[marbles]

Extremists can be good, but I don't think the extremism itself is as important as total information. Extremists tend to know a lot about arguing their extreme position, largely because they have had to defend it from so many angles over time.

So, as it turns out, you get two extremists defending their views and offering up all sorts of different defenses of their positions. If the reader in the middle has the patience and wisdom to sift through all of the garbage, he can pull some nice value out of the discussion.

The thing is, you don't have to have a controversial topic to get this kind of passion out of a discussion... IIRC, my "best fruit" post got a flurry of hits a few months back. What can I say... People care very deeply about their choices in fruit.