There are some good reasons for being terrified. We are tribal animals. We don't really care about the truth as such, but we care a lot about tribal politics. We can pursue truth when we have very high degree of disinterest in what the truth will be, but that's a really exceptional situation. When we care about the shape of truth, we lose a lot of rationality points, and tribal politics forces make us care a lot about things different than truth. It might be our strongest instinct, even stronger than individual survival or sex drive.

I agree with you that it has its downsides, but I really don't see how you can accept the politics and stay rational. I cannot think of many examples of that.

I'm also really disappointed by so many status indicators all over lesswrong - top contributors on every page. Your social status points (karma) on every page. User names and points on absolutely everything. Vote up / vote down. You might think we're doing fine, but so was reddit when it was tiny, let's see how it scales up. I think we should get rid of as much of that as we can. reddit's quality of discussion is a lot lower than 4chan's, even though it's much smaller.

And this is a great example of what you once posted about - different people are annoyed by different biases. You seem to think social status and politics are mostly harmless and may even be useful, I think it's the worst poison for clear rational thinking, and I haven't seen many convincing examples of it being useful.