God Tricks or Barnes Tricks? Comments on 'What's Wrong with American Regional Science?'
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Let me come right to the point: this essay irritates me enormously. Central to Trevor Barnes' text is the concept of a trick. As best I can determine from the context of his comments, a God trick seems to be a mindset, or a concrete act based thereupon, derived from the belief in a body of disembodied knowledge that aspires to be universal in nature and that is based upon a firm certitude concerning its intellectual position. (I stand to be corrected if this is not the precise definition, but I think that we all get the general idea suggested by the term). My first, and overwhelming reaction to Professor Barnes' essay is that he is guilty of precisely that for which he so vehemently criticizes science: with firm certitude he is applying a universal framework (this one derived from science studies), one that specifically considers all of science as an undifferentiated whole, one that does not take into consideration the local or differences that are so frequently cited in his text. I am told by colleagues that attended the Annual Meeting of the Canadian Regional Science Association in May 2003 that the original focus of this paper was regional in general, not in particular. I am also told that the title change that reflects American science was the result of certain objections that were raised at the time of the presentation. The title notwithstanding, most of the text continues to talk about science, in general, even though most of the discussion concerns individuals working in the US in the period 1950-1970. If I am being unfair to the author, I sincerely apologize, but this is my understanding of the origin and the transformation of this paper. Irrespective of the accuracy of the above information, the final paragraph of the paper (... I am very glad to publish this paper in the Canadian Journal of Regional Science ... long live Canadian science) is an ineffective quick and dirty way out of the problem that the author's universalist approach has created for himself. Even worse, it appears to me to be highly patronizing in tone. This essay is particularly unsatisfactory because it only tells part of the story: the rise and of science is covered (the period 1950 to 1975, approximately), but it fails to mention an equally significant period (1975 to the present) that is characterized by the subsequent renaissance (the fall and rise, if you will) of certain elements within the larger science universe, a renaissance based upon solid applied research conducted with the purpose of contributing to important public policy debates. …
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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 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| 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".