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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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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.
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.