I just wrote an EV application, hoping for some quick cash to bring @realKIRAC to Second Order San Salvador. For "what is one mainstream or "consensus" view that you absolutely agree with?" I wrote: If Hanania and Scott Alexander have shown the internet why the media is honest and good, I think academia—to an extent massively underrated by my internet right peers—is as well. The Philip Tetlock critique is important indeed, but, as Caplan wrote in 2005: “What Tetlock really shows is that experts are overconfident if you exclude the questions where they have reached a solid consensus.” No one paper may be that good, but teeming academic literatures are never that bad. And much of the social sciences has been pretty resilient to the replication crisis. Henderson’s First Law of Econometrics is pretty strong. Contemporary Western ways of knowing (the paper, the meta-analysis, and the meta-analysis of meta-analyses etc) may not be perfect, but they’re a pretty obvious improvement over anything else ever devised, ever.