Dialektik des Dataismus; or, a Critical Examination of the “Dataist” Moment
Bibliographic record
Abstract
In this essay, I will assess what many have termed the “Dataist” moment. I argue that Dataism, as a social sciences discourse, presents itself as an instantiation of unveiling, or enlightenment, which confronts many of the challenges encountered by previous instances of Enlightenment. I will, in order to present a critique of Dataism, draw upon some of the arguments put forth by the 20th-century German philosophers Theodor W. Adorno and Max Horkheimer in their Dialectic of Enlightenment (1947). Finally, I will consider how Adorno and Horkheimer’s framework, as representative of the Frankfurt School of thought, may be a valuable resource for staging a critical confrontation with Dataist dogma.
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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 | 0.022 | 0.020 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.004 | 0.005 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.007 | 0.085 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.015 | 0.030 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.008 |
| Research integrity | 0.004 | 0.010 |
| 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 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".