My own experience with this tends to arise out of an extreme cognitive dissonance - I want my opinions to be internally consistent, and I've come to realize tha

My own experience with this tends to arise out of an extreme cognitive dissonance - I want my opinions to be internally consistent, and I've come to realize that a few of them just aren't consistent. When you get into reading the philosophy (or the relevant literature in other cases) you can come to conclusions which are quite far removed from beliefs one holds dear. So there's some tension between what I'd like to be true (security in a belief) and what seems true when I rationally consider the arguments. The second part of my experience shows that when you report your findings to others, they are immediately skeptical to the point of refusing to engage with the established literature. In reality, I try and make others aware of these opinions by arguing for them - partially in the hope that they can offer a counter-argument and that I can be back "home" safe in my original opinions which I thought I couldn't justify. Secondly is the matter of epistemological framework; some people seem stuck with a particular way of finding information about the world which intentionally or not is constructed to dismiss critical engagement. The most controversial topics of political philosophy are very interesting to me because it can be hard to find a view which is internally consistent. I'm emotionally upset when I can't arrive at such a view. To hold a view I can't justify is a horrible feeling. The kind of topics I'm talking about are issues of freedom of speech (pornography, hate speech, censorship, debate, the notion of harm and the validity of the harm principle), economics (the labour theory of value, tendency for the rate of profit to fall, objectivity or subjectivity of value, various historical arguments), social psychology (ideology in society and the flattening of culture, totalitarianism of the market, the experience of other sexualities e.g. the adult My Little Pony fan community and the Japanese lolicon phenomenon), and the nature of work (the meaning of consent and coercion, free will, the phenomenon of "bullshit jobs"). In the face of these issues, I find that it's hard to spend any energy on talking about such banalities as vim vs emacs or FOSS.