Why is Less Wrong against humor?

Err... It's not. I have seen a few comments where people have lamented the fact that their most upvoted (by far) comment ever was a light-hearted joke, rather than one with some deep insight or otherwise useful contribution.

As much respect as I have for Eliezer (which is a lot), people tend to get all emotionally attached to the "hero" of their community/movement, and suddenly it becomes not ok to joke about the authorities or otherwise hint anything negative about them at all. Doesn't go well with your whole "we're not a cult" thing.

I didn't downvote, but I don't think people were necessarily downvoting because the names mildly insulted Eliezer. I'm guessing that just didn't think they were very good names for an organisation attempting to improve the rationality of humanity. (e.g. the second one relates to AI far more than rationality.)

Not sure about LW in general, but I don't want to see humor on LW unless maybe if it's exceptionally good. Humor seems to be toxic to thoughtful discussion. It's not about Eliezer as a high value target, I feel the same way about humor aimed at anyone or anything else. A quote from Paul Graham discussing the deterioration of Reddit, among other things:

The most dangerous form of stupid comment is not the long but mistaken argument, but the dumb joke. Long but mistaken arguments are actually quite rare. There is a strong correlation between comment quality and length; if you wanted to compare the quality of comments on community sites, average length would be a good predictor. Probably the cause is human nature rather than anything specific to comment threads. Probably it's simply that stupidity more often takes the form of having few ideas than wrong ones.

Whatever the cause, stupid comments tend to be short. And since it's hard to write a short comment that's distinguished for the amount of information it conveys, people try to distinguish them instead by being funny. The most tempting format for stupid comments is the supposedly witty put-down, probably because put-downs are the easiest form of humor. So one advantage of forbidding meanness is that it also cuts down on these.

Bad comments are like kudzu: they take over rapidly. Comments have much more effect on new comments than submissions have on new submissions. If someone submits a lame article, the other submissions don't all become lame. But if someone posts a stupid comment on a thread, that sets the tone for the region around it. People reply to dumb jokes with dumb jokes.

Dude, don't accuse Ben & Jerry's of being a cult because they were brainstorming ice cream flavor names and you were chided for suggesting a sexual-sounding one.

Why is Less Wrong against humor?

Are you possibly generalizing from one example/committing a fundamental attribution error?

Doesn't go well with your whole "we're not a cult" thing. Just saying.

I'm a non-native English speaker. Can you explain to me what's the intended connotations for the sentence "just saying" here? Is someone supposed to be less offended by the potentially offensive previous statement?

Eliezer asked for help, not humour. The signal to noise ratio on this site has been deteriorating with the increased number of users (and consequently replies!). The marginal value of an additional joke compared to additional real content has been falling pretty rapidly.

Edit: I don't mean to imply the average quality of contributors has declined, but merely the sheer increase in volume has reduced the marginal value of certain kinds of comments.