But we are a community that faces a choice about what values we want: insularity and strong group membership, or openness and intellectualism. This seems fairly analogous to me, and after all don't we need strong new ideas to stop the AI apocalypse or improve lives all over the world? Perhaps the Amish vs. liberal German judaism would be a better analogy.
Epistemic status: probably BS This could be a causal explanation for why engineers are seen as having poor social skills and the usefullness of ASD traits in engineering. If you aren't sensitive to the productive conversations being bad socially, and so don't disrupt them, you will learn more.
As for salons the fact that a hostess lead the conversation and selected the guests meant that the conversation had to be interesting to her. Those who didn't have anything interesting to say, or disrupted interesting conversations, wouldn't be invited back. Sadly wikipedia doesn't say much about how they were run. They seem to also have selected books to read, which would steer the conversation towards those books.
Temporarily: their allies turned on them and Athens soon rebuilt its navy. Ultimately Alexander and Rome ended the whole struggle permanently.