I first really, really noticed this happen to me about a month ago when I was having a debate with an extremely politically conservative person about whether or not women should be banned from being scientific researchers. They re-appropriated the words of Tom Hunt to describe their position, and this is where a lack of granularity took me off track; I ended up conflating what the conservative person believed with what Tom Hunt might believe, overestimating how much I could infer about Tom Hunt's beliefs from a small sample, and honestly, basically failing journalistic ethics 101 when you look at it from the outside. And the stupid thing is that Tom Hunt really had nothing to do with it. I didn't need to assert anything about his beliefs at all. The conservative person was just re-appropriating his words; all I had to do was argue about banning women from research. I started counting points instead of writing down facts. I think you really have to supervise your thoughts in political debate, and just straight System 2 it; keep a good verbal formulation of what question you want to answer and consider everything else as it bears on that question, keep close track of subthreads, don't jump around too much.

In college, I saw that the Marxists had a tendency to hold lots of anti-Israel protests. Since I'm Jewish and Zionist, this rather pissed me off so thoroughly that I refused to have anything to do with the Marxists and became a social democrat.

That was a mistake I corrected upon having a bad experience at a job.