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TheOtherDave comments on Some Heuristics for Evaluating the Soundness of the Academic Mainstream in Unfamiliar Fields - Less Wrong
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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.
It's worth noting that "we" is ill-defined here.
Supposing that what this site does successfully improves rationality among its participants, then we should expect that someone like me who has only been here for a few months would be less rational than the folks who have been around for years and benefiting from the site.
But a discussion of politics here would not exclude me, so even in that scenario we would expect such a discussion not to lead to convergence.
The proper empirical test, I suppose, would be to identify cohorts based on their tenure here, and conduct a series of such conversations within each such cohort -- say, once a year -- and evaluate whether a given cohort comes closer to convergence from year to year.