The adversarial model of handling opposing opinions is certainly frought with pitfalls as your article explains so well. In my career as a professional salesperson, I learned the power of taking the customer's point of view and using it to advantage to bring them on board the product that I was selling.
While it is easy to get emotionally caught up in objections and the entrenched thinking opposing one's own point of view, there is no question about the objective value of being diplomatic and working to achieve one's own ends by understanding the customer, showing them the benefits of seeing things your way and painlessly bringing them over to your way of thinking. In a nutshell, you don't SELL people products; people BUY products.
I guess my point was more into the realm of ideas without the intention of selling anything.
As a professional i can totally image you can distance yourself and use anything to your advantage, in your personal life, it might be harder :)
That being said, I always thought sales people are a special kind of breed.
My response would be that sales is the realm of ideas played for keeps. While the significance of the battle for hearts and minds as demonstrated by Capitalism, Marxism etc. has world wide political and ideological implications, the successful sale manifests the transfer of material wealth and is directly quantifiable which has an aesthetic appeal for the scientific mind.
