Reply To: CT Constructive Criticism

[Juan E. Sandoval]

I'd like to encourage this thread to continue, as an open commentary of anything. I find it very valuable. And it's not my place to represent myself or CT in this thread, but I just wanted to comment on one thing... that may require my personal clarification.
The model is very open to collaborative authorship, research and development. But nobody so far has come forward in that department with the time investment required to make such advances-- nor do I blame anyone for that, of course. As ladynerd alluded to, this sort of work is painstaking and arduous. It's not always fun to crunch numbers and make data tables. And from an ethical perspective I feel it's wrong to condone pay-less assistance anyhow.
Usually research is profit-less unless it is funded on the order of thousands or millions. And although CT isn't a professional research lab, its current R&D challenges at this stage are also not at the laymen level. It's somewhere beyond laymen but not quite academic. In the beginning, years ago, CT was in a more dynamic brainstorming phase where new ideas could be pitches by anyone and it made an immediate difference. Now, new ideas or write-ups require prospective contributors to put together dozens of videos, and present some objective argument as a counterbalance to existing understandings -- just as it does for myself.
Since this is beyond the scope of most member's time-investment, the contributions made by this community are almost always in the form of feedback on existing material, rather than the creation of their own. I've made many open calls for anyone to write a better Se profile, for instance, that could better fit the database samples, but none was made. I've solicited help on GIF creation and identification, for refining the vultology, but efforts quickly die out. Again, I'd expect nothing else and mean no ingratitude whatsoever. But I think this is part of the situation CT is currently in, rather than there being an active effort to exclude members from altering the orthodoxy.
--solutions?
But I'm also a problem solver, and I'm quite aware of the dangers of systemic decay if the situation remains this way, as a one-man project. Even surrounded by a team of brilliant people, humans barely manage to not fool themselves, and I'm no exception. And CT will be able to progress into a new phase of development when it can support a few people's full-time dedication, including those with expertise in the appropriate academic domains.
The next-step solution I've found is to come up with a financially feasible way for R&D to be supported for a team, so a wider group of contributors can add meaningfully and rigorously to the model without doing so absent of compensation. The nearly-ready practitioner program is my publicly-funded way of attaining that. The path I see towards that aim is to standardize a vultological practice and teach it fully to 3-5 people who can then earn an income from offering reading services. Once these 3-5 people and I are on the same page about the existing methodology, all further edits or updates to the methodology itself (and the model) would be done by all of us together rather than by me.
But this path of funding would also require:

• A publicly maintained presence (youtube) that can increase awareness/drive traffic.
• A product that is "complete enough" and useful enough to people, to be worth it for them right now.

This product would be the profiler writeups which, if this works, ought to automatically output tailor-made profiles, directly from the codifier inputs, that are compelling in their accuracy and which can be appreciated by most recipients for their truth-value, even if someone has little or no awareness of the methodology-- which (as has been noted) has a steep learning curve.
I realize this product would not be rigorously supported by evidence, but maybe it would act as a "proof-of-concept" and help drive R&D for a future in which profiles can more appropriately be auto-written directly out of raw data science. For now the profiler would be written from my own consolidation of the inputs of members from this community and the several hundred database samples. This is essentially a business model, like many others, where an imperfect product is used to fund R&D for a better next-gen product.
(I'm afraid I can't correct all the valid criticisms in this thread, many of which I'm aware of but some of which are also new and illuminating, without first building an imperfect engine to drive CT towards better perfection. One thing Je development has taught me is to do things badly at first, rather than not at all. ;p)