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Record W3135178818 · doi:10.1558/imre.19161

Studying Scientology as an Anti-Democratic Institution

2021· article· en· W3135178818 on OpenAlexaff
Stephen A. Kent

Bibliographic record

VenueImplicit Religion · 2021
Typearticle
Languageen
FieldArts and Humanities
TopicReligious Studies and Spiritual Practices
Canadian institutionsUniversity of Alberta
Fundersnot available
KeywordsObligationPublic relationsAuthoritarianismInstitutionSociologyHarassmentPolitical scienceDemocracyLawLaw and economicsPolitics

Abstract

fetched live from OpenAlex

Addressing future researchers who may undertake research on Scientology, this commentary offers a number of cautions related to issues that they likely will encounter. Most of these issues stem from the organization’s anti-democratic, authoritarian nature and resultant policies, which include attempts to curtail any and all activities and research that its leaders conclude are out of alignment with members’ obligation to ‘keep Scientology working.’ Ethically and morally questionable activities within the cult (which is a term that I define) include its own judicial and penal systems, its systematic harassment of perceived critics, its data storage and protection issues, and its extensive but highly questionable manipulation of members – any study of which likely will elicit censoring reactions from leadership. So too will studies about probable membership shrinkage; its sizable body of financial constituents; and its lobbying efforts and network of lawyers, supportive academics, and expert witnesses. Although I encourage newer scholars to undertake Scientology studies, I urge them to prepare for interference attempts that almost certainly will come.

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 imitation

Not 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.

metaresearch head score (Codex)0.023
metaresearch head score (Gemma)0.026
Version: metacan-v3-hybrid-931329e0061cValidation status: machine_predicted_unvalidated
Candidate categoriesnone
Consensus categoriesnone
DomainCandidate signal: none · Consensus signal: none
Study designCandidate signal: Not applicable · Consensus signal: none
GenreCandidate signal: Empirical · Consensus signal: none
Teacher disagreement score0.023
Threshold uncertainty score0.123

Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)

CategoryCodexGemma
Metaresearch0.0230.026
Meta-epidemiology (narrow)0.0000.000
Meta-epidemiology (broad)0.0010.000
Bibliometrics0.0020.002
Science and technology studies0.0170.058
Scholarly communication0.0180.018
Open science0.0020.007
Research integrity0.0090.011
Insufficient payload (model declined to judge)0.0050.001

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.

Opus teacher head0.053
GPT teacher head0.315
Teacher spread0.262 · how far apart the two teachers sit on this one work
Validation statusscore_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it

Classification

machine, unvalidated

Machine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.

The models applied no category: nothing in the taxonomy fit this work.
Study designNot applicable
Domainnot available
GenreEmpirical

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".

Quick stats

Citations0
Published2021
Admission routes1
Has abstractyes

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