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Constant comments on Some Heuristics for Evaluating the Soundness of the Academic Mainstream in Unfamiliar Fields - Less Wrong
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Why do you find it beneficial to bring up implications about political and other charged issues, when discussing topics that are on LW's discussion agenda?
I can understand it if you're making some point about improving rationality in general, and the best example to illustrate your point happens to be political, and you judge the benefit of using that example to be worth the cost (e.g., the risk that LW slides down the slippery slope towards politics being prominently debated, and others finding it difficult to respond to your point because they want to avoid contributing to sliding down that slippery slope).
If it's more like "btw, here are some political implications of the idea I was talking about" then I think we should avoid those.
It could be that by far the main corruptor of rationality, which does by far the most damage however you want to measure it, is the struggle for political power. If that's the case, then it may be unavoidable to discuss power and therefore politics.
The high point of human rationality is science, but as it happens, the scientific establishment has been so thoroughly dominated by the government (government supports much of academia, government supports much of science through grants, government passes laws which make it difficult to conduct science without official government approval, government controls the dissemination of scientific claims) that corruption of science by politics seems inevitable. If in fact science is corrupt from top to bottom (as it may be), then such corruption is almost certainly almost entirely at the hands of the state, and is therefore almost certainly political. So, if science is thoroughly corrupt, then it is almost certainly virtually impossible to discuss that corruption at all seriously without getting heavily into politics.
The poster child perhaps, but I wouldn't go as far as to say the high point. :)