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magfrump comments on Think Before You Speak (And Signal It) - Less Wrong
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This doesn't jive well with my intuition about conversations being good ways to shape new ideas. It's very common for conversation participants to state their ideas aloud without having even thought about them for 5 seconds. Maybe if we were all robots sending signals to each other using TCP/IP then it would be good for each individual robot to spend a certain amount of processing power on an idea and ensure basic soundness before sending it to other robots in the network, but humans can't flip on excitement like a switch. Excitement is valuable, and conversations about exciting topics are a good way to generate it artificially.
I think the main disagreement here seems to me to be that wei dai is talking about general conversations, which are far more often about social obligations than about idea generation. For example, business meetings.
Consider the recent episode of "The Office" where the new boss asks for ideas. Some people have ideas that are dismissed, but Daryl proposes a formal idea with a written schematic, and this allows him to get taken seriously.
Conversations are excellent ways to shape new ideas between a few people, but once you have entered that context you will usually have more information (i.e. about which ideas came up 5 seconds ago and which have been stewing for a while) and more shared motivation (i.e. find good ideas vs. get through the day)