In my inaugural editorial, I stated that the strength and the value of the AJIDD legacy is perhaps most notable in its continuity; the continuity provides a transparent and, at times, unsubtle as well as uncomfortable look at our past that helps point toward the future by relying on the cumulative nature of scientific activity and those engaged in it. In this sense, my primary goal and that of our editorial team are to be good scientific stewards. At the core of our mission is the discovery of generalizable knowledge about the condition of intellectual disability including its correlates and consequences. I have framed many of the challenges as ‘technical’—broadly and specifically in regard to conceptual and analytical issues including measurement of independent and dependent variables, of moderators and mediators, of bio-psycho-social processes, etc., but there remain another class of challenges I characterize as “collective action.”
Collective action problems are...