You might find this exchange a useful pair of data points. Then again you might not.

For my own part, when I ask myself whether I want to see more discussions like this on LW, or fewer, I get a muddled answer... basically, I don't find the discussion itself terribly valuable, but I have a vague intuition that it represents a missed shot at a valuable target, and I'm not quite willing to write the target off.

So I haven't yet voted either way.