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>>limeli+(OP)
It's a funny trend in recent years that people are so offended by the opinions and ideas of others that they cannot bare to expose themselves to anything that person has to say.

Discourse and logical thinking are the basis of modern society and all of it's afforded comforts. If the inventors of the past had coddled themselves in a hugbox for their entire lives we would still be saying things along the lines of "A train can never go more than 10 miles an hour", "there wont be a market for more than 10 computers in the world", and "you wont ever need more than 64k of ram" because there would have been no one who would have heard--or even said for that matter--"No!"

If someone disagrees with you, just explain your points rationally and calmly. If it something you are passionate about, like the OP has pointed out in https://xkcd.com/386/, then isn't it worth the 15 minutes it will take to explain your viewpoint as I am doing here?

>>gravyp+Ya
It's a funny trend in recent years that people are entitled enough to believe that their opinion is important enough that everyone has to read it.

No-one is stopping HN users from commenting, they're just allowing themselves the opportunity to easily ignore it. I don't see anything wrong with that. Why is someone obliged to spend 15 minutes of their time indulging you?

>>untog+Nb
Yes, it is the duty of every thinking person on this planet to examine viewpoints of others.

A famous Aristotle quote that you may not have heard of: "It is the mark of an educated mind to be able to entertain a thought without accepting it."

If you disagree, that is fine! No one is saying you must agree with everyone, just endorse the possibility they are presenting and think reasonably about the evidence they provide to support their claims. Who knows, they might be right.

Do you think Roman forums would have yielded the intellectual progress they where responsible for if people just ignored everyone they didn't agree with 100% of the time?

>>gravyp+ip
To consider alternate/opposing viewpoints, perhaps.

But there are many viewpoints, and to consider all of them would take an excessive amount of time.

As such, it seems there may be uses in narrowing down the ones to consider in some way.

One option I've considered would be to focus on the boundary of what viewpoints one considers to be plausible.

So, in each "direction", the viewpoint that, of all the ones which seem implausible, seems the least implausible, and also the viewpoint that, of all the ones which seem plausible, seems the least plausible.

Another idea might be, if one has already considered a viewpoint, and the viewpoint isn't changing, there might cease to be much use in considering it further (suppose, for example, that one can pass an ideological turing test of it with flying colors). Does it not seem implausible that it might not be worth spending more time on exposing oneself to that viewpoint?

After all, I doubt you believe that you have an obligation to consider the viewpoints of off brand viagra sellers whenever you receive spam in your inbox.