How do you get on top of the literature associated with a controversial scientific topic? For many empirical issues, the science gives a conflicted picture. Like the role of sleep in memory consolidation, the effect of caffeine on cognitive function, or the best theory of a particular visual illusion. To form your own opinion, you’ll need to become familiar with many studies in the area.

You might start by reading the latest review article on the topic. Review articles provide descriptions of many relevant studies. Also, they usually provide a nice tidy story that seems to bring the literature all together into a common thread- that the author’s theory is correct! Because of this bias, a review article may not help you much to make an independent evaluation of the evidence. And the evidence usually isn’t all there. Review articles very rarely describe, or even cite, all the relevant studies. Unfortunately, if you’re just getting started, you can’t recognize which relevant studies the author didn’t cite.

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Hal Pashler and I have created, together with Chris Simon of the Scotney Group who did the actual programming, a tool that addresses these problems. It allows one to create systematic reviews of a topic, without having to write many thousands of words, and without having to weave all the studies together with a narrative unified by a single theory. You do it all in a tabular form called an ‘evidence chart’. Evidence charts are an old idea, closely related to the “analysis of competing hypotheses” technique. Our evidencechart.com website is fully functioning and free to all, but it’s in beta and we’d love any feedback.

More: alexholcombe.wordpress.com/2010/09/02/make-evidence-charts-not-review-papers/

Example: What is the role of sleep on hippocampus-dependent memory consolidation?

I thought this was an interesting idea. Do you think it would be possible and useful to create an evidence chart for risks from AI, existential risks in general and other topics on lesswrong?