“For Credibility’s Sake Let’s Start with the Bad News”: A Pessimistic Pedagogy in the Age of Spectacle
Bibliographic record
Abstract
I am not sure if you have heard, but last year Apple released a new computer called the iPad. In the first thirty second television commercial, “What is iPad?” the narrator describes it as not just “thin” and “beautiful,” but “crazy powerful,” “a revolution,” and even “magical.” Apparently iPad can provide “more books than you could read in a lifetime.” Now philosophers of education are not exactly known for their technical savvy, and while I have no desire to make us even less popular than we currently are, I am willing to publicly admit that I do not want a “magical” and “crazy powerful” computer that holds more books than I could ever possibly read. Since the ad first aired last March Apple has removed it from its website since they subsequently released two more iPad commercials. If you missed the original there is no cause for worry — you can watch it at your leisure while browsing more videos than you could ever see in a lifetime on YouTube.
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 distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
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.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
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".