I'm generally a lukewarm fan of the IDW crowd, although mostly just Sam Harris. Although I always thought heterodoxy was a weird and somewhat inaccurate term, at least for what I was seeking.

To me, it's not about thinking differently, it's about thinking clearly, using your own logic, and hopefully coming up with conclusions that can be useful to other people as well as yourself. Which means many people may in fact arrive at the same - or very similar - conclusions. And that's a good thing.

For example, two mathematicians might take two entirely different approaches to prove the same theorem. They think for themselves, but arrive at the same conclusion. If they weren't able to arrive at the same conclusion, math would be a futile undertaking.

And the same is true for any other problem we want to communicate successfully about.

I think there's a misconception that math is somehow different from philosophy and other fields in this regard. And to some extent, that's true, because it's often harder to agree on your starting premises. But I think that problem is largely overblown, that it persists mostly due to lack of trying, and that it ultimately serves primarily as an excuse for people to say whatever they want.