The Travels of a Set of Numbers: The Multiple Networks Enabled by the Colombian ‘Estrato’ System
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This article documents how a Constitutionally grounded effort to institute ‘cross subsidies’ for public utility payments gave rise to a set of numbers that never achieved the goal of cross-class solidarity. This legal based system lived on, in large part because the numbers were quickly adopted both in popular speech and by multiple institutions, in an uncoordinated manner. Scalar tensions are key to the story: the Colombian ‘estrato’ system for classifying residential properties (initially for differential utility payment purposes) has at its core a set of numbers that was designed as nationally valid: but the work of labelling all residences with one of the six numbers to produce zoning-like ‘estrato’ maps incites qualitative micro-local knowledge. Overall, we show that local knowledges of socioeconomic difference constantly clash with and undermine not only the initial ambitious plan to render cross-class ‘solidarity’ technical but also the subsequent efforts to propose more rational alternatives.
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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 | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.003 | 0.002 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 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".