I tolerate posts like [More ominous than a (marriage) strike], but LW would seem like a friendlier place (to me) and possibly even be more rational if articles about gender issues would take utility for men and women equally seriously.
Well, since that post quotes liberally from a "manosphere" website, you'd be justified for assuming that it does take men's welfare more seriously than women's. But for what it's worth, it's mostly concerned with trying to predict men's strategically reasonable response to a change in institutions, and determining the resulting equilibrium. Whether you value men's and women's welfare equally doesn't much affect how bad the projected outcome is.
I keep getting an impression that the point is that people don't have enough inhibitions against killing for the greater good ...
Why? A standard result in the trolley-problem literature is that folks deviate from utilitarian ethics in a way that's suggestive of just such a moral injunction. People on LW are different, in that they tend to be highly committed to utilitarianism. But we already knew that - the way trolley problems are discussed here is just more evidence of this fact.
A long blog post explains why the author, a feminist, is not comfortable with the rationalist community despite thinking it is "super cool and interesting". It's directed specifically at Yvain, but it's probably general enough to be of some interest here.
http://apophemi.wordpress.com/2014/01/04/why-im-not-on-the-rationalist-masterlist/
I'm not sure if I can summarize this fairly but the main thrust seems to be that we are overly willing to entertain offensive/taboo/hurtful ideas and this drives off many types of people. Here's a quote:
The author perceives a link between LW type open discourse and danger to minority groups. I'm not sure whether that's true or not. Take race. Many LWers are willing to entertain ideas about the existence and possible importance of average group differences in psychological traits. So, maybe LWers are racists. But they're racists who continually obsess over optimizing their philanthropic contributions to African charities. So, maybe not racists in a dangerous way?
An overly rosy view, perhaps, and I don't want to deny the reality of the blogger's experience. Clearly, the person is intelligent and attracted to some aspects of LW discourse while turned off by other aspects.