Why "operationalizable questions"?

Why are we seeking these pivotal questions to be 'operationalizable'?

1. This is in line with our own focus on this type of research,^[The Unjournal focuses on evaluating (mainly empirical) research that clearly poses and answers specific impactful questions, rather than research that seeks to define a question, survey a broad landscape of other research, open routes to further inquiry, etc. However, we have evaluated some broader work where it seemed particularly high impact, original, and substantive. E.g., we’ve evaluated work in ‘applied economic theory’ such as Aghion et al. on the impact of artificial intelligence on economic growth, and applied methodology, e.g., "Replicability & Generalisability: A Guide to CEA discounts"].

2. I think this will help us focus on fully-baked questions, where the answer is likely to provide actual value to the target organization and others (and avoid the old ‘42’ trap).

3. It offers potential for benchmarking and validation (e.g., using prediction markets), specific routes to measure our impact (updated beliefs, updated decisions), and informing the 'claim identification (and assessment)' we’re asking from evaluators (see footnote above).

However, as this initiative progresses we may allow a wider range of questions, e.g., more open-ended, multi-outcome, non-empirical (perhaps ‘normative), and best-practice questions.