Scientific dialogue is generally carried out in form of scholarly papers and conferences, but people like Christopher Langan, "without academic credentials, despair of ever getting published in a scholarly journal."

The idea of applying halfbakery-like informal yet very critical, and quickly-responding crowd of intelligent people to read and criticize your intellectual work, would likely stimulate informal scientific communication among such intelligent people.

The categories would include a hierarchy of sciences. Participants would send-in their statements/conclusions (for others to criticize), with references to their elaboration (i.e., proofs, experiments, etc.) in the [link] section.
-- Inyuki, Apr 19 2012

I'm not sure that's a good idea. Halfbakers aren't renowned for their civility and decorum, you might observe.
-- UnaBubba, Apr 19 2012


umm... wasn't this the idea for the original internet?: connect up all the uni's, free flowing ideas, yadda yadda.

NNTP (newsgroups) are well suited to this sort of thing (as they are to many things, being a generic bbs/forum protocol)... could even do that here: at first glance the only obvious content loss would be buns'n'bones tallying (and about 99% of the visitors, who don't use ng's, and account/post control, and a bunch of other stuff that makes us happily smug).
-- FlyingToaster, Apr 19 2012


I foresee all submissions ranging from X-Ray crystallography to protein-folding enzymes all devolving (evolving?) to discussions about custard. This could be seen as a drawback by the overall scientific community.
-- AusCan531, Apr 19 2012


I just did a quick Google search. Looks like CosmoCoffee is close to what you're after.
-- xaviergisz, Apr 19 2012


um...<raises hand> I think I like this idea, but I need to look up ng's and account/post protocol first.
-- 2 fries shy of a happy meal, Apr 19 2012


I meant that the HB could run on NNTP (as can any forum type thing), but we'd lose fine control of posts and annos.
-- FlyingToaster, Apr 22 2012



random, halfbakery