Reasoned Consideration

"Generating Discussion" is not  per se  virtuous - after all, Hitler also "generated discussion" - a lot of discussion. It's only a virtue if you generate useful discussion.

It's possible for something to be a fad and   also happen to be correct . People who pride themselves on not 'following fads' sometimes blindly follow the wrong path instead. Or to put it another way, sometimes the 'sheeple' are right. If your ego is tied up in your ability to 'not follow the crowd', you may fail to follow the crowd when they happen to be going in the right direction. Forget about whether something is a fad or not - the only thing that matters is whether something is  correct  or not. What you need is a set of 'mental tools' to distinguish good ideas from bad ideas. This mentality seems to be a kind of 'inverse  argumentum ad populum ' - effectively believing something is false  because  it is popular. Sometimes the sheep are going in some particular direction simply because there's food, water or sanctuary from danger that way.

A 'bad philosophy' can be more incapacitating than an actual handicap.

Next time you're right about something - anything - don't be too quick to be proud; rather, consider whether the underlying mental framework of analysis by means of which you initially arrived at your conclusion was truly rational, properly researched, and unbiased. If not, it may really only be by happy accident that you were right, which neither signals any kind of achievement, nor demonstrates any predictive power for being right about other things in future. When people are "right by accident", there is a risk that they will regard it as validation of their flawed reasoning methods, and use them again. As the saying goes, "even a broken clock is right twice a day". We should scrutinize our own reasoning methods as much when we're right as when we're wrong; ask yourself questions like "Why was I right? Was it for the right reasons? Were my sources sound? Was I ultimately really only guessing?"