Most healthy intellectual blogs/forums participate in conversations among larger communities of blogs and forums. Rather than just "preaching to a choir" of readers, such blogs often quote and respond to posts on other blogs. Such responses sometimes support, and sometimes criticize, but either way can contribute to a healthy conversation.
If folks at Less Wrong saw themselves as a part of a larger community of rationalists, they would realize that most rationalist authors and readers are not at Less Wrong. To participate in a healthy conversation among the wider community of rationalists, they would often respond to posts at other sites, and expect other sites to respond often to them. In contrast, an insular group defined by something other than its rationality would be internally focused, rarely participating in such larger conversations.
Today at Overcoming Bias I respond to a post by Eliezer here at Less Wrong. Though I post occasionally here at Less Wrong, I will continue to post primarily at Overcoming Bias. I consider myself part of a larger rationalist community, and will continue to riff off relevant posts here and elsewhere. I hope you will continue to see me as a part of your relevant world.
I worry a little that Less Wrong karma score incentives may encourage an inward focus, since karma is so far only scored for internal site activity.
The question of youth seems easy, and I would expect LW readers to skew young. LW is heavily focused on a form of self-improvement that requires serious investment of effort and willingness to challenge preconceived notions. Youth is on average more open to new experience, is often engaged in deep questioning of their worldview already, has lots of time available, and is more likely to have the discipline required for intellectual reading/learning, since they're probably doing it at school/university already anyway. Most people do not like learning, and apart from learning related to their jobs, have no interest in continuing to learn after their formal education ends.
Not tackling the question of LW WM-ness for now, but this has been discussed before over at OB. I'd be curious if there's a significant difference between the proportion of WMs among LW readers and the proportion of WMs among the obvious feeder disciplines though...
I wonder whether this means that we're missing out on a lot of potential expertise though. (I'm thinking particularly of academics here, so discipline, interest etc. are assured.)
On the other hand, there's a chance that the youth skew is partially a function of the facebook side of the facebook/LW intersection...