The sense I've gotten from people who want to have discussions on LW about particular topics is that they don't want to go to, e.g. a dentistry forum, because the level of discourse there is much lower than on LW. I can't say that I have ever posted on a dentistry forum, but I suspect that if I start talking about resources being fungible and discussing the value of information in dollars, the first response I'd get is someone asking what the hell I'm talking about.
It seems like there are a couple of different models we can go with. We can either have less wrong be a forum for learning rationality, and then have people practice rationality somewhere else, or we can do both here. The second option sounds better to me. At Austin LW meetups, we spend far more time in our discussions applying rationality than we do talking about rationality itself. People talk about personal projects, puzzles, questions that they've been thinking about, things that they're reading about, things they're working on, etc. When we actually discuss something in pure rationality, it tends to be because we are having trouble using rationality. I do like this arrangement. Yes, there needs to be places to discuss and learn pure rationality, but at least in the Austin group, all of us have a grip on the basics (the fact that one of our members has what is essentially a master's degree in the field helps a lot). But it does seem like it would be useful to have, somewhere, a place to practice rationality online.
And LW seems like a pretty reasonable choice.
(This is my view in the recent debate about posts giving a "rational" discussion of some random topic. It was originally at comment level but I've extended it and posted it in discussion because I want to know if and where people disagree with me, and for what reasons.)
I come to Less Wrong to learn about how to think and how to act effectively. I care about general algorithms that are useful for many problems, like "Hold off on proposing solutions" or "Habits are ingrained faster when you pay concious attention to your thoughts when you perform the action". These posts have very high value to me because they improve my effectiveness across a wide range of areas.
Another such technique is "Dissolving the question". Yvain's "Diseased thinking: dissolving questions about disease" is valuable as an exemplary performance of this technique. It adds to Eliezer's description of question-dissolving by giving a demonstration of its use on a real question. It's main value comes from this, anything I learnt about disease whilst reading it is just a bonus.
To quote badger in the recent thread "Rational Toothpaste: A Case Study"
But we don't need more than one or two such examples! Yvain's post about question-dissolving was the only such post I ever need to read.
Posts about toothpaste, house-buying, room-decoration, fashion, shaving or computer hardware only tell me about that particular thing. As good as many of them are they'll never be as useful as a post that teaches me a general method of thought applicable on many problems. And if I want to know about some particular topic I'll just look it up on Google, or go to a library.
It's not possible for LessWrong to give a rational treatment of every subject. There are just too many of them. Even if we did I wouldn't be able to carry all that info around in my head. That's why I need to learn general algorithms for producing rational decisions.
Even though badger makes it clear in the quote I gave that the post is supposed to about the algorithms used, the in the rest of the post almost all the discussion is on the object level (although the conclusion is good). That is, even though badger talks about which methods he's using and why, the focus is still on "What can these methods teach us about toothpaste?" and not "What can optimising toothpaste teach us about our methods?". I'd prefer it if posts tried to answer questions more like the latter. The comments exhibit the same phenomenon. Only one of the comments (kilobug's) is talking about the methods used. Most of the rest are actually talking about toothpaste.
So what I'm suggesting is that LessWrong posts (don't forget there's a whole internet to post things on) should focus on rationality. They can talk about other things too, but the question should always be "What can X teach us about rationality?" and not "What can rationality teach us about X?"