I had a view, and my view was this: Serial sexual abusers should submit to castration. Castration, I believed, would sideline the abuser’s compulsions and thus keep the world safe from him (or her lol). While castration hasn’t been tested on abusers in the Harvey Weinstein style, it’s been used with success on child molesters, bringing the recidivism rate, or so I’d read somewhere, from 75 percent to 2 percent. (Another upside: Castration is rumored to forestall male-pattern baldness.) Of course I meant an entirely bloodless course of hormone therapy. Not a hatchet. I’m not some harridan. The abusers would just get shot up with something called an anaphrodisiac, a brew to suppress androgens and other traces of Aphrodite in the blood.

My opinion was built on a couple of statistics, but less rational motivations were also in play. Like many who have held jobs, I’ve served my time in taxis and at happy hours showing down with groping goats in the garb of VIPs. I’ve either wised up to or aged out of this dispiriting cycle, but now, I imagined, with a touch of grandiosity, I might stop it dead. My view, if I really advocated for it, might not only redeem my own experiences, it would revise my earlier meekness with a Valkyrie-like reversal—and avenge the sisterhood.

Yet another contingency undergirded my pro-castration platform: a church-trained, perhaps sentimental worldview that even the worst among us can be delivered from evil—if not by prayer alone then by the ministrations of a compassionate endocrinologist. My hormone-­therapy prescription was designed both to recognize the suffering of the sinner—he’s “sick” and treatable with medicine—and to punish him with that pitiless word. Castration.

February 2018. Subscribe to WIRED. Sean Freeman

So I had this opinion, and as you can tell I adored it; it made the crooked places in my brain straight and the rough places plain. As the opinion gave me comfort, I grew more tenacious. I amassed an arsenal made of words sharpened to a fine point. I was all but spoiling for a fight.

At the same time, something seemed sinister in my view. Castration? It was zealous. It was maybe mean. At once I realized: I dearly wanted to have my opinion changed.

Because, look, as righteous as I felt, my conscience was also appalled that I wanted to disable the testicles of any mother’s son, however much that son liked to masturbate into potted plants and force frottage on colleagues at the vending machine. To recommend that those in power sterilize, spay, and geld the people they don’t approve of—that seems the very essence of barbarism. Had my desire for revenge made a Mengele of me? Worse still, was I trying to pass off my personal revenge fantasy as high-minded and rational, inspired by Google searches I digni­fied as “scientific data”? And so I signed on to Change My View, a section of Reddit where people post opinions and ask to have them changed.

Change My View was the brainchild of Kal Turnbull, a musician who was just 17 when he launched the subreddit in 2013, roughly three years before intransigence became the guiding principle of all debate everywhere. As a high school senior, Turnbull could have been forgiven for digging in his heels on teen truisms like punk’s not dead or—he’s Scottish— alba gu bràth. Instead he rebelled against all sloganeering and groupthink.

“I was generally surrounded by people that all think similarly,” Turnbull told me by email from near Inverness, in the Scottish Highlands, where he records music in a farm shed. Back in 2013 Turnbull and his mates tended to discuss Breaking Bad, Scottish independence, and indie rock, but Turnbull won’t say what the group’s consensus on those things was, because he’s assiduous about avoiding bias now. “In the grand scheme of the world, we all thought similarly,” he told me. “This led me to wonder, what does someone actually do when they want to hear a different perspective or change their view?”