Any opinions on where Goertzel's stuff stands in relation to whatever there is that passes for state of the art in AGI research?
Depends on how you dereference "AGI research". The term was invented by Goertzel et al to describe what OpenCog is, so at least from that standpoint it is very relevant. Stepping back, among people who actually bother to make the AI/AGI distinction, OpenCog is definately one giant influential project in this relatively small field. It's not a monoculture community though, and there are other influential AGI projects with very different designs. But OpenCog is cerntainly a heavy-weight contender.
Of course there is also the groups which don't make the AI/AGI distinction, such as most of the machine learning & perception crowds, and Kurzweil et al. These people think they can achieve general intelligence through layering narrow AI techniques or direct emulation, and probably think very little of integrative methods pursued by Goertzel.
And is it even worth trying to have this conversation on LW?
Can you elaborate? I'm not sure I understand the question. Why wouldn't this be a great place to discuss AGI?
Why wouldn't this be a great place to discuss AGI?
Because LW has been around for 5 or so years, and I've remember seeing very little nuts and bolts AI discussion at the level of, say, Starglider's AI Mini-FAQ happen here, very few discussion about deep technical details of something like IBM's recent AI work, whatever goes on at DeepMind and things like that. Of course there are going to be trade secrets involved, but beyond pretty much just AIXI, I don't even see much ambient awareness about whatever publicly known technical methods there are that the ...
Ben Goertzel has made available a pre-print copy of his book Engineering General Intelligence (Vol1, Vol2). The first volume is basically the OpenCog organization's roadmap to AGI, and the second volume a 700 page overview of the design.