Bibliographic record
Abstract
Based on speaking notes prepared for a panel discussion on General Semantics at the Heinlein Centennial held in Kansas City, MO, July 7, 2007, celebrating what would have been the 100th birthday of science fiction writer Robert A. Heinlein. I HAVE READ ONLY enough of Heinlein's writings to have a minimally-informed appreciation of his work. But I know something about the field of general semantics, which certainly influenced Heinlein's point of view during his early years as a writer and is unmistakably reflected in character and plot development throughout his work. In the July 2002 Heinlein Journal, Kate Gladstone provided some details from the Institute's archives regarding Heinlein's attendance at two seminars with Alfred Korzybski in 1939 and 1940. (1) From my standpoint, the most interesting piece of Heinlein memorabilia found in the archives is an original transcript of Heinlein's Guest of Honor speech to the 3rd World Science Fiction Convention held in Denver in July 1941. transcript was sent to the Institute by Heinlein's wife at the time, Leslyn. He titled his address, The Discovery of the Future, published in 1992 in Yoji Kondo's collection of Heinlein's writings, Requiem. As he concluded his Denver speech, Heinlein offered this testimony to Alfred Korzybski and general semantics: I save for the last on that list of the books that have greatly affected me, that to my mind are the key books, of the stuff I've piled through, a book that should head the list on the Must List. I wish that, I wish that everyone could read the book--it's just a wish, there aren't that many copies of it, everyone can't, nor could everyone read this particular book. All of you could, you've got the imagination for it. It's Science and Sanity by Count Alfred Korzybski, one of the greatest Polish mathematicians when he went into the subject of symbology and started finding out what made us tick, and then worked up in strictly experimental and observational form from the preliminary works of E.T. Bell. A rigor of epistemology based on E.T. Bell (break in transcript here--some words lost) ... symbology of epistemology. Book refers to the subject of semantics. I know from conversation with a lot of you that the words epistemology and semantics are not unfamiliar to you. But because they may be unfamiliar to some, I'm going to stop and make definitions of these words. Semantics is simply a study of the symbols we use to communicate. General Semantics is an extension of that study to investigate how we evaluate in the use of these symbols. Epistemology is a study of how we know what we know. Maybe that doesn't sound exciting. It is exciting, it's very exciting. To be able to delve back into your own mind and investigate what it is you know, what it is you can know and what it is that you cannot possibly know is, from a standpoint of intellectual adventure, I think possibly the greatest adventure that a person can indulge in. Beats spaceships. Incidentally, any of you who are going to be in Denver in the next 5 or 6 weeks will have an opportunity, one of the last opportunities, to hear Alfred Korzybski speak in person. (2) He will be here at a meeting similar to this at a meeting of semanticians from all over the world--oh, McLean from Los Angeles, and Johnson from Iowa and Reiser from Mills College and Kendig and probably Hayakawa from up in Canada--the leading semanticians of the world--to hear Alfred Korzybski speak. I think starting Aug. 9, isn't it, Missy? early part of August. It'll be in the newspapers in any case. And it's much better to hear him speak than it is to read his books. He's limited by the fact that he's got to stick to the typewriter, to the printed word; but when he talks--when he talks it's another matter! He gestures, he's not tied down with his hands to the desk the way I am; he walks, stumps all around the state, and waves his hands; (audience laughs) . …
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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 | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 0.001 |
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.
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".