Well said, Robin.
My own experience is perhaps too unrepresentative to be useful, being stuck here at the arse-end of the world with only three or four >H types visible in the whole continent. But I have found that long phone discussions with a friend, Russell Blackford, help both of us to clarify relevant ideas. In the last couple of years, partly as a result of such discussions, both he and I have placed informal papers in such places as the Australian cultural/current affairs journal *Quadrant* (Russell had a piece on the likely impact of drastic technological innovation, which drew to some extent on my book THE SPIKE; I've just placed a 5000 word piece on the ill effects of holism as a research method, and hope to see a lump of my forthcoming life-extension book in the national newspaper's monthly upmarket Review of Books). The response has been non-existent, as far as I can tell (apart from the inevitable crusty letters muttered Bah Humbug). And neither of us has yet produced a paper on any of these topics suitable for submission to a peer-reviewed scholarly journal. I do think that will be the way to go, however.
Damien Broderick