There's a trick one can pull if you decide to engage with literal thinkers head-on, and that is to give them bait by inserting a "great error" somewhere in the

There's a trick one can pull if you decide to engage with literal thinkers head-on, and that is to give them bait by inserting a "great error" somewhere in the text, for example: > ...this method is justified, because we know the earth is flat. This is one of the core techniques in esoteric writing. What the great error does is intentionally push the dynamic of the conversation away from agreeability on the surface towards "picking apart and puzzling". People who aren't inclined to think about things will miss the great error entirely and go on without feeling the need to remark(since the essay's surface will usually be framed towards an audience's status quo), but once the error is discovered, the rest suddenly falls into doubt, and then literal thinkers are suddenly confronted with an essay that is far more challenging, because your error was not just an error, but a trap to force them to think about the other statements carefully in order to "prove you more wrong". It is their thinking, and not yours, that becomes warped. To pull this off the essay has to hold a tension between truth and falsity where some statements hold true even under inspection, while others don't. This also makes the resulting comment threads much more lively since they will consist of smart people falling over themselves to show how wrong and stupid you are, only to find their minds are changed by the end.