Why should the location of discussion affect its value?

Because the anonymity of the internet causes discussions to derail in aggressive posturing as many social restraints are absent. Also because much communication is non verbal. Also because the internet presents a low barrier for entry into the conversation.

Mostly, a communication has value separate from where it is posted (although the message is not independent from the messenger, e.g. with the advent of the internet scholarly articles often influence their field while being read by relevant people in the editing stages by peers and go unread in their final draft form) but all else equal, knowing where a conversation is taking place helps one guess at its value. So you are mostly right.

Recently, I heard a novel anti-singularity argument. That "...we have never witnessed a greater intelligence, therefore we have no evidence that one’s existence is possible.". Not that intelligence isn't very useful (a common but weak argument), but that one can't extrapolate beyond the smartest human ever and believe it likely that a slightly greater level of intelligence is possible. Talk about low barriers to entry into the conversation! This community is fortunately good at policing itself.

Now if only I could find an example of unnecessary status manoevering ;-).

I'm still intrigued by how the original post might be relevant for FAI in a way that I'm not seeing.

I didn't quite understand what you said you were seeing, but I'll try to describe the relevance.

The normal case is people talk about moral philosophy with a fairly relaxed emotional tone, from the point of view "it would be nice if people did such-and-such, they usually don't, nobody's listening to us, and therefore this conversation doesn't matter much". If you're thinking of making an FAI, the emotional tone is different because the point of view is "we're going to implement this, and we have to get it right because if it's wrong the AI will go nuts and we're all going to DIE!!!" But then you try to sound nice and calm anyway because accurately reflecting the underlying emotions doesn't help, not to mention being low-status.

I think most talk about morality on this website is from the more tense point of view above. Otherwise, I wouldn't bother with it, and I think many of the other people here wouldn't either. A minority might think it's an armchair philosophy sort of thing.

The problem with these discussions is that you have to know the design of the FAI is correct, so that design has to be as simple as possible. If we come up with some detailed understanding of human morality and program it into the FAI, that's no good -- we'll never know it's right. So IMO you need to delegate the work of forming a model of what people want to the FAI and focus on how to get the FAI to correctly build that model, which is simpler.

However, if lukeprog has some simple insight, it might be useful in this context. I'm expectantly waiting for his next post on this issue.