I appreciate your feedback, and I agree that there’s room for improvement. I think ultimately the ideas need to come from the community rather than the Forum Team, and hopefully by putting more attention and intention around community building we can improve the rate of collective intellectual progress made on the Forum.
That said, I don’t necessarily think that new ideas is the right goal (though it depends on what one categorizes as “new”). For example, writing good summarizes of existing work (or doing things like meta-analyses) creates useful foundations for future work. Research like this may not be considered a “new idea” but builds on existing ideas and adds important data and nuance. Finding specific ways to practically implement ideas that have previously been floated is important and valuable progress.
There’s also the possibility that a enough low-hanging fruit ideas in this space have been brought up already and so it’s just by default harder for someone to come up with a new idea than it was in the past.
most people will only look at articles on subject matters that they are already familiar or on meta-level conversations
I agree that this is a thing to some extent, but I’m guessing I view this as less of a problem than you do (both that I think it’s not happening to an extreme extent [like I would guess that there are not that many people who have background knowledge on cluster headaches but this post got a fair amount of karma and comments], and that I think some of this is fine/good since people probably should spend relatively more time on posts which match their subject matter knowledge).
I appreciate your feedback, and I agree that there’s room for improvement. I think ultimately the ideas need to come from the community rather than the Forum Team, and hopefully by putting more attention and intention around community building we can improve the rate of collective intellectual progress made on the Forum.
That said, I don’t necessarily think that new ideas is the right goal (though it depends on what one categorizes as “new”). For example, writing good summarizes of existing work (or doing things like meta-analyses) creates useful foundations for future work. Research like this may not be considered a “new idea” but builds on existing ideas and adds important data and nuance. Finding specific ways to practically implement ideas that have previously been floated is important and valuable progress.
There’s also the possibility that a enough low-hanging fruit ideas in this space have been brought up already and so it’s just by default harder for someone to come up with a new idea than it was in the past.
I agree that this is a thing to some extent, but I’m guessing I view this as less of a problem than you do (both that I think it’s not happening to an extreme extent [like I would guess that there are not that many people who have background knowledge on cluster headaches but this post got a fair amount of karma and comments], and that I think some of this is fine/good since people probably should spend relatively more time on posts which match their subject matter knowledge).