MétaCan
Menu
Back to cohort

Many‐models medicine: diversity as the best medicine

2012· article· en· W1497055250 on OpenAlexaff
Robin Nunn

Bibliographic record

VenueJournal of Evaluation in Clinical Practice · 2012
Typearticle
Languageen
FieldArts and Humanities
TopicPhilosophy and History of Science
Canadian institutionsUniversity of VictoriaUniversity of Toronto
Fundersnot available
KeywordsBiomedicineImperfectComputer scienceDiversity (politics)UnificationManagement scienceData scienceEpistemologyMedicineArtificial intelligenceBioinformaticsBiologyEngineeringPolitical scienceLaw

Abstract

fetched live from OpenAlex

Many medicines have been proposed to cure various ills of biomedicine including evidence-based medicine, evolutionary medicine, narrative medicine, and complexity medicine, among others. To the extent that all models are idealizations or abstractions, all of these model medicines are imperfect in some respects. In the absence of a single unified model, if indeed unification is possible or even desirable, and despite the relative advantages of one model or another, in practice many models and methods are necessary in medicine. In this article, I consider the value of such diversity in models and methods. I briefly describe several models. Then I discuss simulations of agents who use diverse models. Advocates of models such as those discussed here typically claim that we should use their preferred model because it is the best. Evidence-based medicine, for instance, has been promoted as the single best model of medicine while other models have been cast as lesser models or in opposition to it and each other. But isolated models and methods may never be as good as groups of models and methods. Debates about various individual models may result in better outcomes, but explicitly choosing to use many models is likely to produce even better outcomes.

Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.

How this classification was reachedexpand

Full frame machine prediction

Teacher imitation

Not calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.

metaresearch head score (Codex)0.031
metaresearch head score (Gemma)0.045
Version: metacan-v3-hybrid-931329e0061cValidation status: machine_predicted_unvalidated
Candidate categoriesMetaresearch
Consensus categoriesnone
DomainCandidate signal: Methods · Consensus signal: none
Study designCandidate signal: Theoretical or conceptual · Consensus signal: Theoretical or conceptual
GenreCandidate signal: Empirical · Consensus signal: none
Teacher disagreement score0.969
Threshold uncertainty score0.163

Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)

CategoryCodexGemma
Metaresearch0.0310.045
Meta-epidemiology (narrow)0.0020.001
Meta-epidemiology (broad)0.0020.001
Bibliometrics0.0030.002
Science and technology studies0.0040.025
Scholarly communication0.0120.017
Open science0.0040.009
Research integrity0.0060.011
Insufficient payload (model declined to judge)0.0060.001

Machine scores (provisional)

The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.

Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.

Opus teacher head0.456
GPT teacher head0.487
Teacher spread0.031 · how far apart the two teachers sit on this one work
Validation statusscore_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it

Classification

machine, unvalidated

Machine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.

Study designTheoretical or conceptual
DomainMethods
GenreEmpirical

How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".

Quick stats

Citations8
Published2012
Admission routes1
Has abstractyes

Explore more

Same venueJournal of Evaluation in Clinical PracticeSame topicPhilosophy and History of ScienceFrench-language works237,207