I would consider 3 to be a few.
Do you feel confident that you could recognize a Bitcoin-like opportunity if one did appear, distinguishing it from countless other unlikely investments which go bust?
You should definitely post the entire quote here, not just the snippet with a link to the quote. For a moment I thought the one sentence was the entire quote, and nearly downvoted it for being trite.
While the quote is anti-rationality, it IS satirical, so I suppose it's fine.
I'm fairly confident it stands for "Society for Creative Anachronism".
Too strong.
Nobody EVER got successful from luck? Not even people born billionaires or royalty?
Nobody can EVER be happy without using intelligence? Only if you're using some definition of happiness that includes a term like "Philosophical fulfillment" or some such, which makes the issue tautological.
The quote always annoyed me too. People bring it up for ANY infringement on liberty, often leaving off the words "Essential" and "Temporary", making a much stronger version of the quote (And of course, obviously wrong).
Tangentially, Sword of Good was my introduction to Yudkowsky, and by extension, LW.
The tricky part is the "achievable levels of accuracy". It would be possible for, say Galileo to invent general relativity using the orbit of mercury, probably. But from a pebble, you would need VERY precise measurements, to an absurd level.
Honestly, I did read the source, and it's very difficult to get anything useful out of it. The closest I could interpret it is "Theory (In what? Political Science?) had become removed from "Other fields" (In political science? Science?)".
In general, if context is needed to interpret the quote (I.E. It doesn't stand on it's own), it's good to mention that context in the post, rather than just linking to a source and expecting people to follow a comment thread to understand it.
Sorry if this is overly critical, that was not my intention. I just don't get what the "internecine conflict" you are referring to is.
Edit: I misunderstood what you said by "rationalize", sorry.
As Polymath said, rationalization means "To try to justify an irrational position later"", basically making excuses.
Anyway, I wouldn't worry about the downvotes, based on this post the people downvoting you probably weren't being passive aggressive, but rather misinterpreted what you posted. It can take a little while to learn the local beliefs and jargon.