I leave myself open to reading dissenting writings around such “ugh topics”. I mostly motivate myself with a smug sense of superiority and the ability to mock their obviously poor reasoning. I don’t seek it out, but I have intelligent friends with the occasional stupid philosophical attachment, so I get linked to fairly high-quality articles from a variety of perspectives.
The end result is that I often reinforce “this idea is clearly stupid, since the people defending it can’t mount an intelligent defense”. Occasionally, however, I go “oh, I never thought about it that way!” and realize that the majority of my objections just got wiped away, at which point the “ugh field” usually goes away and I can re-evaluate the idea.
So, basically, I let myself openly mock ideas I disagree with, because it tricks me in to having an actual discourse, and I trust myself to recognize novel arguments and information well enough to actually integrate them. It helps that I have no objections to mocking an idea I don’t understand, so this doesn’t impact my social status in cases where conceding the debate would look bad. I’ve occasionally argued against a point long after accepting it, then just quietly reversed my opinion a few days later to save face. I don’t know how helpful this is for other people, but it helps me strike a very nice balance between social and intellectual values.
I leave myself open to reading dissenting writings around such “ugh topics”. I mostly motivate myself with a smug sense of superiority and the ability to mock their obviously poor reasoning. I don’t seek it out, but I have intelligent friends with the occasional stupid philosophical attachment, so I get linked to fairly high-quality articles from a variety of perspectives.
The end result is that I often reinforce “this idea is clearly stupid, since the people defending it can’t mount an intelligent defense”. Occasionally, however, I go “oh, I never thought about it that way!” and realize that the majority of my objections just got wiped away, at which point the “ugh field” usually goes away and I can re-evaluate the idea.
So, basically, I let myself openly mock ideas I disagree with, because it tricks me in to having an actual discourse, and I trust myself to recognize novel arguments and information well enough to actually integrate them. It helps that I have no objections to mocking an idea I don’t understand, so this doesn’t impact my social status in cases where conceding the debate would look bad. I’ve occasionally argued against a point long after accepting it, then just quietly reversed my opinion a few days later to save face. I don’t know how helpful this is for other people, but it helps me strike a very nice balance between social and intellectual values.