Baiting Heuristic

Someone online posts an opinion so wrong it burns. You feel your fingers moving before you have decided anything. Twenty minutes later you have written three paragraphs and changed no one's mind.

Understand the trap from the builder's side. Outrage is not an accident of the argument; it is the product. Attention is the currency, and anger spends fastest. The bait is engineered to be wrong in exactly the way that makes correction feel compulsory.

The heuristic — the rule of thumb — is to ask one question before replying: who profits from my reply? If the answer is "the man who posted the bait," you have your answer about whether to post.

Not every wrong statement is a summons. The world contains more wrongness than you have years. Reserve your corrections for rooms where correction can land. The rest, let it starve. Silence is not surrender; it is the withdrawal of payment.