Agreed.

One person at the Paris meetup made the really interesting and AFAICT accurate observation that the more prominent a Less Wrong post was, the less likely it was to be high quality - ie comments are better than Discussion posts are better than Main (with several obvious and honorable exceptions).

I think maybe it has to do with the knowledge that anything displayed prominently is going to have a bunch of really really smart people swarming all over it and critiquing it and making sure you get very embarrassed if any of it is wrong. People avoid posting things they're not sure about, and so the things that get main-ed tend to be restatements of things that create pleasant feelings in everyone reading them without rocking any conceivable boat, and the sort of overly meta- topics you're talking about lend themselves to those restatements - for example "We should all be more willing to try new things!" or "Let's try to be more alert for biases in our everyday life!"

Potential cures include greater willingness to upvote posts that are interesting but non-perfect, greater willingness to express small disagreements in "IAWYC but" form, and greater willingness to downvote posts that are applause lights or don't present non-obvious new material. I'm starting to do this, but hitting that downvote button when there's nothing objectively false or stupid about a post is hard.