I don't want LW to change in that direction.

In the famous talk "You and Your Research", Richard Hamming explained why physicists don't spend much time on researching antigravity:

The three outstanding problems in physics, in a certain sense, were never worked on while I was at Bell Labs. By important I mean guaranteed a Nobel Prize and any sum of money you want to mention. We didn't work on (1) time travel, (2) teleportation, and (3) antigravity. They are not important problems because we do not have an attack. It's not the consequence that makes a problem important, it is that you have a reasonable attack.

We can talk productively here about topics like decision theory because we have an attack, a small foothold of sanity (established mostly by Eliezer and Wei) that gives us a firm footing to expand our understanding. As far as I can see, we have no such footholds in politics, or gender relations, or most of those other important topics you listed. I've been here for a long time and know that most of our interminable "discussions" of these controversial topics have been completely useless. Our rationality helps us maintain a civil tone, but not actually, you know, make progress.

Human understanding progresses through small problems solved conclusively, once and forever. The first step in any pre-paradigmatic field (like politics) is always the hardest: you need to generate a piece of insight that allows other people to generate new pieces of insight. It's not a task for our argumentative circuitry, it's a task for sitting down and thinking really hard. Encouraging wide discussion is the wrong step in the dance. If you don't have a specific breakthrough, I'd rather we talked about math.