SSC often makes highlight posts of comments pulled from the discussion, often containing critical commentary. That, and the regular open threads, strike me as the behavior of someone open to doubt, forming new opinions, revising old ones.

It's interesting you mention this because as I was wrapping up to go populate a rack and terminate 18 runs of CAT5 I had an insight into myself, in particular

- Why I don't blog

- Why I don't trust bloggers

Let's unpack:

SSC often makes highlight posts of comments pulled from the discussion

Right - the author gets to pick and choose from among those who interact with him, while deleting and censoring those he chooses not to. He has the mic, he chooses who he hands it to, and he turns it on and off at will. That's not free-ranging discussion - that's shaped discussion and it's a very different thing. Wade into /r/The_Donald and take a look at the "commentary" there. do you see much dissent?

The header of your linked post:

[COMMENT THREAD CLOSED GO AWAY]

[Content note: Gender, relationships, feminism, manosphere. Quotes, without endorsing and with quite a bit of mocking, mean arguments by terrible people. Some analogical discussion of fatphobia, poorphobia, Islamophobia. This topic is personally enraging to me and I don’t promise I can treat it fairly.]

I comment. I often comment where I'm not welcome, and I often say negative things. Put it this way: I'm just as interested in capital-T Truth as anybody else, I just don't think I have it. And in 40 years of searching, I don't think anybody else does, either. Those who are willing to share their journey are interesting and trustworthy. Those who share their arrival are suspect.

And for me, I'm not interested in publishing "this is what I think about something" despite the fact that people have been asking me to do so for a decade or more. Because really? "this is what I think RIGHT NOW" is closer to the truth. "this is what I think IN RESPONSE TO THAT" is another caveat. And the blogging platform strikes me as fundamentally dishonest: I mean, yeah - I can pick a bunch of comments that disagree with my nuance and answer them as an illustration of my open-mindedness. But nobody wants to read me putting forth a firmly-held notion and then getting into a pissing match with someone else who disagrees. Who learns from that? And who can trust it?

I think bloggers are open to having their nuances discussed so that they can better shape their message for their admirers. I think the pseudo-intellectual "rationalist" sphere is particularly guilty of this - if you disagree, you're irrational and not worthy of debate. However, if you disagree on nuance, on taxonomy, on particulars... well, you're increasing their pagerank so all aboard.