My thoughts are similar to yours although I’m more willing to tolerate posts that you call “almost painfully anti-rational” (while still wishing Said was around to push back hard on them). I think in the early stages of genuine intellectual progress, it may be hard to distinguish real progress from “bullshit”. I would say that people (e.g. authors of such posts) are overly confident about their own favorite ideas, rather than that the posts are clearly bullshit and should not have appeared. My sense is that it would be a bad idea to get rid of such overconfidence completely because intellectual progress is a public good and it would be harder to motivate people to work on some approach if they weren’t irrationally optimistic about it, but equally bad or worse if there was little harsh or sustained criticism to make clear that at least some people think there are serious problems with their ideas.
My thoughts are similar to yours although I’m more willing to tolerate posts that you call “almost painfully anti-rational” (while still wishing Said was around to push back hard on them). I think in the early stages of genuine intellectual progress, it may be hard to distinguish real progress from “bullshit”. I would say that people (e.g. authors of such posts) are overly confident about their own favorite ideas, rather than that the posts are clearly bullshit and should not have appeared. My sense is that it would be a bad idea to get rid of such overconfidence completely because intellectual progress is a public good and it would be harder to motivate people to work on some approach if they weren’t irrationally optimistic about it, but equally bad or worse if there was little harsh or sustained criticism to make clear that at least some people think there are serious problems with their ideas.