More generally, if your leadership position depends on making and defending an <i>argument</i> that is based off of strong premises, and you seek to amass a lot of support for that argument, it seems the most effective pathway is to be very visible when making that argument, and rather private otherwise. This is just because if you are trying to maximize support among those that agree with your argument, you are going to attract people that disagree on other arguments. It requires focus. As soon as you, a leader, weigh in on another divisive argument that has nothing to do with your charter, it acts as a filter that can jeopardize large swaths of support.<p>I'm also a little fascinated, just generally, by the tendency for very smart people to make "good points for bad reasons" - strenuously quibbling with some premise that would make no relevant impact to the lemmas and conclusions constructed atop them. It's like an inability to grasp larger points.