John Weaver, A Sadly Troubled History: The Meanings of Suicide in the Modern Age
Bibliographic record
Abstract
S tarting in the 19th century, social scientists and medical experts began a frenetic search for comparative and aggregate statistical information on suicide, each trying to prove that suicide was a proper subject of their own discipline.The credibility of their arguments, however, was undermined by political, ideological, institutional, and cultural biases that tainted data, and by lack of access to first hand, comprehensive, and uniform suicide datasets.John Weaver's work promises to overcome both of these problems.On the one hand, it strives to integrate sociological and medicopsychological insights, and on the other hand, it uncovers and uses two rare historical suicide datasets containing nearly seven thousand case files found in the coroners' inquest of New Zealand and Queensland, Australia, likely representing "the most complete and accessible sets of inquest records for any large areas in the world" (p.12).The data mainly covers the first half of the 20th century, including 4,220 cases for New Zealand 1900-1950, 2,402 for Queensland 1890-1940, and 255 for Brisbane 1942-1950.Using these two datasets, Weaver aims to transcend the long-standing schism between society and the psyche in order to arrive at an understanding of the "human condition" that combines insights from sociology and psychology.For this purpose he both calculates suicide rates among sub-populations and over time, and pores over the details emerging from testimonies and suicide notes for insight into "how people imagine their past, present, and future" (p.5).The book is organized in three parts, representing three "narrowing circles."Part one reviews 19th and 20th century European and American sociological and medical literature on suicide.Based on the practice identified there of dividing "background forces" from "proximate causes" of suicide, part two investigates intersections of social and life
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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 | 0.000 |
| 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 | 0.004 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| 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".