Character and the Moral Self in Barack Obama’s Memoir, Dreams from My Father
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Barack Obama is the subject and his memoir is the content for this essay on character and the moral self. These last two themes are applied to the development of Barack Obama’s character traits of love and caring, temperance, courage, love of learning, justice, and spirituality. Each character trait is valued, practiced worldwide and praised in children and adults. This analysis answers a question that has eluded scholars and political pundits. How was it possible for Barack Obama to understand that whites would vote for him to become president of the United States? The answer is hidden in plain view in the development of his character and moral self. This essay provides insights into how his character prepared him to become President of the United States.A practical model of character development is an important aim of this essay. Character is habits of mind and body that persist over time. The development of the moral self is a frame for understanding the role of emotions and cognition in the cultivation of habits of mind. Understanding the character of Barack Obama is only partial vindication of a model of the development of character. A supremely talented Barack Obama makes any model look good. The test of the usefulness and validity of the model is that it provokes the reader to think about children, especially African-American children in all of their uniqueness and universality. A conversation that begins with the habits of love and caring, temperance, courage, love of learning, justice, and spirituality is a good beginning toward that end.
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 | 0.001 |
| 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".