This post does not talk about strength of preferences so this seems a bit off topic. Nevertheless I think this misses some important considerations. You say:

the probability that one would actually go ahead and vote in a race does correlate with the strength of one's preferences. So, perhaps, this is indeed working as intended.

This doesn't take into account voter suppression. Take for example Texas; from 2012 to 2018, 542 polling places were closed in counties with significant increases in African-American and Latino populations, while counties with fewer minority increases saw only 34 closures.
They also placed restrictions on absentee ballots and limits on drop-off locations. For example; Harris County, which had only one drop-off location for 2.4 million voters.
It's not so much the strength of preferences that determines who votes, as much as who is systematically discouraged from voting.

the best-researched article I know of on gender differences in chess

So I read this article and occasionally checked the sources and while it's not a bad article by any stretch, the scientific backing is not as strong as they imply. For example they write:

the sexes differ in their -preferences- for competition. As both Kasparov and Repková have intuited, men are simply -more competitive-

With the words "preferences" and "more competitive" being hyperlinks to their source. This implies (especially in the context) a "nature" explanation, but the source doesn't show that. And that's another thing, it's one study. Of course you can link to the same study twice, but it feels a bit icky to do so this close together about the same claim. A link to a study implies you have evidence for your claim, and if your claim has two links a couple words apart a reader will naturally assume you have two studies, which is a much stronger reason to believe someone. I think this is therefore a bit misleading.

I'm also missing some social explanations that an academic/leftwing article would surely have mentioned. Take for example "stereotype threat", the idea that stereotypes change how people perform. There is a semi-famous study about this in chess: https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/ejsp.440

The female players in the experiment were misled. They always played against men, but sometimes the researchers would say they were playing against women. When they believed they were playing against a woman their performance would improve even with the exact same opponent (e.g. they would play multiple games against the same man, and they would score better against him when they believed he was a woman). Performance was reduced by 50% when they believed the opponent was a man and they were reminded of the stereotype. To my academic/leftwing brain, this seems like a pretty glaring omission.

[crossposted from my comment on substack]

Hmmm, I don't know if that works. There have definitely been times were I (phenomenologically) felt inconsistent preferences at the same time, e.g. I simultaneously want to hang a painting there and not hang a painting there. I do get this a lot more with aesthetic preferences than with other preferences for some reason. I think the proposed solution that we're multiple agents is quite plausible, but it does have some problems, so that's why I proposed this solution as a possible alternative.

I tried a bit of a natural experiment to see if rationalists would be more negative towards an idea if it's called socialism vs if it's called it something else. I made two posts that are identical, except one calls it socialism right at the start, and one only reveals I was talking about socialism at the very end (perhaps it would've been better if I hadn't revealed it at all). The former I posted to LW, the latter I posted to the EA forum.

I expected that the comments on LW would be more negative, that I would get more downvotes and gave it a 50% chance the mods wouldn't even promote it to the frontpage on LW (but would on EA forum).

The comments were more negative on LW. I did get more downvotes, but I also got more upvotes and got more karma overall: (12 karma from 19 votes on EA and 27 karma from 39 votes on LW). Posts tend to get more karma on LW, but the difference is big enough that I consider my prediction to be wrong. Lastly, the LW mods did end up promoting it to the frontpage, but it took a very long time (maybe they had a debate about it).

Overall, while rationalists are more negative towards socialist ideas that are called socialist, they aren’t as negative as I expected and will update accordingly.