Well, the example was to show that there are certain meta-contrarian views held by a big part of this community which are trivially wrong and proof that they have gone too far. Given that restriction, what less controversial example would you have preferred?

I really would have liked to use the racism example, because it's most elegant. The in-group bias means people will naturally like their own race more than others. Some very intelligent and moral people come up with the opposing position that all races are equal; overcoming one's biases enough to believe this becomes (rightly) correlated with high intelligence and morality. This contrarian idea spreads until practically everyone believes it and signals it so much as to become annoying and inane. This creates a niche for certain people to signal their difference to the majority by becoming pro-racial differences. But taken too far, this meta-contrarian position could easily lead to racism.

But any post that includes a whole paragraph on racism automatically ends up with the comments entirely devoted to discussing racism, and the rest of the post completely ignored. Feminism would also have worked, but I would have to be dumb as a rock to voluntarily bring up gender issues on this blog. Global warming seemed like something that Less Wrong is generally willing to admit is correct and doesn't care that much about, while still having enough of an anti-global-warming faction to work as an example.

I've been lurking and reading for a few days--interested in a few things, thinking about a few things, but not quite ready to jump in and start participating yet. This comment cracked me up enough to make an account and upvote it.

What less controversial example should have been used instead?