Ironically, a brief passage by Scott Alexander (from the hit piece targeting him linked above) describes a very good reason to read content you disagree with, almost making the parent comment germane to the overall discussion.
> Compare RationalWiki and the neoreactionaries. RationalWiki provides a steady stream of mediocrity. Almost nothing they say is outrageously wrong, but almost nothing they say is especially educational to someone who is smart enough to have already figured out that homeopathy doesn’t work. Even things of theirs I didn’t know – let’s say some particular study proving homeopathy doesn’t work that I had never read before – doesn’t provide me with real value, since they fit exactly into my existing worldview without teaching me anything new ...
> The Neoreactionaries provide a vast stream of garbage with occasional nuggets of absolute gold in them ... The garbage doesn’t matter because I can tune it out.
For more context, look up the leaked e-mails where Scott is caught admitting that he writes about neoreactionaries because it drives more clicks.
Writing about it once or twice could have been interesting, but constantly returning to neoreactionary content over and over again to mine what he calls “nuggets of absolute gold” starts to become an endorsement.
Scott’s entire writing style is based on tricks like faux-humbleness and pretending to present an unbiased “both sides” overview of a topic while planting seeds that lead the reader to a specific conclusion.
Said emails are in the link I posted above! It is, hilariously enough, literally someone trying to defend Scott by just reposting his emails in their entirety -- "Sunlight is the best disinfectant" indeed. If it's a hit piece, it's Scott writing a hit piece on himself.
Thank you for pointing that out, I didn't even realize that was Emil O. W. Kirkegaard's blog, I thought you had linked Topher Brennan's piece directly.
> Compare RationalWiki and the neoreactionaries. RationalWiki provides a steady stream of mediocrity. Almost nothing they say is outrageously wrong, but almost nothing they say is especially educational to someone who is smart enough to have already figured out that homeopathy doesn’t work. Even things of theirs I didn’t know – let’s say some particular study proving homeopathy doesn’t work that I had never read before – doesn’t provide me with real value, since they fit exactly into my existing worldview without teaching me anything new ...
> The Neoreactionaries provide a vast stream of garbage with occasional nuggets of absolute gold in them ... The garbage doesn’t matter because I can tune it out.