The Open Thread posted at the beginning of the month has gotten really, really big, so I've gone ahead and made another one. Post your new discussions here!
This thread is for the discussion of Less Wrong topics that have not appeared in recent posts. If a discussion gets unwieldy, celebrate by turning it into a top-level post.
I guess I should try harder to remember this, in the context of my rather discouraging recent foray into the Richard Dawkins Forums -- which, I admit, had me thinking twice about whether affiliation with "rational" causes was at all a useful indicator of actual receptivity to argument, and wondering whether there was much more point in visiting a place like that than a generic Internet forum. (My actual interlocutors were in fact probably hopeless, but maybe I could have done a favor to a few lurkers by not giving up so quickly.)
But, you know, it really is frustrating how little of the quality of a person (like Richard Dawkins, or, say, Paul Graham) or a cause (like increasing rationality, or improving science education) actually manages to rub off or trickle down onto the legions of Internet followers of said person or cause.
You understand this is more or less exactly the problem that Less Wrong was designed to solve.