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grouchymusicologist comments on Open Thread, August 2010-- part 2 - Less Wrong
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It's probably good to have a mix. I get something distinct from reading people like Roissy or Sailer, whose basic values are totally divorced from my own. I get something else from Eliezer or Will Wilkinson, who derive different policy preferences from values that are similar to mine.
There's something liberating about evil analysis, and I think it's that it's audaciousness allows you to put down mental blinders that would be on guard againstmore plausible threats to your ideological integrity. And a nice thing about values changing over time is that the classics are full of this stuff. Reading, say, Schmidt is like reading political philosophy from Mars, and that's something you should experience regularly. Any similar recommendations?
Further to this. Let's plot political discourse along two axes: substantive (x axis: -disagree to +agree) and rhetorical (y axis: -"cool"/reasoned to +"hot"/emotional). Oligopsony states that it is valuable to engage with those on the left-hand side of the graph (people who disagree with you), without any particular sense that special dangers are posed by the upper left-hand quadrant. (Oligopsony says reading so-and-so is "like reading political philosophy from Mars, and that's something you should experience regularly" -- regardless of the particular emotional relationship you are going to have with that Martian political philosophy as a function of the way in which it's presented.) My view (following on, I think, PitM-K -- and in sharp disagreement with James Miller's original post in this thread) is that the upper half of the graph, and particularly the upper left-hand quadrant, is danger territory, because of the likelihood you are going to retreat into tribalism as your views are mocked.