An Unabashedly Non-Arm’s-Length Account of My Lifelong Affair with Philosophy
Why this work is in the frame
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
My life-long favourable disposition toward philosophy started very early, although unknowingly to me at the time. It sneaked up on me very gradually, perhaps starting as early as the age of nine and certainly by early adolescence. It was probably prompted by where I spent my childhood and teen years. I grew up on a family farm in southeastern Kansas, the kind of farm on which work was the default position for everyone, whatever your age. So, by nine, I was deemed old enough to graduate from garden work with my mother to "going to the field" on a tractor by myself for many hours at a time. By early adolescence this meant full days of 12 to 14 hours. Due to childhood asthma, my assigned task for most of the summer was cultivating the corn and beans with an old Case tractor. This required sitting on an iron seat with no back, trying to "man"-handle a tractor with no power steering and bad brakes, and doing so with unwavering concentration to avoid moving more than two inches to the right or left and thus plowing up the tiny plants I was supposed to be nurturing. Now, part of the point of noting these details is to emphasize that this was an inherently lonely way to spend much of my early life. I was forced by necessity to be my own company for these long hours. But the main point here is what can be done with that company. Another detail thus needs to be added: all of this went on at the often break-neck speed of one mile an hour. So it must be said that this work was also inherently boring. Daydreaming was one way of dealing with this boredom, but at that age and on a Kansas farm, the content of this itself can be equally boring. I soon discovered that active thinking was much less boring-and much less likely to result in the fence at the end of the row suffering serious injury because a tractor had failed to turn soon enough. Thus, if philosophy involves focused thought, and, in particular, thinking about thinking, I suspect it was cultivated into my bones at a very early age.
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.
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 | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 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 it