Bibliographic record
Abstract
Actors engaged in learning from rare events must trade off between two different criteria for effective learning: validity—the extent to which learning can be used for understanding, prediction, and control—and reliability—the extent to which understandings of experience are public, stable, and shared. Existing models of learning from rare events have elided conflict and politics by assuming that individuals and organizations always seek new valid knowledge that then becomes public, stable, and shared across actors. Here we examine the politics of learning in a historical analysis of population-level learning by four different actors following the 1994 sinking of the ferry Estonia. We show how politics shaped the trade-off between reliability and validity and, in turn, shaped the nature of the learning. Whereas the new knowledge was sometimes both valid and reliable, the more common outcome was knowledge that was only partly valid and reliable. Rather than treat these outcomes as substandard, we show how they are important to the dynamics of learning, as different population-level actors take into account different aspects of experience. The result is a model that makes conflict and contestation—and hence politics—essential to effective learning.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
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 | 0.012 | 0.022 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.006 | 0.029 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.009 | 0.008 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.005 |
| Research integrity | 0.003 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.005 | 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".