The Steel-Man Obligation
There is a practice in modern public discourse that I find not merely unpersuasive but intellectually dishonest, and it is so widespread that most people no longer recognize it as a failure. It is the habit of engaging with the weakest version of an opposing argument rather than the strongest.
The name for this failure is the straw man. The remedy is what philosophers call the steel man: the deliberate construction of the most powerful, most coherent version of a position you disagree with, so that when you refute it, you have actually refuted something worth refuting.