cousin_it:

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.

To me, this sounds way too ambitious for a place that advertises itself as a public forum, where random visitors are invited with kind words to join and participate, and get upvoted as long as they don't write anything outright stupid or bad-mannered.

You're correct about the reasons why physicists don't work on on anti-gravity, but you'll also notice that they don't work by opening web forums to invite ideas and contributions from the general public. A community focusing strictly on hard scientific and mathematical progress must set the bar for being a contributor way higher, so high that well over 90% of the present rate of activity on this website would have to be culled, in terms of both the number of contributors and the amount of content being generated. At that point, you might as well just open an invitation-only mailing list.

As for the softer (or as you call them, "pre-paradigmatic") fields, many of them are subject to Trotsky's famous (though likely apocryphal) maxim that you might not be interested in war, but war is interested in you. Even if it's something like politics, where it's far from certain (though far from impossible either) that insight into it can yield useful practical guidelines, by relinquishing thinking about it you basically resign to the role of a pawn pushed around by forces you don't understand at all. Therefore, since you'll have an opinion one way or another, it can't hurt if it's been subjected to a high-standard rational discussion, even if only for eliminating clear errors of fact and logic. Also, I don't see anything wrong with discussing such things just for fun.

Moreover, the real problem with such discussions are the "who-whom?" issues and the corresponding feelings of group solidarity, not the inability to resolve questions of fact. In fact, when it comes to clearly defined factual questions, I think the situation is much better than in the hard fields. Progress in hard fields is tremendously difficult because all the low-hanging fruit was picked generations ago. In contrast, the present state of knowledge in softer fields is so abysmally bad, and contaminated with so much bias and outright intellectual incompetence, that a group of smart and unbiased amateurs can easily reach insight beyond what's readily available from reputable mainstream sources about a great variety of issues. Of course, the tricky part is actually avoiding passions and biases, but that's basically the point, isn't it?