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NancyLebovitz comments on Some Heuristics for Evaluating the Soundness of the Academic Mainstream in Unfamiliar Fields - Less Wrong
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Fallacy of gray. Nobody is perfectly rational, but that doesn't make all people equally rational. Also, you used the inflammatory and imprecise "boasting" characterization.
While not relying on helpful techniques is a good way of signaling ability, it's a bad way of boosting performance. The virtue of humility is in taking every precaution even if all seems fine already, or even if the situation looks hopeless.
On the practical question, I think eliminating politics was an inspired decision that should continue to be followed, and I think the lead article was not political; I also think it's the best post in a good while. Nevertheless, I find the fact that we must avoid politics troubling. If we're succeeding in making ourselves rational, this---one would think--would lead to a political convergence. This is a nice empirical test of the value and possibility of becoming more rational by the methods we employ, a perspective we should consider an empirical question. It's a shame we can't conduct this test.
I will be very impressed if we can get Aumann agreement on hot political issues.
I suspect that the result on many of them would be convergence to realizing that we don't know what the best solution is, but that might be my prejudices talking.