My main problem when debating an issue with people, I believe are horribly wrong, is that people I generally feel that way about, simply aren't very intellectua

My main problem when debating an issue with people, I believe are horribly wrong, is that people I generally feel that way about, simply aren't very intellectually curious. They are set in their ways and not willing to actually spend any brainpower understanding your argument or the depth of the problem. Another common problem is that we use different associations or interpretations of a word. E.g. I find discussing politics with Americans quite difficult because Americans have redefined the meaning of conservative, liberal, socialism and capitalism to a large degree. Socialism e.g. seems to imply command economy and dictatorship, while capitalism seems to automatically imply freedom and democracy rather than merely describing an economic system. This applies to many things e.g. when discussing programming languages, advocates of OOP programming tend to assume that encapsulation and polymorphism is uniquely OO concepts.