I use "trolls" here for lack of a better term. In the few instances where I've seen this type of behavior, it seems to come from an honestly sincere place, not the typical trolly motivation, though the behavior is very similar. (Let me emphasize this point: the entire purpose to my asking this question is to give such people the benefit of the doubt, presume good faith and all, presume that they’re not trolls. I only use this term because I don’t have a better one which gets the same point across without the negative connotation.)
What I'm describing is exchanges in which:
- Answerer posts answer with extremely controversial content, sometimes heretical but not necessarily.
- Another user (in the above examples, me) posts question asking on the answer.
- Answerer basically tells off user, saying that his opinion is invalid. Does not usually defend opinion, and if he does, it takes just one or two further questions before answerer tells off user.
- Answerer shuts down all further discussion, or else teases additional discussion with the intent of driving it in circles and not making any progress in fleshing out the answer at all.
The first time I stumbled across such a post, I was directed to the usual troll policy: downvote, disengage, flag. In instances since my policy has always been to assume good faith and prod at the answer until it's clear they're not interested, then downvote, disengage, flag (or now that I have the rep, vote to delete where applicable).
Personally I feel that this is the correct approach, but does the community agree that we should be treating these posts as regular trolls? On the other hand, it's not our job to delete as wrong, and maybe these shouldn't be treated as trolls, but rather uninformed and therefore just downvoted but not deleted?