Good point! I also appreciate how a lot of your ideas are referenced to books. Assuming your right (I think I would have to know much more about AGI in order to evaluate the claim with any certainty), the next obvious question is, what's limiting progress? Are there not enough people making small discoveries (good reason to go into the field)? Are they not sharing their discoveries (don't know how you'd fix this one)? Is there not enough funding for them to do their work (good reason to stay out unless you plan on outcompeting everybody because you feel that's what you can do best to help)?
It's one thing to read about a subject, but one gains a deeper understanding by seeing it applied to real problems, and an even deeper understanding by applying it yourself. This applies in particular to the closely related subjects of rationality, cognitive biases, and decision theory. With this in mind, I'd like to propose that we create one or more discussion topics each devoted to discussing and analyzing one decision problem of one person, and see how all this theory we've been discussing can help. The person could be either a Less Wrong member or just an acquaintance of one of us.
I'll commit to actively participating myself. Does anyone want to put forth a problem to discuss?