Nightmares of Eminent Biographers [review of Ray Monk, <i>Bertrand Russell</i>, [Vol. 2:] <i>1921-70: the Ghost of Madness</i>]
Bibliographic record
Abstract
T his second volume of biography of Russell completes Monk's largely revisionist account of Russell's life, covering his last fifty years, from 1921 to .1970.That the research and writing of the project as a whole occupied Monk for over ten years is hardly surprising.Russell's vast written output, longevity, huge number of contacts, roller-coaster love-life and considerable philosophical and political activities, to note just some aspects ofhis life, naturally present the biographer with a daunting task.Previous biographers such as Ronald Clarki and Caroline Moorehead/ despite their often engaging styles, tended to bypass the more difficult aspects of Russell's character and to avoid discussion of the technicalities ofhis philosophy.These were not hagiographic in tone, but in general approving of Russell the man.Yet Clark in particular is scathing about some of Russell's (fleetingly held) views on women and race, for instance, and readily draws attention to some of the philosopher's more absurd statements.Monk tackles the more troublesome and contrary side of his subject head on, exposing it in way that makes Clark and Moorehead's complaints rather slight.The real problem for any critic and reader of Monk's work is to assess the accuracy of his damming portrait of Russell, as it has become in this second volume.The second half of Russell's life is bound to seem less enthralling than the first in a numb.er of respects.Instead of life at Cambridge, overwhelming first love, the monumental effort of the colossal Principia Mathematica (1910-13), the intellectual wrestling with Wittgenstein, the bold resistance to the Great War, 1 The Life ofBertrand Russell (London:
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot 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.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.003 | 0.013 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.006 | 0.007 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.004 | 0.003 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.007 | 0.006 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.003 | 0.006 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.023 | 0.017 |
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 source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), 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".