The trouble with hyper-sensitivity

I first wrote this to send in reply to a post "Society is too sensitive" but that post got deleted by its author in between.
Quote of that post:
People have become offended by literally everything nowadays. Its always criticizing someone who is considered "different". Whether the person has different viewpoints, way of living life, or feelings, society has become too sensitive.
Discussion over anything that is considered a touchy subject is basically impossible because of people fearing judgement of other people.
How have we evolved into this kind of society? I find it incredibly sad and wish people would just stop caring so much about what other people are doing, saying, or acting.
My reply:

I also have this experience when attempting and failing online discussions on scientific or philosophical issues, which is actually why I only had little such activity, and rather focus on developing my own work alone without interactions.
Precisely, I see the world as usually managing more or less well in concrete works and most scientific fields where validity criteria are unambiguous (some inescapable verdict of experiments, any reality feedback or the rigor of mathematical proofs), but otherwise rather doomed to stay divided into separate religions, reputational kingdoms and other kinds of closed local groups of orthodoxy which cannot communicate with other groups, whenever validity criteria are subject to human assessment. Indeed, the root of the problem as I see it is that whenever a given community presents a given reference as the best available thought on a given subject, it becomes impossible for anyone (from another community, or with any original thought) to come and criticize the presumed value of that reference, because such a move is condemned and banned as offensive, breaking the "community rules". Anyone may proudly claim being open to criticism... but of course if only the criticism is polite and constructive. The problem is that this criterion remains subjective, so that any really different view is likely to be perceived as offensive even if it was no way intended or structured as such. The practical result is that people remain open to the criticism... from peers who basically agree with them, but hardly ever much beyond this.
The effect of this process is the practical impossibility for any given community to exchange thought and understanding with a different community, as well as for any community to make progress by correcting its errors which may look obvious in the eyes of another community. The one main exception to this process I could observe, is the case of people with different ideas but who have in common some attitude of openly unserious speculation and some kind of epistemological nihilism, that is, they openly proclaim being just randomly speculating and somehow unsure of their own thoughts and arguments, and so they only have weak arguments to exchange with each other, and are happy with that because it is comfortable. Yet they'd start being offended as soon as someone would really come up and dare having any much more solid background and arguments to offer against them.
That is how the world basically remains unable to make progress in such intellectual fields, and oppositions stay on the way to worsen in their silenced sociological reality with the risk of suddenly becoming much more effectively violent someday, by lack of ability to express these oppositions and deal with them in quest for resolution in explicit and intellectually productive manners.
This is also an explanation of the superiority of market economy over planned economy, as a market economy generates progress by its internal objective mechanism of competition which can naturally eject incompetent managers from power, bypassing any argumentative process, something impossible in a planned economy where criticism against existing managers or management methods is likely to be banned as an offense regardless of its actual validity.

Related links:
The politeness argument
Quotes on MBTI
The cult of the violent social paralysis
Scale Relativity
Why science and spirituality seem to diverge
The debate on quantum idealism and science
Lubos Motl
Philosophy
On the hierarchy between fundamental and applied research