One thought that occurs to me re: why this discussion tends to fail, and why Less Wrong has trouble getting things done in general, is the forum structure. On lots of forums, contributing to a thread will cause the thread to be “bumped”, which gives it additional visibility. This means if a topic is one that many people are interested in, you can have a sustained discussion that does not need to continually be restarted from scratch. Which creates the possibility of planning out and executing a project. (I imagine the linear structure of an old school forum thread is also better for building up knowledge, because you can assume that the person reading your post has already read all the previous posts in the thread.)
A downside of the “bump” mechanic is that controversial threads which attract a lot of comments will receive more attention than they deserve. So perhaps an explicit “sticky” mechanic is better. (Has anyone ever seen a forum where users could vote on what posts to “sticky”?)
There has been lots of discussion of this. This is probably at least the tenth thread on why/how to fix LW.
http://lesswrong.com/lw/kbc/meta_the_decline_of_discussion_now_with_charts/
http://lesswrong.com/r/discussion/lw/nf2/lesswrong_potential_changes/
http://lesswrong.com/lw/n0l/lesswrong_20/
http://lesswrong.com/lw/n9b/upcoming_lw_changes/
https://wiki.lesswrong.com/index.php?title=Less_Wrong_2016_strategy_proposal
http://lesswrong.com/lw/nkw/2016_lesswrong_diaspora_survey_results/
http://lesswrong.com/lw/mbd/lesswrong_effective_altruism_forum_and_slate_star/
http://lesswrong.com/lw/mcv/effectively_less_altruistically_wrong_codex/
http://lesswrong.com/lw/m7g/open_thread_may_18_may_24_2015/cdfe
http://lesswrong.com/lw/kzf/should_people_be_writing_more_or_fewer_lw_posts/
http://lesswrong.com/lw/not/revitalizing_less_wrong_seems_like_a_lost_purpose/
http://lesswrong.com/lw/np2/revitalising_less_wrong_is_not_a_lost_purpose/
http://lesswrong.com/lw/o7b/downvotes_temporarily_disabled/
http://lesswrong.com/lw/oho/thoughts_on_operation_make_less_wrong_the_single/
(These are just the ones I recall, and they don’t include all the posts Eugene generated or the discussion in Slack.)
One thought that occurs to me re: why this discussion tends to fail, and why Less Wrong has trouble getting things done in general, is the forum structure. On lots of forums, contributing to a thread will cause the thread to be “bumped”, which gives it additional visibility. This means if a topic is one that many people are interested in, you can have a sustained discussion that does not need to continually be restarted from scratch. Which creates the possibility of planning out and executing a project. (I imagine the linear structure of an old school forum thread is also better for building up knowledge, because you can assume that the person reading your post has already read all the previous posts in the thread.)
A downside of the “bump” mechanic is that controversial threads which attract a lot of comments will receive more attention than they deserve. So perhaps an explicit “sticky” mechanic is better. (Has anyone ever seen a forum where users could vote on what posts to “sticky”?)