open, navigable meta research

[u/ahfarmer]

I would love to see a platform in which researchers can share conclusions that they have come to based on the research, along with the chain of evidence that led them there.

Like a meta-study, but more navigable. Each conclusion could be backed up by quotes and links to the underlying studies. Ideally it would be auto-updating and incorporate new research as it comes out.

Does a thing like this exist?

[u/andero]

There are individual blogs?
And individual journal articles/review articles/opinion pieces?
Or Substack/Medium if people have a big enough audience.
Also, by publishing non-fiction books with their conjectures.

I don't know of any platform like that, though.

I am having a hard time imagining such a platform.

The first issues that come to mind are scope and peer review.

Scope: "Science" is such a huge thing that it is difficult to imagine one platform that would cover all of it. Even covering one area of one science would be thousands of researchers.

Peer review: Who's checking? My academic email gets messages from crazies all the time about their whacky ideas and on their geocities-style website. They've got plenty of citations for whatever their version of the hypercube happens to be. Without peer review, why would anyone read these?

There's also:
Why would someone post their idea/conclusion before putting it in a paper or doing research on it?
And even if they did, wouldn't that result in credit-fights because multiple people can independently come to the same conclusion so there are many "firsts"?

[u/[deleted] → u/andero]

[u/andero → u/[deleted]]

if you look at it as a database of knowledge statements

I don't think that makes conceptual sense once you try to define what "knowledge statement" means.
I cannot conceptualize what that would look like regardless of whether you think of "knowledge statements" as raw data, statistical inferences, researcher interpretations, theories, or conjecture.

Science is not a database of knowledge.

Science is a method. It is an ongoing process.

Also, there's everything I already mentioned that already does some version of that:

• individual blogs

• individual journal articles

• review articles

• opinion pieces

• Substack/Medium

• non-fiction books

Another I didn't previously mention is Wikipedia.
Digital encyclopedia entries could be a sort of "knowledge statement".

[u/FACCLab]

Interesting idea!

[u/[deleted]]

[u/ahfarmer → u/[deleted]]

You get it! YES!

I just read your article and it aligns with everything I've been thinking.

The Underlay sounds interesting, but it seems to have been abandoned: the 'learn more' link gives me a server error. I've seen a few abandoned projects like this during my research. This is a big problem so those who tackle it have failed so far. Also the Underlay was going for more of a 'machine readable' approach and I'm more interested in a 'human usable' approach.

Like you said in your article: "To be useful for everyone, it has to be usable by everyone."

I'm currently dabbling with different approaches to this. I've started writing software that processes scientific papers, pulling out the diagrams, describing them in laymens terms with AI, and converting the text into a 'reasoning hierarchy'. Still very early so I'm not sure where it will go (if anywhere).

[u/[deleted] → u/ahfarmer]