> Can someone recommend places to read or be involved in non partisan discussion about these topics?

The ethereum developers mailing list or something, I'd expect? I agree with your sentiment, I find the cutoff is "programming crypto stuff" vs "not doing that".

Actually I find the same is true of AI, if you don't know how to train a classifier or what a vector space is, your comment about AI is probably dumb.

Everyone's got opinions I guess, I just find builders have more varied, interesting things to say.