If you're not willing to stand by your opinion and face the consequences of sharing it, how important is your opinion really? Intellectual progress demands tha

If you're not willing to stand by your opinion and face the consequences of sharing it, how important is your opinion really? Intellectual progress demands that ideas distasteful to the status quo must be openly discussable, but some stakes are necessary to keep those who have carefully thought out their positions and thus hold them with conviction from being drowned out by those who merely parrot ridiculous talking points they never took the time to digest themselves. If you are ashamed to be associated with an idea, that is not an idea you should be advocating - if it has any merit, others will advocate it better than you, if not then what purpose does your advocacy serve? There is nothing wrong with picking which hills are worth dying on, and it's okay to acknowledge that some of your opinions are kinda dumb. The fact is most of us are experts on only a narrow range of human knowledge, and our opinions on the rest are coming from a place of ignorance. If you don't have something valuable to add to a conversation, it is not only reasonable but preferable to remain silent and listen to what others have to say.