Possibly related: Beware Identity (originally Paul Graham) (-> Why the Brights Make Me Uneasy), Keep Your Identity Small (-> Avoid Identifying With Anything).
I used to participate in talk.origins - a creation vs evolution forum. For reasons which now escape me, I took a moderate creationist position in a mock debate for a few days. Though that exercise did not produce enough 'distance' to convert me, I discovered that, for months thereafter, I was noticing minor flaws in evolutionist arguments that I had never noticed before.
It might prove to be an interesting exercise if one of the giants here - Eliezer, or Anna, or Wei Dai - were to try to argue against one of the LW orthodox positions under the guise of a sock puppet. It could be a good test of how well us lesser folk understand the justification for the positions we hold. And, it might be a useful stretching exercise for the 'giant'.
Julian Baggini argues that we might be more willing to judge our beliefs objectively if we avoid thinking of them as "our own". I hadn't thought before about explicitly distancing myself from my beliefs in this sense.