For some reason, I find it difficult to reason about these problems, and have never acquired a facility of easily seeing them all the way through, so it's hard work for me to follow these discussions. I expect I was not making an error in understanding the problem the way it was intended, and figuring out the details of your way of parsing the problem was not a priority.
why did you never get back to our discussion there as you promised?
It feels emotionally difficult to terminate a technical discussion (where all participants invested nontrivial effort), while postponing it for a short time can be necessary, in which case there is an impulse to signal to others the lack of intention to actually stop the discussion, to signal the temporary nature of the present pause (but then, motivation to continue evaporates or gets revoked on reflection). I'll try to keep in mind that making promises for continuing the discussion is a bad, no good way of communicating this (it happened recently again in a discussion with David Gerard about merits of wiki-managing policies; I edited out the promise in a few hours).
At this point, if you feel that you have a useful piece of knowledge which our discussion failed to communicate, I can only offer you a suggestion to write up your position as a (more self-contained) discussion post.
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.)