I always ask “Is there anyone brave enough to get boiling hot water poured in their hand?” There is always someone. The shock is universal, each time newly boiled water is poured into a tense hand:

“It is cold!?”

Yes,

Then it's not boiling hot water, it's boiling cold water.

Also, this sort of thing is not clever. Even if you leave out the word "hot", it amounts to "ha ha, you thought I was talking about a central example". People are justified in thinking you are talking about a central example.

"The purpose of a system is what it does" doesn't mean that motivations don't exist. It does mean that motivations are often illegible. If people behave as if they think suffering is important, and they say things that are roughly along those lines, looking for a smoking gun where someone actually goes on record as saying that in a precise way isn't going to be very useful.

If you are not Scott, remember "the purpose of a system is what it does". Someone may not say outright "I want you to feel pain", yet may still treat people's pain as very unimportant when implementing policy.

You need to distinguish between errors that are of no significance and errors that are significant. Although Bob's words were not literally true, the error is not relevant to the proposition for which the statement was used as evidence. (That's what a nitpick means: caring about an error that is not relevant to the associated proposition.)

It's true that people in some obscure small town may not be aware of online stereotypes, but the stereotype isn't the cause of the problem, it's the result. People already notice that wearing a suit or fedora is weird behavior, and they already understand the signal sent out by it. If they see many occurrences of the same weird behavior, they will notice the trend and put a label on it, but the label is not the cause of their disdain.

you will find that the men generally know very little about clothing and will wear what looks good to them

Knowing little isn't the same as knowing nothing. Suits and fedoras are things that even people who don't know much know enough not to wear inappropriately.

teased ... means full acceptance and not just toleration

I think you are off base here.

It means "you've spent some of your weirdness points, but not so many as to end the friendship".

What if the authors weren’t a subset of the community at all? What if they’d never heard of LessWrong, somehow?

Wouldn't that not change it very much, because the community signal-boosting a claim from outside the community still fits the pattern?

People subconsciously assess others' appearance without consciously and explicitly pointing to particular traits. Just because they wouldn't look at someone and say "long-shinned freak" doesn't mean the long shins wouldn't reduce their perceived attractiveness anyway. They'd look at the person and have a hunch that something is a little weird without being able to pin it down.

And all this comes at a time when more and more research is confirming that black soldier flies feel pain just like larger and more charismatic animals.

I thought a couple of posts ago you were arguing that even with a small chance that insects are sentient we have to save them. Now suddenly your small chance has grown to 100%?