I could add some groundless speculation, but my general advice would be: Ask, don’t guess!
You probably won’t get answers like “I wanted to publish a paper.”. But I’d bet, it would be very enlightening regardless. It’d be surprising if all of them were so extremely busy that you can’t approach anybody in the area. But don’t settle for PhD students, go for senior professors.
Please go ahead and add your groundless speculation. (I just added a couple more of my own to the post.) I’m actually more interested in the set of plausible explanations, than the actual explanations. A possible explanation for an error can perhaps teach us something, even if it wasn’t the one responsible for it in this world.
For example, “The authors were trying to solve one particular case of time inconsistency.” suggests that maybe we shouldn’t try to solve ethical dilemmas one at a time, but accumulate as many of them as we can without proposing any solutions, and then see if there is a single solution to all of them.
I’m actually more interested in the set of plausible explanations, than the actual explanations. A possible explanation for an error can perhaps teach us something, even if it wasn’t the one responsible for it in this world.
I don’t really expect you to find explanations, but you could get insights which would help you to interpret their works in the right context.
I had the experience several times that I could move from fuzzy to definite feelings over topics, just by talking to the right people.
I could add some groundless speculation, but my general advice would be: Ask, don’t guess!
You probably won’t get answers like “I wanted to publish a paper.”. But I’d bet, it would be very enlightening regardless. It’d be surprising if all of them were so extremely busy that you can’t approach anybody in the area. But don’t settle for PhD students, go for senior professors.
Please go ahead and add your groundless speculation. (I just added a couple more of my own to the post.) I’m actually more interested in the set of plausible explanations, than the actual explanations. A possible explanation for an error can perhaps teach us something, even if it wasn’t the one responsible for it in this world.
For example, “The authors were trying to solve one particular case of time inconsistency.” suggests that maybe we shouldn’t try to solve ethical dilemmas one at a time, but accumulate as many of them as we can without proposing any solutions, and then see if there is a single solution to all of them.
I don’t really expect you to find explanations, but you could get insights which would help you to interpret their works in the right context.
I had the experience several times that I could move from fuzzy to definite feelings over topics, just by talking to the right people.
I strongly endorse this proposal.