> Rather, you read material like this for perspective. It's a way of training your brain to look at the same set of observations in an entirely different way. Then when you're faced with actual facts in your own life, you can apply the lens you just read about to it and see what the meaning of those facts is, and ideally shift rapidly between different perspectives to triangulate something approaching reality.

Wow, I think this last paragraph of yours manages to capture exactly what a philosophy or an ideology is for: perspectives to help create meaning.

My follow-up question then is: what makes for a "good" perspective? Can you judge it, to get back to the topic of this thread, by the number of mooks it enrolls?