Loved reading this, finish the whole thing at the linked site. The comments at Overcoming Bias are really topnotch!!!!!
Praise Polymaths
By Robin Hanson · February 12, 2010 9:15 am · Discuss · « Prev · Next »
Once upon a time folks who traveled far were treated with suspicion. Sure if you were rich and traveled like the rich you weren’t more suspicious than other rich. But those who traveled more than their class were suspected, correctly on average, of being less loyal to their neighbors.
Today travel is mostly celebrated; people love to talk about their trips and admire the well-traveled, even beyond the wealth it signals. But travel today doesn’t much threaten loyalty – intellectual contact with locals is limited, and usually selected to be like-minded. Ooh look, another pretty building. True intellectual travel, where you actually take the time to see things from different perspectives, is rare, more valuable, and yet elicits more suspicion than admiration.
You see, our beliefs are severely distorted by our culture and training, and intellectual travel remains our only remotely reliable remedy. We all know that we would have been inclined toward different beliefs had we been raised in different cultures or disciplines. We see consistent differences between folks trained in West vs. East, science vs. humanities, economics vs. sociology, and in different schools of thought of most any discipline. We like to think that we correct for this, but when we realize how hard that is, we throw up our hands saying “what ya gonna do?”
via Overcoming Bias : Praise Polymaths.