If you're more concerned with sending the message out rather than getting credit, then multiple psuedonyms tackling different levels of inferential gaps might be a possibility in the internet era.

You can have one psuedonym who is atheist and is targetting the root questions, however people coming to this final level will be relatively few. You might be mostly preaching to the choir here.

You can have another psuedonym of a tolerant religious person who would write a post like the one you are trying to write. You can signal plently over here. You can say that you are a believer and that love is paramount, etc.

My journey away from theism was characterized by smaller arguments such as these. There was no great leap, just a steady stream of losing faith in doctrines I had been brought up to believe. Creationism went first. Discrimination against homosexuals went next. Shortly after that, I found it impossible to believe in the existence of hell, except perhaps in a sort of Sartrean way. Shortly after that, I found myself rejecting large portions of the Bible, because the deity depicted therein did not live up to my moral standards. At that point I was finally ready to examine the evidence for God's existence, and find it wanting.

I think in the end you will find that there are two things which can work. You must either point out that the beliefs lead to conclusions that are not just inconsistent, but also absurd, or you must point out that the beliefs lead to conclusions that contradict more "core" beliefs, such as "love your neighbor as yourself".

Fred Clark is a liberal, fairly orthodox Christian. He blogs on a variety of subjects, including the birther/TeaParty movement, the deficiencies of creationism ([1] [2]), the strange phenomenon of religious hatred of homosexuals ([3] [4] [5]), and an interesting view on vampires. (He also has an entertaining ongoing series where he rips apart the popular fundie series 'Left Behind', and shows how the writers know nothing of their own religion, let alone how the real world works.)

You could do worse than to look at how he handles this sort of thing, from a religious perspective.

The closer their values are to ours, the smaller the upset of integration; but for this very reason, the value of integration and the need to integrate may also be smaller

This is not a logical truth, of course, but it is often true. For instance, in the original story, the need to integrate was directly proportional to the difference between the human and Babyeater (or Superhappy and Babyeater) values.

I would find this argument much more convincing if it were supported by people who actually have children. My mother goes beserk over a smiling infant in a way I cannot begin to comprehend (I am usually afraid I will accidentally hurt them). My husband, likewise, has an instant affinity for babies and always tries to communicate and play with them. He was raised Jewish with the idea that it is unclean to have animals in the home and does not find animals particularly adorable. In our culture we are inundated with anthropomorphised images of animals in television and given stuffed toys and pets that we take care of like children. It's not that surprising that we find animals cute when we focus so much attention on them as if they were little people. I do not know that such evaluations of 'cuteness' would hold cross-culturally, especially in cultures where people do kill and eat 'cute' animals on a regular basis.

These social networks certainly cannot take the place of original research

The way you phrased that implies that these social networks cannot be used for original research.

Doctors make decisions based on a mix of theoretical knowledge and experience. More the experience than the knowledge.

'Experience' is another word for their subjective view of the patient histories that they have observed through their career. Why not make the decision based on an emprical measure of patient histories, taken over a large random-ish sample, rather than one particular physicians subjective interpretation of only the patients he has seen?

Better yet, why not present this data to your physician and have a talk about it?

The "people" in the quoted bit are correct. This is not science; this is statistical analysis.

It is possible that an individual would be better served by this social network, though I have generally agreed that a physician who treats himself has a fool for a patient, and the more so for a layman who neglects to consult competent medical authorities. These social networks certainly cannot take the place of original research; they rely on existing observed trends.

You mean like you advocated doing to the "Baby-eaters"? (Technically, "pre-sexual-maturity-eaters", but whatever.)

ETA: And how could I forget this?

That reason sounds incomplete, but I think I know what the person is talking about.

The best example I can think of is Normal Cryonics. The post was partly a personal celebration of a positive experience and partly about the lousiness of parents that don't sign their kids up for cryonics. Yet, the comments mostly ignored this and it became a discussion about the facts of the post -- can you really get cryonics for $300 a year? Why should a person sign up or not sign up?

The post itself was voted up to 33, but only 3 to 5 comments out of 868 disparaged parents in agreement. There's definitely a disconnect.

Also, on mediocre posts and/or posts that people haven't related to, people will talk about the post for a few comments and then it will be an open discussion as though the post just provided a keyword. But I don't see much problem with this. The post provided a topic, that's all.

I've also noticed "liberals" making more sense, but I attribute this to smart people abandoning conservative groups and jumping ship to liberal ones. This may mean that "conservative" policies are being under-argued.