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homunq comments on Undiscriminating Skepticism - Less Wrong
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I don't think filtering people by rationality is a good idea at all. It's pretty much the definition of an ad hominem argument, and also a more-harmful-than-average case of the fundamental attribution error. Yes, it might be able to give you an early advantage on deciding whether they are right in any particular case; but that advantage would quickly evaporate as you got new data, and in most cases you'd already have enough data from the start for it to be a disadvantage (given limited human bandwidth).
Ad hominem reasoning is not always fallacious.
When someone else makes an argument that doesn't seem right to you, your estimation of whether it's they or you who're making a mistake should vary widely depending on whether the argument is coming from someone with an established history of predictive expertise in contentious cases, or from Bob the Biased Bozo.
I didn't say it was fallacious, I said it was a waste of bandwidth. There are almost always other, better clues about whether some statement is right or wrong. And even for filtering attention, it's not the best heuristic. if someone is just telling you things you already know, it doesn't really matter if they're being rational or just parrots, they're not worth paying attention to.