A good explanation of the difference between intellectual exploration and promoting people. You don’t need to agree with everything someone says, and you don’t even need to like them, but if they occasionally provide good insight, they are worth taking into account. If you propagate this strategy, you may even get to a “wisdom of the crowds” scenario—you’ll have many voices to integrate in your own thinking, potentially getting you farther along than if you just had one thought leader you liked.
Having many smart people you don’t necessarily agree with, like, or respect > having an idol you always agree with.
The prerequisite for all of this is to be a “high-decoupling” person. Rationalists (by definition?) have this personality, but this post is nevertheless very useful as it sketches out why separating the messenger, the context, and the message is good. And potentially, it teaches those with lower decoupling philosophies to stop “respecting” a Person Who Is Correct, but to start listening to many voices and judge for themselves what makes sense and what doesn’t.
A good explanation of the difference between intellectual exploration and promoting people. You don’t need to agree with everything someone says, and you don’t even need to like them, but if they occasionally provide good insight, they are worth taking into account. If you propagate this strategy, you may even get to a “wisdom of the crowds” scenario—you’ll have many voices to integrate in your own thinking, potentially getting you farther along than if you just had one thought leader you liked.
Having many smart people you don’t necessarily agree with, like, or respect > having an idol you always agree with.
The prerequisite for all of this is to be a “high-decoupling” person. Rationalists (by definition?) have this personality, but this post is nevertheless very useful as it sketches out why separating the messenger, the context, and the message is good. And potentially, it teaches those with lower decoupling philosophies to stop “respecting” a Person Who Is Correct, but to start listening to many voices and judge for themselves what makes sense and what doesn’t.