Holding conversations in person is useful; feedback is quick, and it seems to be much easier to change your behavior as a result of actually talking with people.

Having effective goal-oriented conversations is somewhat difficult. One source of difficulty is a strong tendency to stray from useful talk into entertaining talk. A typical example is the tendency of many (otherwise potentially productive) conversations between rationalists simply wandering into an extended dialog about the nature of existential risk or some interesting philosophical problem, and then stagnating there (potentially treading interesting new intelligence-demonstrating terrain, but not in point of fact getting anything done or refining beliefs in a meaningful way).

If this is what all participants want out of the conversation, then it's great that we've found a community where people can get their kicks in this particular abstruse way. If this is what some but not all participants want out of the conversation, then perhaps the conversation should divide or conclude. But conversations seem to get derailed--either for significant lengths of time, or indefinitely--even when participants honestly want to get things done, and view conversations with other rationalists as instruments to serve their values.

In the interest of getting things done, I (and Nick Tarleton and Michael Curzi, with the tiniest bit of testing) suggest that the rationalist community try really hard to adopt the following norm: when someone else is talking, and the conversation would be significantly better served by them stopping, let them know. Either point out that the topic is nice to think about but unhelpful, that the topic should be considered later rather now, or whatever else the speaker seems to have failed to notice. To help make adoption a little easier, it might be help to choose one person in advance who will have some responsibility to arbitrate.

If a participant disagrees about the relevance of a remark, don't push it--our hope is that such a system could help people who have honestly wandered from the topic pursuing an interesting tangent or happy thought, not to resolve any actual dispute. If a participant doesn't want to adhere closely to any particular notion of usefulness--for example, if someone is having a conversation to simply enjoy themselves and unwind--then the conversing parties should resolve their misunderstanding, or if not possible simply stop talking to each other and save some time.

Have any LWers considered other lightweight measures to hold more useful conversations? There seems to be low-hanging fruit here, and there seems to be a lot to gain.