This could also be a methodology of solidifying an uncompromising bias.
The "given" was a pretty near unchangeable opinion. So, the chance for further solidification isn't something to be concerned about. My only point here was that even in such cases, there's still some utility to debating with people on the other side just to hone your arguments (not to further determine the objective truth). But if we do want to still assume a chance for a change of opinion, debating will increase the likelihood compared to just not discussing the issue at all, especially if you try to find the best presenters of the opposing side's ideas.
Unless you've hopped down the rabbit hole of solipsism
I rejected that rabbit hole very early in life :-)
"does it really matter if my belief is biased? How does it affect the trajectory of my life and the life of others?"
If I understand you correctly, you're suggesting that bias that leads to wrong conclusions may not be something to worry much about if it doesn't have a negative impact on our life. If so, I guess that could be considered something of a truism on a utilitarian basis, but if our passion is just for truth independent of utility, it obviously still matters. And I'm not sure if we can always correctly measure the impact of mistaken beliefs based on biases either.
I also like to draw upon the game of poker where my constant mantra is, "does the story make sense?" Mix that with a dash of Occam's razor and two dashes of Hanlon's razor, boom, you have my personal bias cocktail.
I think that's not a bad formula for evaluating human behavior and it share some similarity to my own. I wasn't familiar with the term Hanlon's razor, but as a concept I'm a strong believer in it and frequently use it when trying to understand human behavior.
show that you have given consideration to their perspective without being blatantly disrespectful.
Yes, completely agree with this. It can be hard at times, but if you really want to change someone's mind, I think its critical.
I'm very utilitarian about it because I'm not sure that I'll ever be capable of achieving an accurate depiction of objective reality through my limited human capability. Also, after a few months of thinking about it, I'm not sure that my picture of reality has to be accurate. I'm resting my laurels on utilitarianism.
(I'm not even sure I believe in free-will any more but this is an on-going internal struggle. That's another debate altogether. I'm working on a theoretical model for cognition based on the parallels between biology and computation. Hopefully I'll draft something solid and get it academically published. If so, I'll share it here. I'm a non-traditional student studying computer science and neuroscience.)
There's another good one to go along with Hanlon's razor! I forget what it is called but (paraphrasing) I think it goes like this: "Malice must be the intention of those who couldn't possibly be THAT incompetent." Human behavior is tough, its the emergence of a complex system of hardware and experience. One thing I have noticed though is that reasoning is always justified for someone, even if it's after the fact. Many bad people in history have justified horrendous actions through the means of necessity and imaginary evil.