Magnum - "There have been two mentions on this forum recently of the org's instructing JWs not to pay attention to negative info from the outside..."
Looking back, I think hearing that once was one of my little wake-up moments.
I grasped, logically, that it was virtually impossible for all "negative" information coming from the outside the Org to be wrong just because it came from outside the Org...
...by sheer statistical averages, some of it couldn't help but be true...
...therefore, it was stupid to summarily reject everything simply because you were told to, or because you might not like hearing it.
And I hated feeling stupid.
(I suppose it helped that I'd already grasped that not everything in "The World" was a weapon specifically pointed at JWs.)