Bibliographic record
Abstract
Who (still) believes in myths?"Nobody" is a simple answer that comforts our scientific age; "everybody" a more nagging one that can (and should?) still puzzle us.But why should anybody have once believed, or continue to believe, in myths?This is the question almost no one even dares ask -not even Manuel Peña.His book American Mythologies: Semiological Sketches draws us into the deconstruction of those myths that nobody deeply believes in, but that everybody seems nevertheless to cling to -that is, before being informed of how we can criticize their semiological formation by associating them with their ideological reification.Of course, with the aid of Roland Barthes' semiological theory of myth, relayed through a Marxist view of ideology, we can quickly be assured of a solution to the problem: myths are what the dominant class uses to perpetuate its rules in order to reign supreme over the dominated classes.This kind of naïve stance appears to be at the bottom of Peña's argument.Although his analysis of some myths that circulate in US society proves informative about their genealogies, and to be funny at a distance about their hermeneutic resistance and resilience, it hardly reveals anything we did not already know about their existence as myths.In eleven short chapters that analytically tackle one myth each, we are led through the false representations of "corrupted union bosses," "Wal-Mart's associates," the "rags to riches" litany, "Egypt in Las Vegas" and others.These amount to personal portraits the semiologist draws of (arguably false) representations that apparently seem to dupe everyone else in US society (and abroad).True enough, one could argue about the inaccuracy of the representation of the Alamo, particularly regarding the current rhetoric of chauvinistic nationalism that degrades the Mexican version of the story, and especially considering the fact that the proclamation of the Texas' independence preceding the war would deprive Mexico of about one-half of its territory.But isn't it common sense (or am I being too generous here?) to look at such rhetoric with slight skepticism, and without replicating the crass ignorance that one would need to believe the "mythified" version as it appears at tourist sites like the shrine
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 | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.004 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 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".