It's funny, I am totally sympathetic to everything you wrote here, yet all I can think is, "my daily life is chock full of people incapable of grappling with trolley problems or discussing torture concretely, why are you trying to make LessWrong more like real life?"
This encourages me to think more about just what I was proposing....
A lot of what I was trying to do was demonstrate that I think the writer of the original link has a point. This is not quite the same thing as a call for action, even though I'd be happier without the trolley problems.
Another angle I was taking was that LW is theoretically open-minded, but is actually much more hospitable to some sorts of radical low-empathy ideas than others.
What I think is more feasible than changing LW (which is not to say very feasible) would be an empathy-tilted ratio...
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.