The Discipline of Reading Against Your Own Opinion
Deliberately seeking out texts and teachers you expect to disagree with, and why that discomfort is worth cultivating.
Most reading, left to its own inclinations, drifts toward confirmation: texts that agree with what you already believe, teachers whose conclusions you already find comfortable.
A smaller discipline, practiced deliberately by some serious readers, is the reverse: seeking out a text or teacher you expect to find frustrating, wrong, or uncomfortable, and reading it with the same seriousness you would bring to a text you already trusted.
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