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Record W1592352328 · doi:10.1086/648063

Drift and “Statistically Abstractive Explanation”

2009· article· en· W1592352328 on OpenAlexaff
Mohan Matthen

Bibliographic record

VenuePhilosophy of Science · 2009
Typearticle
Languageen
FieldArts and Humanities
TopicPhilosophy and History of Science
Canadian institutionsUniversity of Toronto
Fundersnot available
KeywordsIndeterminacy (philosophy)Artifact (error)EpistemologyPopulationPhilosophyComputer scienceSociologyArtificial intelligenceDemography

Abstract

fetched live from OpenAlex

A hitherto neglected form of explanation is explored, especially its role in population genetics. “Statistically abstractive explanation” (SA explanation) mandates the suppression of factors probabilistically relevant to an explanandum when these factors are extraneous to the theoretical project being pursued. When these factors are suppressed, the explanandum is rendered uncertain. But this uncertainty traces to the theoretically constrained character of SA explanation, not to any real indeterminacy. Random genetic drift is an artifact of such uncertainty, and it is therefore wrong to reify it as a cause of evolution or as a process in its own right.

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)0.007
metaresearch head score (Gemma)0.013
Version: metacan-v3-hybrid-931329e0061cValidation status: machine_predicted_unvalidated
Candidate categoriesScience and technology studies
Consensus categoriesnone
DomainCandidate signal: none · Consensus signal: none
Study designCandidate signal: Theoretical or conceptual · Consensus signal: Theoretical or conceptual
GenreCandidate signal: Empirical · Consensus signal: none
Teacher disagreement score0.998
Threshold uncertainty score0.039

Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)

CategoryCodexGemma
Metaresearch0.0070.013
Meta-epidemiology (narrow)0.0010.000
Meta-epidemiology (broad)0.0010.001
Bibliometrics0.0020.001
Science and technology studies0.0020.019
Scholarly communication0.0030.008
Open science0.0020.002
Research integrity0.0030.004
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 head0.038
GPT teacher head0.248
Teacher spread0.210 · 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
Domainnot available
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

Citations30
Published2009
Admission routes1
Has abstractyes

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