A discussion with started with the first statement and response, and then went on with the statements they listed under "ignores all the larger context of the issue" looks pretty decent to me.
It might turn out that the second person thinks one or more of the bullet points is false, and both sides might learn something.
I agree! I love playing devil's advocate. People tend to focus too much on "who is right" and get annoyed. For me, it's about learning. It's about challenging my and my peer's assumptions and finding what are the limits of the assertion.
The article is a good invitation to reflection, but an alternative title could be "let's discover the relevant context together".
It is much easier to play devils advocate then having opinion you advocate for. And it is overly easy to use devil advocate tactic to make it hard to keep original topic, to force people to go to lengthy tangents or otherwise prevent them to actually make the statement they were aiming for.
If I intend to discuss complex enough real world problem in good faith, especially one with unclear parameters, devils advocate basically makes it impossible.
I agree, but I would put it differently. It is a lot easier to advocate a conclusion with full control over the assumptions, than discovering the boundary assumptions where the opinion no longer holds.
For example, it is easy to argue for "HTTPS is more secure than HTTP". But what I am often interested in -- as a curious and skilled IT person, and not a lambda user -- is what attack models does HTTPS defend against. Remove assumptions one by one, when does HTTPS offer equivalent security to HTTP.
This is not just nitpicking, but extremely relevant for our profession. TLS has gotten under quite a lot of fire lately, so sooner or later, someone somewhere will discover those hidden assumption. I rather it happens on a public forum.
It might turn out that the second person thinks one or more of the bullet points is false, and both sides might learn something.