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Yup, I couldn't have said it more eloquently. My biggest issue with pursuing this is I have next to no breadth of knowledge in the medical or medical research

Yup, I couldn't have said it more eloquently. My biggest issue with pursuing this is I have next to no breadth of knowledge in the medical or medical research fields. It would be hard for me to understand what would help doctors and research labs to share and distribute information, other than being more filterable and searchable than a facebook group.

Reelin 7y ago
tl;dr Kicking out the non-experts won't solve the current problems and is likely to introduce new ones. It's a tooling issue, not a platform one. This is a difficult problem. In trying to reduce the noise by choosing who gets to speak, you immediately encounter a number of issues related to gatekeeping. Moreover, filtering by source doesn't directly address what I see as the underlying problem of presenting relevant information to the user. Competent and aggressive moderation seems to work fairly well for setting a standard of discourse without excluding anyone (HN is a good example here) but it's time consuming. And it doesn't do much of anything to address the problem of filtering for relevant information. I think conversations themselves (ie actual back-and-forth with meaningful input from all sides) ultimately just don't scale well beyond a small group. Topic specific mailing lists seem to be the least-worst solution to date, and a Facebook group or subreddit is essentially the same thing implemented using a proprietary platform. It seems like we still lack the models and tooling to address these problems on a fundamental level. Plenty of academic research exists surrounding knowledge graphs, ontologies, and relationships, but in practice all the mainstream tooling that "just works" is restricted to hierarchical folders (and tags if you're lucky). Zotero is very much a least-worst reference management solution in my opinion (I detailed my thoughts in an HN comment sometime within the past year if you're curious). On the literature front we have things like Arxiv Sanity Preserver and Semantic Scholar, but we're still proverbially drowning in new publications. Tools like Memex (https://github.com/WorldBrain/Memex https://github.com/WorldBrain/Memex) and Contextualise (https://github.com/brettkromkamp/contextualise https://github.com/brettkromkamp/contextualise) look promising, but aren't (yet?) a complete solution.

Reelin 7y ago

tl;dr Kicking out the non-experts won't solve the current problems and is likely to introduce new ones. It's a tooling issue, not a platform one. This is a difficult problem. In trying to reduce the noise by choosing who gets to speak, you immediately encounter a number of issues related to gatekeeping. Moreover, filtering by source doesn't directly address what I see as the underlying problem of presenting relevant information to the user. Competent and aggressive moderation seems to work fairly well for setting a standard of discourse without excluding anyone (HN is a good example here) but it's time consuming. And it doesn't do much of anything to address the problem of filtering for relevant information. I think conversations themselves (ie actual back-and-forth with meaningful input from all sides) ultimately just don't scale well beyond a small group. Topic specific mailing lists seem to be the least-worst solution to date, and a Facebook group or subreddit is essentially the same thing implemented using a proprietary platform. It seems like we still lack the models and tooling to address these problems on a fundamental level. Plenty of academic research exists surrounding knowledge graphs, ontologies, and relationships, but in practice all the mainstream tooling that "just works" is restricted to hierarchical folders (and tags if you're lucky). Zotero is very much a least-worst reference management solution in my opinion (I detailed my thoughts in an HN comment sometime within the past year if you're curious). On the literature front we have things like Arxiv Sanity Preserver and Semantic Scholar, but we're still proverbially drowning in new publications. Tools like Memex (https://github.com/WorldBrain/Memex https://github.com/WorldBrain/Memex) and Contextualise (https://github.com/brettkromkamp/contextualise https://github.com/brettkromkamp/contextualise) look promising, but aren't (yet?) a complete solution.