[FieIsay]

Describing these as 'excuses' seems to reduce a yet broader, overarching idea to its essential fault somewhat cleanly: looking at the listed cases in the article, they generally seem to be serving as excuses to others for not engaging by replacing a counter-argument with fundamental invalidation—an excuse to the standards of the self, and a corruption risk to the standards of the other. This mechanism seems a little like a run-time exception for responding to preserve internal coherence in response to an unmanaged (perception of) expectation. Ideally, an honest and coherent refusal of the engagement would be possible and provided—"Sorry, I don't have the capacity for this discussion right now"—but such circumstances often align with mental resources (and thus capacity to provide such 'cooperative refusals') being limited, and so the response may drop to a 'lower order', where the basis of the disagreement is invalidated (excused) instead. Then, there's the more negative case of low-effort rejection of engagements which don't seem worthwhile ("I've had this argument a hundred times, and it never goes anywhere"). Here, the general heuristic of 'effort optimisation' seems to lead to narrow-mindedness and (in turn or in parallel) dismissal of others' perspectives and the understanding of others in turn, such that they warrant neither coherent engagement nor coherent reason for refusal; thus, the basis of the discussion is again discarded, regardless of its general validity. In my experience, this can cause severe misunderstandings when the 'prejudice' underlying that dismissal isn't recognised; I've found it to 'mess me up' more than a few times with an over-literal reading.