I am unsure; I believe Ra asked for evidence of what Gleb had said followed by Gleb declaring his academic status as evidence enough to be an authority on . This led Ra to criticize his academic status.
While it is true that Gleb is an academic; it is also true that "because I said so" is not a good enough answer to a request for more information(especially not here on LW) (I am unsure if the request was polite or not)(I am also unsure of the exact wording of Gleb's response). I am unsure as to the state of that whole thread;
Ra could probably compile the best history as he is right in the thick of it.
It could certainly be said that adressing the arguments is the most significant thing, not the person who made it. If the arguments are not clear enough to address; That would lead to asking for more evidence and lead us to here and now. I am unclear as to all the details to be able to understand this all.
By my reading of that thread, he was not leaning on his own authority but on that of an academic consensus. James Miller replied by claiming to distrust academia in general on the matter, and mentioned relevant incentives that might push them towards an incorrect conclusion. Gleb replied that "peer review is peer review". Up to that point, everyone was being reasonable.
Then VoiceOfRa jumped in, was very rude and seemed to thoroughly misunderstand what was going on. See this comment where he says:
...
Richard Kennaway has posted about an edit war on the wiki. Richard, thank you.
Unfortunately, I've only used the wiki a little, and don't have a feeling for why the edit history for an article is inaccessible. Is the wiki broken or has someone found a way to hack it? Let it be known that hacking the wiki is something I'll ban for.
VoiceofRa, I'd like to know why you deleted Gleb's article. Presumably you have some reason for why you think it was unsatisfactory.
I'm also notifying tech in the hope of finding out what happened to the edit history.