The key difference, I think, is that people who read posts on LessWrong ask whether they're "true" or "false", while the writers who read my posts on writing want to write.

Whereas on LessWrong a more typical response would be, "Aha, I've found a case for which your step 7 fails! GOTCHA!"

This is a failure mode of LW that's disenchanted me with the community for several years.

I think the core of it is that almost nobody on LW has anything to protect, which is what you're basically pointing out here. The people on your blog want to get better at writing. LWers want to get social validation from the LW community, and a great way to do that is to shit on anyone they can to eke out a little more status.

I think a lot of the problem has to do with karma. It's easy to upvote GOTCHA comments because it feels like the truth-valuing thing to do and most of the time the comments are verifiable. But GOTCHA comments are the imgur links of LW. They provide a bite-size amount of feel-good content that's ultimately useless.

I think less wrong would benefit from having its own /r/circlejerk, because sometimes the only way to notice these sorts of things is to magnify them to the point of absurdity.