forty-five minutes constructing a devastating rebuttal to a cartoon frog. From a mental health perspective, the cost is not merely the time. It's the attentional residue. Your nervous system often reacts as though a genuine social conflict is occurring. Cortisol doesn't necessarily care that the threat comes from "QuantumAR15Patriot" whose IP address is in Kazan rather than your next-door neighbor.
In philosophy, we are reminded that wisdom cannot be downloaded into an unwilling mind. Even Socrates understood this. He asked questions rather than delivering lectures because genuine learning begins with the student's own recognition of ignorance. This is why, with MAGA cultists, facts don't work, because they don't use their brains, (ethos) they only use their feelings (pathos) so the only deprogramming approach comes from asking them questions why they feel a certain way about a certain thing. And to extend this into other online potentially anonymous communications, the healthiest stance online is often a kind of playful agnosticism saying such things as "Maybe" or "That's an interesting model" or "what evidence would change your mind?" Notice how different this feels from the gladiatorial style of argument that dominates social media.
So it's good to not ask whether you can win the argument and more ask whether the other person is capable of updating their beliefs. Then ask whether you are. If the answer to both questions is no, you're not having a conversation. You're watching two reality tunnels collide. At that point, "don't teach a pig to sing" becomes less an insult toward the other person and more an act of self-care. It means recognizing that not every disagreement deserves your finite supply of attention. Attention is your most valuable currency. Spend it where learning is possible.