Is there some way to encourage coherence in people's stated views? For some of the posts in this thread I can't tell whether I agree or disagree because I can't understand what the view is.

That's to be expected with it comes to contrarian views. A lot of positions are not widely held because they are complicated to understand or take certain background knowledge.

If you would give me a bunch of academic math problems I wouldn't understand the problems. In math it's fairly easy to say: Hey math is complicated, it's okay that I don't know enough about the topic to understand the claim. But in other areas the same applies. Understanding what other people think is often hard when they differ substantially from yourself.