Brain Physiology, Cognition and Consciousness group: topic
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Seeking consensus measuring methods info
Brent Allsop
Monday, 08 September 2008 03:37 UTC
We’re doing some research on ways of doing anything like attempting to rigorously measure consensus in any field of study. Especially controversial fields of study like the study of the mind.
Has anyone ever done any scholarly work on developing methods of any kind to measure or survey what everyone, or even ‘experts’ or ‘peers’ or whatever believes on controversial topics of research?
Since we’re very interested in doing such at http://canonizer.com, we’re wondering if anyone has ever attempted anything like this before.
We’ve been searching, but other than Imants Baruss’ work we haven’t found much of anything in this or any other field of study – controversial or not.
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Replies
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Dear Brent,
the answer depends on how broad or narrow you define the parameters of this question.
In am aware of social psychiatry in Germany, which is part of a controversial field: psychiatry. Basically there is a somatic camp, that values therapy with medication, there is a psychodynamic camp that values psychotherapy and the socialpsychiatric camp that values social therapy. These camps are mixed. Nevertheless some positions are not consensual. Debates about these matters have been led in a political, even ideological way.
A good example for how difficult this matter is: there has been a serious attempt to establish katamneses into the field. Katamneses are studies that follow clients over a long period of time in order to evaluate how successful interventions have been.
I am not aware of specific research, but those are topics where I would start looking.
Yours friendly
Hans -
Hans,
Thanks for this info.
What we’re really looking for are ways to work with huge groups of people, experts, peers, or whatever in any controversial field of study like you mentioned. Have there ever been any attempts to collaboratively find, produce, or develop ‘camps’ on where there is mostly consensus within such field?. Developing concise statements of what is agreed on, and so on. And for where there is less agreement, also developing ‘camps’, along with concise statements of what people in those camps believe. And most important, quantitative measures of how many, and who are in each camp?
Of course good experts in any field that spend 100% of their time reading the voluminous literature in such, get a general idea of what all the camps are, where there is consensus and where there is not, for what reasons, and so on. But at best such knowledge is not in any way rigorous or quantitative and could never include quantitative counts within large groups. And it is always biased by whatever beliefs the expert themselves hold. And worst of all, how can the rest of us have access to such information that only these experts have earned through much arduous effort.
Of course, all this is what we’re attempting at http://canonizer.com. We’re just very surprised that, given how important one would think such should be, it seems like nobody has ever tried to survey in any way or truly measure consensus in any kind of rigorous way for any field of study.
Brent
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Mind Experts topic to quantitatively determine experts
We’ve now started a ‘Mind Experts’ topic at http://canonizer.com where peers can rank each other relative to each other. A draft of a description of how it works is contained in the agreement statement of the topic:
http://canonizer.com/topic.asp/81/5
We’d love to here any comments or thoughts on whether this is the best way to do all this. Is this the best way to say it?…
Also, of course this “top 10” like list will only be valuable to the degree people contribute. So please, if you know of any experts that you truly respect in this field, let’s get them entered. And if you are an expert, let’s get everyone added and start rigorously and quantitatively measuring what everyone thinks of everyone else. Remember, it’s a wiki, so it doesn’t have to be perfect to start. Just take a small step in the right direction for you and or someone else. Lots of people doing small easy steps is all it takes. Don’t worry about breaking anything. You or anyone else can always fix it.
Once we get a start on some good data, we will be making a ‘canonizer’ that uses this quantitative data so we can get a rigorous quantification of consensus amongst ‘experts’ (as so defined) in this field. Of course this will not yet be perfect but hopefully it can become a step in the right direction. Once we get this going surely many more ways to do this kind of stuff in greatly improved ways will unfold before us.
After yourselves, who are the second and third… best ‘experts’ in this field? We desperately want to know this rigorously, concisely, and quantitatively.
Brent Allsop
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