I am not trying to convince the person I am talking with to my side of the argument rather it's the audience. When people sit back and say your wrong because of X, Y and Z others see this as a demonstration of conflict so both sides could be right. But, when people say "the world is 6,000 years old" and you respond with "Did the talking snake tell you that?" it works on a different level.

Take global worming there is a manufactured debate on the issue and few people are willing to say, "Ok, smart guy how should we rewrite the laws of physics?" Or, letting people say "Clean Coal" like there is such a thing when they can say, "Ok, I agree that Clean Coal is great let's mandate zero CO2 emissions from coal in 5 years." so they need to say, "Well we don't have the ability to do that."

Since this reaction is so strong, wouldn't the logical move be to exploit it? I think successful salesmen often figure out how to reinforce people's ego defense mechanisms. They play to their audience's fears and offer some sort of relief.

Not if you want to live in a reason-based society.

Exploitation as an effective maneuver is dependent on a society unpracticed and unconditioned in the use of reason. It may be a practical move in the short run, but invariably has terrible consequences in the long. A society that remains vulnerable to such exploits will be swayed by the best exploiters rather than the best arguments (which is how it is now).

In the long run, our best strategy is to cultivate cool, calm, collected, and charitable discourse.

"cool, calm, collected, and charitable discourse" will always only exist in the right environments. At no time in history has there been a society that was completely rational. It's just not human nature.

There was a time in human history when it did not exist, period. There are no demonstrated limits as to how pervasive it can be.

The ability to engage in charitable discourse is simply a skill that can be taught like any other. Parents could be teaching it to their children, but socially and culturally we haven't yet made it a priority. We should.

I agree with all of your points. But the truth is, is that it is just one current in human affairs. No nation has ever been free of irrational delusion or demagoguery and entirely driven by rationality. This includes regimes like the Soviet Union, which supposedly had rationalist materialist philosophical underpinnings.

True, rationality can be pervasive, and it can be taught, but it can never be totally dominant. Our primitive substrate keeps coming out, and that is every bit as pervasive as rationality.

I agree that we'll never be completely free of irrationality, or that rationality will be totally dominant. It takes self-restraint to keep our primitive substrate, as you put it, at bay, and that's impossible to do every time. But I nevertheless think there's considerable room for improvement, and it starts with efforts like, say, PG's essay on disagreement.

Someone suggested turning that hierarchy of disagreement into tags that people could assign to comments on a debate site, and filter accordingly. I built something of precisely this sort for my master's project, and believe the idea should be implemented for nearly all online communications. It's doable, and an effective way to impress a great many people with the value of rational discourse, to which they simply may not have had enough exposure to appreciate.

And there is, I think, potentially a tipping point or critical mass where a culture of charitable discourse enters a positive feedback loop and makes gains even faster than before.

Whatever the case, I think there are definitely plausible means for improvement. They deserve to be tested.