I guess another factor is that I have the expectation that if someone is really interested in this stuff (i.e., have a "burning need to know"), they would already have figured out which problems are not solved as opposed to which problems they just don't know the solution to, because they would have tried every available method to find existing solutions to these problems.
Discussing things that are already known can help in understanding them better. Also, the "burning need to know" occasionally needs to be ignited, or directed. I don't study decision theory because I like studying decision theory in particular, even though it's true that I always had a tendency to obsessively study something.
But decision theory ought to be a natural attractor for anyone with intellectual interests (any intellectual question -> how am I supposed to answer questions like that? -> epistemology -> Bayesianism -> nature of probability -> decision theory). What's stopping people from getting to the end of this path? Or am I just a freak in my tendency to "go meta"?
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.)