I don't think it's implausible to believe that people pay more attention to those who have higher status than themselves, and less attention to those who have lower status.

Do I read it correctly as: "..therefore, to focus on the opinions of lower-status people, it is necessary to exclude the higher-status people from the debate (because otherwise people would by instinct turn their attention only to what the higher-status people said -- which is probably not a new information for anyone -- and ignore the rest of the debate)."?

I would agree with that. -- And by the way, in some situations an average woman is actually higher-status than an average man, so perhaps we should debate those situations by excluding the women's voice. Actually, if a "dating market" is an example of such situation, that would explain the necessity of PUA debates (as in: the debate about dating is culturally framed by women's terms, so we need a place where men are allowed to explain how they feel without automatically taking a status hit for doing so).

Perhaps the problem is at not making a difference between "hypothesis generating" and "hypothesis debating" parts of reasoning. Excluding higher status people from some hypothesis-generating discussions is good, because it allows people to hear the opinions they would otherwise not hear. But when those hypotheses are already generated, they shouldn't be accepted automatically. (There is a difference between "you oppress me by using your status to prevent me from speaking my hypothesis" and "you oppress me by providing an argument against my hypothesis".) In theory, a group of lower-status people doesn't have a monolithic opinion, so they could make the debate among themselves. But sometimes the dissenting subgroup can be accused of being not-low-status-enough. (As in: "this topic should be only discussed by women, because only women understand how women feel. oh, you are a woman and you still disagree with me? well, that's because you are a privileged white woman!")

As an unpolitical analogy, it makes sense to use some special rules for brainstorming, to help generate new ideas. But it does not mean that the ideas generated by these special rules should be protected by them forever. It makes sense to use brainstorming for generating ideas, and then to use experiments and peer review for testing them. -- So while it can be good to use brainstorming to generate an idea for a peer-reviewed journal... it would be silly to insist that the journal must accept the idea uncritically, because otherwise it ruins the spirit of brainstorming.

I don't think it's implausible to believe that people pay more attention to those who have higher status than themselves, and less attention to those who have lower status. Furthermore, I believe in the snafu principle (people don't give accurate information if they'll be punished for it*).

I would like to point out that Yvain's post that progressive like to site elsewhere in this thread makes the exact opposite argument.