Worth Listening To, But...

There are people worth listening to, but not worth arguing with.  You know the type: the least disagreement provokes a response that the other person cannot admit a 1% chance they are 1% wrong; they cannot accept that you have any reasonable point or decent motivation; they resort quickly to childish insult.  If challenged on this last, they usually double down and become even more sophomoric.  I suspect they think this is actually a virtue - that they don't suffer fools gladly, that they can dispatch others quickly, that they have biting wit.  (Well, biting, anyway.) Evidence of their great intelligence.

I have some tendency to this myself, I suppose, being more worth listening to than arguing with.  I hope not to the extreme I am thinking of in another, though.

Our preferred narrative is that it is those who can listen, be civil, and fight fair are the smarter ones.  They are the ones who are really knowledgeable, we tell ourselves.  But is that actually so?  In theory we say it should be, but is there actually a correlation?  Of the five psychiatrists I have learned the most from, three were very able to listen and charming in their replies, one was intermittently good at it, but had a fairly narrow range of people he respected, and the last was frankly horrible to deal with.  He was forever condescending and snide and cutting others off when he believed he understood their point (though he hadn't always). Yet he was worth listening to for all that.

Of those I read or hear, those I meet in a dozen live venues where brilliance might be shown, or those I knew in Prometheus, I can find examples of both types in all groups.

I would be interested what your personal experiences are with this.