Dale McGowan writes:
And it needs to go well beyond one greeter. EVERY MEMBER of EVERY GROUP should make it a point to chat up new folks—and each other, for that matter. And not just about the latest debunky book. Ask where he’s from, what she does for a living, whether he follows the Mets or the Yankees. You know, mammal talk.
In this spirit, I propose the creation of a fully off-topic discussion thread.
Here is our monthly place to discuss topics entirely unrelated to Less Wrong that (of course) have not appeared in recent posts.
ETA: There are two behaviors I would love to see associated with this thread. First of all, discussions often drift off-topic in the middle of a thread. In these cases "let's take this to the off-topic thread" would be an excellent response. Secondly, given who's doing the discussing, I could easily see, say, a discussion about recent developments in some webcomic blossoming into a LW-worthy insight, in which case someone could spawn a new thread.
I have the same problem with finding it much harder to concentrate while reading an actual book as opposed to forum posts etc. I used to have a huge attention span for books of any sort when I was younger, so I wonder if being used to the short content you tend to find on the internet is the issue.
My trick is to go somewhere away from my house to read. Weather permitting, I walk to a park bench about 10 minutes from where I live. It makes it much easier to focus when I know I can't check my email or reddit almost instantly. Although it is annoying when I want to, say, look up the definition of a word.
I use Google SMS for that. Just text 'em with "define [word]" and you've got a dictionary at your fingertips.