I've been less engaged with the old topics for the last several months while trying to figure out an updateful way of thinking about decision problems (understand the role of observations, as opposed to reducing them to non-observations as UDT does; and construct an ADT-like explicit toy model). This didn't produce communicable intermediate results (the best I could manage was this post, for which quite possibly nobody understood the motivation). Just a few days ago, I think I figured out the way of formalizing this stuff (which is awfully trivial, but might provide a bit of methodological guidance to future research).
In short, progress is difficult and slow where we don't have a sufficient number of tools which would suggest actionable open problems that we could assign to metaphorical grad students. This also sucks out all motivation for most people who could be working on these topics, since there is little expectation of success and little understanding of what such success would look like. Even I actually work while expecting to most likely not produce anything particularly useful in the long run (there's only a limited chance for limited success), but I'm a relatively strange creature. Academia additionally motivates people by rewarding the activity of building in known ways on existing knowledge without producing a lot of benefit, but producing visible, and possibly of high quality, if mostly useless results that gradually build up to systematic improvements.
Just a few days ago, I think I figured out the way of formalizing this stuff
Uhh, so why don't I know about it? Could you send an email to me or to the list?
More and more, LessWrong's posts are meta-rationality posts, about how to be rational, how to avoid akrasia, in general, without any specific application. This is probably the intended purpose of the site. But they're starting to bore me.
What drew me to LessWrong is that it's a place where I can put rationality into practice, discussing specific questions of philosophy, value, and possible futures, with the goal of finding a good path through the Singularity. Many of these topics have no other place where rational discussion of them is possible, online or off. Such applied topics have almost all moved to Discussion now, and may be declining in frequency.
This isn't entirely new. Applied discussions have always suffered bad karma on LW (statistically; please do not respond with anecdotal data). I thought this was because people downvote a post if they find anything in it that they disagree with. But perhaps a lot of people would rather talk about rationality than use it.
Does anyone else have this perception? Or am I just becoming a LW old geezer?
At the same time, LW is taking off in terms of meetups and number of posts. Is it finding its true self? Does the discussion of rationality techniques have a larger market than debates over Sleeping Beauty (I'm even beginning to miss those!) Is the old concern with values, artificial intelligence, and the Singularity something for LW to grow out of?
(ADDED: Some rationality posts are good. I am also a lukeprog fan.)