Well, there is the aesthetic appreciation of polemic for its own sake, but that’s not going to make you more rational.
I think the most obvious answer, though, is that it can inure you a bit to connotative sneers. Aversion to this kind of insult is likely one of the major things keeping you from absorbing novel information!
One way to do this very quickly—you shouldn’t, of course, select your politics for such trivial advantages, but if you do, take advantage of it—is to become evil yourself, relative to the majority’s values. There are certain groups an attack upon which constitutes an applause line in the mainstream. If you identify as a communist or fascist or Islamist or other Designated Antagonist Group, you can either take the (obviously epistemically disastrous) route of only reading your comrades, or you can keep relying on mainstream institutional sources of information that insult you, and thereby thicken your skin. (Empirical prediction: hard {left|right}ists are more likely to read mainstream {conservatives|liberals} than are mainstream {liberals|conservatives}.)
(An alternate strategy this suggests, if your beliefs are, alas, pedestrian, is to “identify” with some completely ridiculous normative outlook, like negative utilitarianism or something. Let everyone’s viewpoint offend you until “this viewpoint offends!” no longer functions as a curiosity stopper.)
Well, I understand your reasoning: you suggest that it’s likely (or at least possible) that one’s reaction in the face of rhetorically “hot” disagreement will be a built-up tolerance (immunity) for mockery, making one more able to extract substance and ignore affect. My belief is that that particular strength of character (which I admire when I see it, which is rarely) is infrequent relative to, as I keep calling it, a retreat into tribalism in the face of mockery of one’s dearly-held beliefs. Hence my feeling that the upper-left quadrant of the graph I describe is not good breeding grounds for rationality. That isn’t to suggest that we shouldn’t do our best to self-modify such that that would no longer be the case, but it is hard to do and our efforts might be best spent elsewhere.
Also worth considering is the hypothesis that the two axes of my graph aren’t fully independent, but instead that “hot” expressions are correlated with substantively less rich and worthwhile viewpoints, because the richest and most worthwhile viewpoints wouldn’t have much need to rely on affect. If this is true (and I think it is at least somewhat true), it would be another reason for avoiding rhetorically “hot” political viewpoints in general.
As my political beliefs have become more evil I’ve become much better at ignoring insults to my politics. I remain pretty thin-skinned individually, though, so it seems that whatever’s moving me in this way is politics-specific.
The healthiest reading space is probably all over the axis. Passion is not the opposite of reason, and there are pleasures to take in reading beyond the conveyance of mere information.
Well, there is the aesthetic appreciation of polemic for its own sake, but that’s not going to make you more rational.
I think the most obvious answer, though, is that it can inure you a bit to connotative sneers. Aversion to this kind of insult is likely one of the major things keeping you from absorbing novel information!
One way to do this very quickly—you shouldn’t, of course, select your politics for such trivial advantages, but if you do, take advantage of it—is to become evil yourself, relative to the majority’s values. There are certain groups an attack upon which constitutes an applause line in the mainstream. If you identify as a communist or fascist or Islamist or other Designated Antagonist Group, you can either take the (obviously epistemically disastrous) route of only reading your comrades, or you can keep relying on mainstream institutional sources of information that insult you, and thereby thicken your skin. (Empirical prediction: hard {left|right}ists are more likely to read mainstream {conservatives|liberals} than are mainstream {liberals|conservatives}.)
(An alternate strategy this suggests, if your beliefs are, alas, pedestrian, is to “identify” with some completely ridiculous normative outlook, like negative utilitarianism or something. Let everyone’s viewpoint offend you until “this viewpoint offends!” no longer functions as a curiosity stopper.)
Well, I understand your reasoning: you suggest that it’s likely (or at least possible) that one’s reaction in the face of rhetorically “hot” disagreement will be a built-up tolerance (immunity) for mockery, making one more able to extract substance and ignore affect. My belief is that that particular strength of character (which I admire when I see it, which is rarely) is infrequent relative to, as I keep calling it, a retreat into tribalism in the face of mockery of one’s dearly-held beliefs. Hence my feeling that the upper-left quadrant of the graph I describe is not good breeding grounds for rationality. That isn’t to suggest that we shouldn’t do our best to self-modify such that that would no longer be the case, but it is hard to do and our efforts might be best spent elsewhere.
Also worth considering is the hypothesis that the two axes of my graph aren’t fully independent, but instead that “hot” expressions are correlated with substantively less rich and worthwhile viewpoints, because the richest and most worthwhile viewpoints wouldn’t have much need to rely on affect. If this is true (and I think it is at least somewhat true), it would be another reason for avoiding rhetorically “hot” political viewpoints in general.
As my political beliefs have become more evil I’ve become much better at ignoring insults to my politics. I remain pretty thin-skinned individually, though, so it seems that whatever’s moving me in this way is politics-specific.
The healthiest reading space is probably all over the axis. Passion is not the opposite of reason, and there are pleasures to take in reading beyond the conveyance of mere information.