I agree it's more related than a randomly selected Nate post would be

It is indeed more related than a randomly selected post would be. The relevant part is not because of the subject matter (as you solely talk about during this comment thread), but because of the nature of the evidence it uses to make its case.

The vast majority^[1] of the original post, along with subsequent comments, uses Nate Soares's personal experience meeting with congressional staffers, elected officials, cold-emailing famous and notorious people to get endorsements for his book, etc, as evidence of how his strategy works out in practice/can succeed for his purposes.

If the post was along the lines of "I, Nate Soares, talked to this expert on PR and this is what he recommended for how AI Safety should handle public communication" or "I, Nate Soares, analyzed these papers and came to this conclusion" or "I, Nate Soares, believe for technical alignment reasons that [X is true]", then talking about his supposed personal abrasiveness or how he turned off other people would be off-topic and arguably ad hominem.

But if the post is mostly Nate Soares describing his own conversations where he employed this strategy, suppressing descriptions of other conversations of his where he employed these strategies but his interlocutors were turned off/thought he was manipulative/thought he was so abrasive they got scared of him/etc. is entirely inappropriate. He himself has opened the door to this topic by bringing it up in the first place! Allowing the same body of evidence to be used, but only when arguing for one side, is incompatible with principles of truth-seeking.

If people think otherwise they should say so

LessWrong seems to hold local validity in arguing as a core principle, or so I think. The process by which you argue for a conclusion is worth discussing, not just the conclusion itself.

1. ^{^}

   but not the entirety