I'm not sure I'm the best person to talk about this, but I've been struggling with the difference between the Poisoned Well fallacy and not trusting someone because they're a Bad Person.

An easy example is the Founding Fathers. They were all Very Important who had Many Thoughts and did Many Things.

Do I think that everything that Thomas Jefferson did was absolutely awful just because he was a rapist and slaver?

No.... but he's also not the guy I'm going to listen to when I want to hear someone's thoughts about Freedom and Justice.

This isn't necessarily a discussion about someone arguing in Bad Faith, either.

I think that someone can be arguing about a related topic in good faith, and then you discover they're toxic in one area that has direct implications to the subject at hand.

This is one reason why I'm hesitant to read fiction by people I know are Bad People. Their toxic beliefs infect and inform the storyworld they're creating in sometimes subtle ways, which then can also infect the storyworld of my mind.

Yet, when you dismiss people for being racist (or sexist, or ableist, or any other form of bigotry), they always start whining about Cancel Culture and accuse you of dismissing THEM without listening to their IDEAS.

And I do think that people aren't all one thing. Bad People can still do and believe good things, and even have good ideas (or parrot them). All of us are a mixed bag, all jumbled together.

But our attention is limited. We can only listen, truly listen, to so many people before we start tuning them out.

So it becomes less who are you listening to, and more, who are you excluding?

Our minds are also notoriously lazy. We forget where we heard things, we accept information without considering it critically, and different sources have the same weight after a while.

Which is why we need to be careful about Fake News, among other things.

I haven't figured it all out. Currently, my rule is to be as humble and discerning as possible - I look to authorities who have direct experience.

I'm not going to listen to TERFs about trans identities - I'll listen to trans people instead.

It's not a perfect rule, but it's what I've got.

For a related series of thoughts by someone far smarter and more eloquent than myself, let me direct you here: https://twitter.com/michaelharriot/status/1279888558581579779?s=20

This is another related thread from someone worth listening to: https://twitter.com/AlexandraErin/status/1280569946762874886?s=20