I wonder if a good pre-reading strategy is to search for, or ask experts about, the major controversies and challenges/issues related to the topic in question.
Your first step would be to try and understand what those controversies are, and the differences in philosophy or empirical evaluation that generate them. After you’ve understood what’s controversial and why, you’ll probably be in a better position to interpret anything you read on the subject.
One way you could potentially further your work on epistemic evaluation is to find or create a taxonomy of sources of epistemic uncertainty. Examples might include:
Controversy (some questions have voluminous evidence, but it’s either conflicting, or else various factions disagree on how to interpret or synthesize it).
Lack of scholarship (some questions may have little evidence or only a handful of experts, so you have limited eyes on the problem)
Lack of academic freedom (some questions may be so politicized that it’s difficult or impossible for scholars to follow the evidence to its natural conclusion)
Lack of reliable methods (some questions may be very difficult to answer via empirical or logical methods, so that the quality of the evidence is inevitably weak).
You can find papers addressing many of these issues with the right Google Scholar search. For example, searching for “controversies economic inequality” turns up a paper titled “Controversies about the Rise of American Inequality: A Survey.” And searching for “methodological issues creativity” turns up “Methodological Issues in Measuring Creativity: A Systematic Literature Review.”
My guess is that even just a few hours spent working on these meta-issues might pay big dividends in interpreting object-level answers to the research question.
This sure seems like it should work. My experience is that there’s either nothing, or whatever quality analyses exist are drowned out by pap reviews (it is possible I should tolerate reading more pap reviews in order to find the gems). However I think you’re right that for issues that have an academic presence, google scholar will return good results.
It seems like some questions might seem heavily researched, but are in fact either so hazy that no amount of research will produce clarity, or so huge that even a lot of research is nowhere near enough.
An example of the latter might be “what caused the fall of Rome?”
Ideally, you’d want numerous scholars working on each hypothesis, modeling the complex causal graph, specializing in various levels of detail.
In reality, it sounds like there are some hypotheses that are advanced by just one or a handful of scholars. Without enough eyes on every aspect of the problem, it’s no surprise that you’d have to become an expert to really evaluate the quality of the arguments on each side.
I wonder if a good pre-reading strategy is to search for, or ask experts about, the major controversies and challenges/issues related to the topic in question.
Your first step would be to try and understand what those controversies are, and the differences in philosophy or empirical evaluation that generate them. After you’ve understood what’s controversial and why, you’ll probably be in a better position to interpret anything you read on the subject.
One way you could potentially further your work on epistemic evaluation is to find or create a taxonomy of sources of epistemic uncertainty. Examples might include:
Controversy (some questions have voluminous evidence, but it’s either conflicting, or else various factions disagree on how to interpret or synthesize it).
Lack of scholarship (some questions may have little evidence or only a handful of experts, so you have limited eyes on the problem)
Lack of academic freedom (some questions may be so politicized that it’s difficult or impossible for scholars to follow the evidence to its natural conclusion)
Lack of reliable methods (some questions may be very difficult to answer via empirical or logical methods, so that the quality of the evidence is inevitably weak).
You can find papers addressing many of these issues with the right Google Scholar search. For example, searching for “controversies economic inequality” turns up a paper titled “Controversies about the Rise of American Inequality: A Survey.” And searching for “methodological issues creativity” turns up “Methodological Issues in Measuring Creativity: A Systematic Literature Review.”
My guess is that even just a few hours spent working on these meta-issues might pay big dividends in interpreting object-level answers to the research question.
This sure seems like it should work. My experience is that there’s either nothing, or whatever quality analyses exist are drowned out by pap reviews (it is possible I should tolerate reading more pap reviews in order to find the gems). However I think you’re right that for issues that have an academic presence, google scholar will return good results.
It seems like some questions might seem heavily researched, but are in fact either so hazy that no amount of research will produce clarity, or so huge that even a lot of research is nowhere near enough.
An example of the latter might be “what caused the fall of Rome?”
Ideally, you’d want numerous scholars working on each hypothesis, modeling the complex causal graph, specializing in various levels of detail.
In reality, it sounds like there are some hypotheses that are advanced by just one or a handful of scholars. Without enough eyes on every aspect of the problem, it’s no surprise that you’d have to become an expert to really evaluate the quality of the arguments on each side.