In the "create new article", you can choose whether to publish the article to your unsaved drafts, to LessWrong, or to the discussion area.
Or it seems if you have clicked on the discussion link and the click on the create new article. You don't seem to have the option of creating a draft if you do it this way though.
After contributions from a number of us (by random example here, here) over a number of months, particularly User:wmoore and User:tommccabe (and all happening before User:Yvain's work here, so we missed those ideas) we have a discussion area.
Discussion, including discussion of the discussion area, is welcome.