Given the similarities, why are there so many different organizations? How is an outsider >supposed to know what makes each of them unique?
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What makes these different from each other?
You are not the first person to ask questions like this. And I feel like I often hear people trying to make databases of researchers and orgs or give overviews of the field etc. etc. But the situation you describe just seems...normal, to me. As in, most industries and areas, even pretty niche things will have many different organizations with slightly different outlooks and no central way to navigate them and learn about them. And most research fields in academia are like this; there isn’t a great way to get to know everyone in the field, where they work, what they work on etc, it just takes years of talking to people, reading things, meeting them at conferences etc. and you just slowly build up the picture .
I don’t think it’s silly or bad to ask what you’re asking, that’s not what I’m saying/I may well be wrong anyway, but to my mind the situation seems like it wouldn’t necessarily have a good ‘explanation’ that someone can just hand to you, and the usual way to find out the sorts of things you want to find out would be to just continue immersing yourself in the field (from what I hear from most people who start figuring out this field, ~15 hours is not very long).
You are not the first person to ask questions like this. And I feel like I often hear people trying to make databases of researchers and orgs or give overviews of the field etc. etc. But the situation you describe just seems...normal, to me. As in, most industries and areas, even pretty niche things will have many different organizations with slightly different outlooks and no central way to navigate them and learn about them. And most research fields in academia are like this; there isn’t a great way to get to know everyone in the field, where they work, what they work on etc, it just takes years of talking to people, reading things, meeting them at conferences etc. and you just slowly build up the picture .
I don’t think it’s silly or bad to ask what you’re asking, that’s not what I’m saying/I may well be wrong anyway, but to my mind the situation seems like it wouldn’t necessarily have a good ‘explanation’ that someone can just hand to you, and the usual way to find out the sorts of things you want to find out would be to just continue immersing yourself in the field (from what I hear from most people who start figuring out this field, ~15 hours is not very long).