Creative Accounting: Alternative Facts in the History of the Pirate, John Gow
Why this work is in the frame
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Bibliographic record
Abstract
The narratives in Captain Charles Johnson’s General History of the Pyrates (1724–1728) have often been regarded as reliable accounts of pirate activity between 1690 and 1726, in part because the book’s long-held attribution to Daniel Defoe has, until recently, granted it some measure of journalistic integrity. A closer examination of one of General History’s narratives, that of the Scottish pirate, John Gow, reveals a story filled with contradictions, loose ends, possible fabrications, and simple errors, to the point where a definitive account of Gow’s activities becomes almost impossible to determine. This paper compares the two Gow narratives found in the 1725 and 1728 editions of General History with naval reports, newspaper accounts, and pamphlet narratives, all of which offer vastly differing versions of Gow’s story. As the general outlines of the story become fixed in various tellings, we can see how the focus of these narratives shifts from being a simple record of criminal activity to a drama in which the pirate must satisfy the expectation of being hostis humani generis—the enemy of all humanity—to the point where violence, rape, murder, and other anti-social acts overshadow the maritime plundering of goods and money as the pirate’s chief defining characteristic.
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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 | 0.000 |
| 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) | 0.003 | 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