Introducing sleepingbeautyproblem.org

Research can be quite laborious, especially if you’re not intimately familiar with the field. In order to see what has been said about a subject, you must track down and read as many papers as you can find. To do it comprehensively, you will inevitably read many irrelevant papers. In actuality, the difficulties in doing this mean that many papers never get read, and their contributions are largely forgotten or reintroduced at a later time.

Abstract summaries of work in a field, such as that provide by the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, can be quite helpful to get a start. But while they provide a new researcher with the lay of the land, they only cover topics at a fairly abstract level.  They don’t aim to provide a comprehensive guide to work on the subject.

There is a reason why this is so.  Encyclopedia entries have a history as printed books, and entries in printed books are constrained by space and to a linear presentation. One of the great things about Wikipedia is that it helps remove both of these constraints. A Wikipedia article may provide links to other articles that elaborate on ideas in the present article, so that the reader may get as much details as he or she wants. And Wikipedia contains vastly more information than the average encyclopedia.

Contemporary scholarship has gotten a huge boost from internet resources. I never had to do serious research without the help of Google scholar. That, together with Philpapers, has been immensely helpful. The internet can provide resources that make research much easier. One resource which is not presently available, but which would be immensely useful, would be a comprehensive database of brief summaries of the contributions made by academic papers on a given issue, organized in a way that makes it easy to see the main trends of research and how each paper fits in with those trends.

To this end, I have created a Wikipedia-style resource for the Sleeping Beauty problem at sleepingbeautyproblem.org. The aim of this project is provide a short summary of every paper written on the subject as an experiment in what such a resource might provide.

For the Sleeping Beauty problem, this is rather manageable, as there are a relatively small number of papers. Even still, it’s a high enough number that it is worthwhile to have such a resource. I suspect that many researchers in the area are familiar with the general trends, but few have read every last paper on the subject.