Listening Disorders as Eating Disorders

I run into a lot of people who consider themselves truthseeking intellectuals who are also incredibly fussy about what information reaches their eyes. They block at the drop of a hat, derail intellectually substantive discussions into mind-numbing litigation of minutiæ of "tone", and refuse to acknowledge a logical point unless it's been presented to them in the precise way that doesn't offend their (often idiosyncratic) sense of etiquette or "discourse norms." It would be hard to communicate how much contempt I hold these people in. (Not because I couldn't find the words. Because they'd block me before I could communicate it.) I think they are ineffective and boring people whose pretensions to intellectualism are morally fraudulent; I think they are making the world worse insofar as they manage to trick anyone into conflating epistemic virtue with mastery of their impoverished form of cant. To be clear, I understand that attention is a precious and limited resource, now more than ever. One must ruthlessly filter and prune one's information environment in order to maintain the signal-to-noise ratio, lest one drown in an ocean of slop. If someone is quick to drop out of conversations because they're busy and don't have time for whatever nonsense people are yammering about, then that person has my respect, and indeed, admiration. (Perhaps I should learn to one day have so much respect for my own time.) But the people I'm complaining about are obviously not protecting their time from noise. They're protecting their egos from signal that would hurt their feelings, cocooning themselves away from information that might challenge what they would prefer to believe. Someone protecting their time might mute someone for being boring, but not for "being a dick." (In my experience, everyone who complains about someone allegedly "being a dick" is actually complaining about that person's refusal to suck theirs.) It's not that I'm some kind of superhuman stoic who has no empath