I don't know. Since when is bias good?
In my own wild and reckless youth I read all sorts of stuff, including religious scriptures, occultism stuff, philosophers of all kinds. I don't regret it, and I wouldn't want to have not considered some idea because of having it already established as a "villain" idea. It was interesting and promising at the time, and now I have the experience of what it feels like to have (or at least be dabbling in) other worldviews than my current one.
To use Professor Quirrel's words, if I could go back in time and remove the desire to do that from my younger self, my present self would not benefit from it.
The problem with the heroes and villains heuristic is that if you happened to initially choose your allegiance wrongly, you'd suffer that much stronger bad consequences; you'll get stuck somewhere stupid. If your judgement were good enough to reliably choose well, you'd not need heroes and villains anyway, just use that judgement.
Heroes and villains happen automatically, anyway, it's avoiding it that takes effort. Whenever a searching young person manages to do that, that's a virtue, not a problem. The way I see it, the age of 16 is pretty much for exploring ideas. And I can't imagine why we'd prefer a closedminded approach to an openminded one, at any age. Or why you'd think not having read things you disagree with is a boast.
"If you meet the Buddha on the road, kill him!"
When Edward Wilson published the book Sociobiology, Richard Lewontin and Stephen J. Gould secretly convened a group of biologists to gather regularly, for months, in the same building at Harvard that Wilson's office was in, to write an angry, politicized rebuttal to it, essentially saying not that Sociobiology was wrong, but that it was immoral - without ever telling Wilson. This proved, to me, that they were not interested in the truth. I never forgave them for this.
I constructed a narrative of evolutionary biology in which Edward Wilson and Richard Dawkins were, for various reasons, the Good Guys; and Richard Lewontin and Stephen J. Gould were the Bad Guys.
When reading articles on group selection for this post, I was distressed to find Richard Dawkins joining in the vilification of group selection with religious fervor; while Stephen J. Gould was the one who said,
"I have witnessed widespread dogma only three times in my career as an evolutionist, and nothing in science has disturbed me more than ignorant ridicule based upon a desire or perceived necessity to follow fashion: the hooting dismissal of Wynne-Edwards and group selection in any form during the late 1960's and most of the 1970's, the belligerence of many cladists today, and the almost ritualistic ridicule of Goldschmidt by students (and teachers) who had not read him."
This caused me great cognitive distress. I wanted Stephen Jay Gould to be the Bad Guy. I realized I was trying to find a way to dismiss Gould's statement, or at least believe that he had said it from selfish motives. Or else, to find a way to flip it around so that he was the Good Guy and someone else was the Bad Guy.
To move on, I had to consciously shatter my Good Guy/Bad Guy narrative, and accept that all of these people are sometimes brilliant, sometimes blind; sometimes share my values, and sometimes prioritize their values (e.g., science vs. politics) very differently from me. I was surprised by how painful it was to do that, even though I was embarrassed to have had the Good Guy/Bad Guy hypothesis in the first place. I don't think it was even personal - I didn't care who would be the Good Guys and who would be the Bad Guys. I just want there to be Good Guys and Bad Guys.
[Postscript, 2026: Since then, I've read Wynne-Edwards' last book arguing for group selection. IMHO it is a very bad book, and hooting dismissal of it is appropriate. Goldschmidt's theory of macroevolution may have been based on quick changes in the fossil record (I don't know), but we now have strong evidence this is due to cascades of rapid evolutionary change (punctuated equilibrium). I don't know what Gould was talking about re. the cladists. So I no longer think of Gould's statement as especially virtuous, which makes it a bad example for this post.]