MétaCan
Menu
Back to cohort
Record W2941199353 · doi:10.1111/phc3.12587

Collective harm and the inefficacy problem

2019· article· en· W2941199353 on OpenAlexafffund
Julia Nefsky

Bibliographic record

VenuePhilosophy Compass · 2019
Typearticle
Languageen
FieldArts and Humanities
TopicWar, Ethics, and Justification
Canadian institutionsUniversity of Toronto
FundersSocial Sciences and Humanities Research Council of CanadaConnaught Fund
KeywordsHarmsortPoint (geometry)Law and economicsComputer scienceEpistemologyRisk analysis (engineering)Political scienceBusinessSociologyLawMathematicsPhilosophy

Abstract

fetched live from OpenAlex

Abstract This paper discusses the inefficacy problem that arises in contexts of “collective harm.” These are contexts in which by acting in a certain sort of way, people collectively cause harm, or fail to prevent it, but no individual act of the relevant sort seems to itself make a difference. The inefficacy problem is that if acting in the relevant way won't make a difference, it's unclear why it would be wrong. Each individual can argue, “things will be just as bad whether or not I act in this way, so there's no point in doing otherwise.” The goal of this paper is to give an overview of some of the main responses available to the problem and to highlight central issues that arise for each type of response. In the final section, I explain what I take to be the most promising strategy and discuss the form that this strategy should take.

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 machine prediction

Teacher imitation

Not 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.

metaresearch head score (Codex)0.019
metaresearch head score (Gemma)0.021
Version: metacan-v3-hybrid-931329e0061cValidation status: machine_predicted_unvalidated
Candidate categoriesnone
Consensus categoriesnone
DomainCandidate signal: none · Consensus signal: none
Study designCandidate signal: Theoretical or conceptual · Consensus signal: Theoretical or conceptual
GenreCandidate signal: Empirical · Consensus signal: none
Teacher disagreement score0.019
Threshold uncertainty score0.102

Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)

CategoryCodexGemma
Metaresearch0.0190.021
Meta-epidemiology (narrow)0.0010.000
Meta-epidemiology (broad)0.0010.001
Bibliometrics0.0020.002
Science and technology studies0.0090.071
Scholarly communication0.0080.013
Open science0.0020.009
Research integrity0.0090.010
Insufficient payload (model declined to judge)0.0080.001

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.

Opus teacher head0.060
GPT teacher head0.246
Teacher spread0.186 · how far apart the two teachers sit on this one work
Validation statusscore_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it

Classification

machine, unvalidated

Machine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.

The models applied no category: nothing in the taxonomy fit this work.
Study designTheoretical or conceptual
Domainnot available
GenreEmpirical

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".

Quick stats

Citations120
Published2019
Admission routes2
Has abstractyes

Explore more

Same venuePhilosophy CompassSame topicWar, Ethics, and JustificationFrench-language works237,207