Being a post-positivist is exhausting: The daunting commitment to an uncertain truth
Bibliographic record
Abstract
It is exhausting being a post-positivist.We believe that there is truth out there, but we can only know it imperfectly.We are driven to searching, gathering more information, questioning our biases, and trying to take other perspectives.We never actually find peace and cannot rest from our perpetual wondering and second-guessing.Dealing with relentless ambiguity and the pursuit of truth is psychologically draining.We are prisoners of an unending quest: like Ulysses, we hear the irresistible siren voices calling us to believe that we have the truth but have restrained ourselves from falling prey to their ephemeral pleasures.We are forced to eat the unholy gruel of incomplete knowledge and pervasive uncertainty.I'm weary from the struggle.
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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 | 0.007 | 0.038 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.003 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.008 | 0.015 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.021 | 0.010 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.009 | 0.021 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.008 | 0.005 |
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".