This is a great use for a volunteer network. Those with university access can get on a university PC and have access to JSTOR and so on and just download every single paper that matches certain key terms and email the PDFs to whoever is working on the project. You still need someone who knows the fields, and which keywords to look up, and you need someone to read all the papers and understand them and synthesize them and judge which papers are the most important, but many of these little steps can be done by anybody who knows how to use a search engine.
Part of the research for my friendly AI people was to simply download every single paper that exists on about 10 different keywords, skim-read them all, make a list of all the ones that mattered, and then read those ones in more detail.
It’s not that researchers just “know” all this stuff already when they write a paper. It’s systematic hard work.
Could this work be more distributed? Could different people read the papers related to different concepts and contribute to the presentation that concept within a paper?
On that part, I’m skeptical. Being able to think like a mainstream philosopher about concepts and write (and plan the writing) in that style is a very particular skill that almost nobody is trained in, just like almost nobody is trained in deontic logic or Presidential speechwriting.
This is a great use for a volunteer network. Those with university access can get on a university PC and have access to JSTOR and so on and just download every single paper that matches certain key terms and email the PDFs to whoever is working on the project. You still need someone who knows the fields, and which keywords to look up, and you need someone to read all the papers and understand them and synthesize them and judge which papers are the most important, but many of these little steps can be done by anybody who knows how to use a search engine.
Part of the research for my friendly AI people was to simply download every single paper that exists on about 10 different keywords, skim-read them all, make a list of all the ones that mattered, and then read those ones in more detail.
It’s not that researchers just “know” all this stuff already when they write a paper. It’s systematic hard work.
Could this work be more distributed? Could different people read the papers related to different concepts and contribute to the presentation that concept within a paper?
On that part, I’m skeptical. Being able to think like a mainstream philosopher about concepts and write (and plan the writing) in that style is a very particular skill that almost nobody is trained in, just like almost nobody is trained in deontic logic or Presidential speechwriting.