But it sure is damning that they feel that way, and that I can’t exactly tell them that they’re wrong.
You could have, though. You could have shown them the many highly-upvoted personal accounts from former Leverage staff and other Leverage-adjacent people. You could have pointed out that there aren’t any positive personal Leverage accounts, any at all, that were downvoted on net. 0 and 1 are not probabilities, but the evidence here is extremely one-sided: the LW zeitgeist approves of positive personal accounts about Leverage. It won’t ostracize you for posting them.
But my guess is that this fear isn’t about Less Wrong the forum at all, it’s about their and your real-world social scene. If that’s true then it makes a lot more sense for them to be worried (or so I infer, I don’t live in California). But it makes a lot less to bring to bring it up here, in a discussion about changing LW culture: getting rid of the posts and posters you disapprove of won’t make them go away in real life. Talking about it here, as though it were an argument in any direction at all about LW standards, is just a non sequitur.
I use this technique sometimes (my lead-in phrase is the deliberately silly “Among my people...”), but it has a couple of flaws that force me to be careful with it.
Most importantly, this framing is always about drawing contrasts: you’re describing ways that your culture _differs_ from that of the person you’re talking to. Keep this point in the forefront of your mind every time you use this method: you are describing _their_ culture, not just yours. When you say, “In my culture, we put peanut butter on bread”, then you are also saying “in your culture, you do not put peanut butter on bread”. At the very most you are asking a question: “does your culture also put peanut butter on bread?” So, do not ever say something like “In my culture we do not punish the innocent” unless you also intend to say “Your culture punishes the innocent”—that is, unless you intend to start a fight.
Relatedly, you have to explicitly do the work of separating real cultural practices from aspirational ones—this framing will not help you. When you write “In my culture we do not punish the innocent”, probably you are thinking something like “In my culture, we think it’s important not to punish the innocent”, since mistakes do still happen from time to time. But statements like “In my culture we put peanut butter on bread” do not require this kind of aggressive interpretation, they can just be taken literally, so your listeners might reasonably take “In my culture we do not punish the innocent” as a (false) statement of literal fact. Clear and open communication is unlikely to follow.
(If you feel like you grasp these points and agree with them, here’s an exercise: can the section of the OP that starts “In my culture, we distinguish between what a situation looks like and what it actually is.” be productively rewritten, and if so how?)
Overall, although I do like this technique and use it from time to time, I don’t think it’s well-suited to important topics. For similar reasons it’s easy to use in bad faith. That’s why I present it in such a silly and sociological (instead of formally diplomatic) way.