Surviving Bio-angst: an Introductory Position on the Groundwork for Ethical Policy Making in Biotechnology
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Many things characterize the second halfofthe twentieth century, but perhaps none is more revealing than our loss of certainty.The atrocities of the Second World War made us lose faith in ourselves, while more recently the continual deterioration of the environment and the alienation brought about by our technologies have called into question the ultimate goals and practices of science.Collectively, Western society faces a crisis of certainty-we have lost the sense of who we are, what we are able to do, and ultimately where we are going.It is not surprising, then, to find many commentators struggling to find the perfect verbal aphorism that encapsulates these complex and troubled times.Various offerings have undisputed, though partial and incomplete, success: the aspirin age, the age of globalization and post-industrialization, the age of anxiety, the Prozac age, the nuclear age, and most recently, the age of terrorism.Of these, W.H. Auden's claim that our search for meaning in this, "the age of anxiety," is particularly pertinent because it reflects the results of all the issues facing modernity.It is a reminder that today the complexities of our modern world, when considered as a whole, have lead to a sense of cultural anxiety precisely because we have lost certainty in our abilities and ourselves.The specific issues of weapons of mass destruction, drugs, or globalization (for example) are connected because of the anxiety, more specifically, the angst they create.The reasons for the age of anxiety are numerous, having origins and reflections in most of the great ideas and movements of the twentieth century.
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 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 | 0.009 |
| 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 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| 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".