© Lloyd

Etherpad Discussion 11/8/15

IDEA METHOD

[Here's] the "I have an idea" method. So you announce that you have an idea on something that you want to discuss. You fire up an Etherpad session for it, and you start explaining your idea, identifying what it's about, and why you think that it's a good idea.

Then, people can join in, asking questions, contributing supporting material, citing contrary arguments, etc. The advantage to using something like Etherpad is that material can be inserted precisely where it is relevant, instead of new material always going at the end, which fragments the logic, and forces people to read everything before understanding anything, which is usually too much for most people. So you never fully grasp the value of what is emerging. But if you can put new for/against material where it is relevant, people can follow the logic a lot easier. This is what we found with our Google Docs sessions — we could quickly get focused on the key issues, because of the dynamic editability.

Once the idea has been fleshed out in the initial Etherpad session, work can begin on formalizing the arguments, including the addition of citations, images, tables, etc. Once formalized, the idea becomes an article, that can be added to the relevant category in some sort of Encyclopedia, such as QDL. So the idea here is to start off with a tabula rasa for the idea exploration, and to do all of the formalizing after the fact.

I know images can't be posted here, so we could look for another Etherpad, or find another way to reference images, like links.

 

OBSERVATIONS FOLDERS

Actually, I asked you if you'd like to put Observations from your papers in Observations Folders. Are those ready or not hard to handle?

I agree with this. In general, I "try" to lay out the observations, and then I identify the mainstream explanation, and what's wrong with it, and then I get into my proposed explanation.

it isn't like all of the observations are in one big block at the beginning, that would be trivial to break out into their own section. But I'm considering the possibility that such a degree of formalization would be a good exercise, and it's definitely good scientific form.

Can you copy some Observations from one of your papers here?

I started trying to sort out the Observations, but it was a bit difficult.

I think that I'll probably have to restructure the article to support this.

I like the wording of your papers as they are, so I hope you don't lose the logical flow by separating out Observations.

 

SURVEY IDEA

Should I make up a questionnaire about odd theories that we agree or disagree with?

If you're talking about a QDL survey, one of the cool things is that users can add their own options.

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